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AVPR: Aliens vs Predator Requiem
It seems only yesterday that Alien vs Predator surprised us by being reasonably average - but it was actually four years ago. This one has its own share of surprises too.
AVPR: Aliens vs Predator Requiem is no better or worse than the previous episode, but with different strengths. It's never going to convert anyone, but as this type of movie goes, it's actually not bad. I enjoyed this film: I think the average moviegoer will enjoy it: Testosterone Satisfaction Rating: - pleasingly graphic gore and profanity at a level you always get in these movies. Young kids should probably be kept away, if only from the "there's a monster outside the window" scene which may make it difficult for the tike to sleep tonight... To enjoy this film you should: have a history of these movies.
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I have one major bone of contention which kept bugging me throughout, and that's the DARKNESS of it all. Most of the
action takes place in various badly lit environments, so you can't see what's going on, even on the big screen.
This is worsened by the fact that at the end of the last movie, an alien burst forth from a predator's belly, so we now
have a PredAlien hybrid that has Daddy Pred's rasta-pigtails. This makes it virtually impossible to tell the bad guys
apart when they're going at it, so you can't tell who's winning. More to the point, the creatures are so similar that I
didn't even twig that one of them was a hybrid until after I'd got home and looked at the still pictures.
On the upside though, the low light makes the effects look more
convincing (much like 
On a more positive note, there is a dose of unpredictability that we don't normally see in splatter fodder like this.
Yes, we have the college kids, the hard-nosed soft-centred Ripley-esque army woman and the local cop way out of his depth,
and they do get picked off one by one, but it's usually a surprise when one of them goes. More than once I was shocked to
see the character I expected to see the end credits get splurged all over the wall, and that earns it points in my book.
The effects are well up to scratch, as you would expect from directors with a history in visual effects, and the story
is largely irrelevant. Whereas the previous AvP successfully set up the scenario of Aliens and Predators locking
tentacles, this one just goes with the splattering.
