Alien Vs Predator 2: Requiem

It's hard to express how badly this film does in almost any respect you might care about. It tramples all over anything that made the original movies good and it adds nothing of any value to either franchise.

OK, most viewers of AVPR, as it styles itself, will be watching because they remember how good the original ideas were. Alien gave us tense, fearsome horror, which turned into gung-ho action spectacle in the sequel, while Predator turned even our highest trained, toughest warriors into prey and then added depth and honour in its sequel.

I'm sure we can agree that the Alien films dropped off, even if there will be differences of opinion as to whether this came in film three or four. Predator also lost its way in the second outing, but even Danny Glover didn't outright ruin it. Either way, by the time the first AVP was released, I think we all knew to protect our excitement with a shield of caution.

We were not wrong. AVP was poor. There was practically no suspense and rules went out of the window. There was no room for science in this fiction. Yet the basic idea was pretty cool. It was credible that the Predators might hunt the Aliens for sport, even if the location was a tad daft. In the end, we had to put our memories of the good times behind us and accept that, while AVP was rubbish, at least they tried.

Now take AVPR and AVP feels like a masterpiece. This is movie making by checklist. Face huggers? Check. Acid burns? Check. Faces getting bitten off? Check. Alien queen? Nope. Eggs? Nope. Motion detectors? Nope.

Wait. What's going on here? Put simply, AVPR uses all the nasty concepts. What it doesn't do is use all the suspense building gambits and then make the nasty bit into a shocking climax that relieves the tension and lets us move on. Instead it just lays on more and more of the gore without any of the point. It eliminates the power of the horror through over exposure and in doing so it manages to turn the scariest xenomorphs in movie history into guys running around in Halloween costumes.

It's just such a terrible film that it's hard to know how to describe it without sounding petulant. To give you an idea, this is a film that includes a protracted boxing match between a Predator and an Alien/Predator hybrid. Seriously.

I despair.

Alien Vs Predator 2: Requiem