Cynical Cinema

Here is my review of the original mash-up in this dreadful series:

Download Alien vs. Predator

It sucked then, and it sucks now.  I am certain that there is a group of people working at, say, Pontiac.  Or any other major car company.  And it is their sole function to accept or reject the names of new cars based on their connotation.  And were this group to be presented with a new idea for a car name, like the Pontiac Requiem, they would do some research, say in a dictionary or on Google, and decide against going with that name.  They would say “yes, it sounds badass, but it isn’t a good name for a car”.  And the Pontiac Requiem name would die on the operating table, as it should.  So, too, should Aliens vs. Predator have died on the operating table.  The name, yes, but also the movie.

A requiem is a musical mass for the dead.  Usually, a Roman Catholic mass for the dead.  Mozart wrote probably the most famous requiem of all, but other great ones have been written by Berlioz, Verdi, Brahms and Dvorak.  So…the title of this movie means…there are going to be dead people?  That doesn’t quite work, but what the hell.  It sounds badass, and the producers of the film didn’t have that Pontiac-naming focus group to help them out.  So they went ahead.  Perhaps “requiem” was left on the reject pile from all those Resident Evil video games and movies.  (Nemesis, Survivor, Outbreak, Dead Aim, Apocalypse, Extinction, Degeneration.  4.)  But I digress.  The name is not the worst thing about the movie.  The movie is the worst thing about the movie.

At even the most basic level, the only reason anyone could possibly want to watch this (and the previous one as well) is that they want to see giant unkillable monsters fighting extra-terrestrial unkillable hunters.  Does anyone really expect a story, or a plot, or snappy dialogue?  Right.  So the key scenes here have nothing to do with the irritating human protagonists, but rather the predators and the aliens.  And those are the worst scenes in the movie!  They are filmed SO dark that unless you have one of those incredibly sharp, high-definition TVs, you have no hope whatsoever to understand what’s happening.  I started out watching this on my old TV downstairs, and my step-son had to bring it upstairs to the good TV just to find out what was happening.  And we still couldn’t really see.  Maybe it’s all a ploy to force people to buy it on blu-ray when that comes out.  Or maybe it’s just lousy movie making.

So, without the predator-alien fight scenes, why watch?  Perhaps for the mutant bizarre hybrid, the PredAlien.  Which is, from what I understand, half-alien, half-predator, and therefore twice as ferocious and unkillable.  Or something.  Which would lead us to suppose that the Predators, as was explained in the first movie, are a race of intergalactic hunters who hunt these Aliens for sport, but sometimes, when they are not killing them…they have sex with them?  I’m sure this was actually explained in some way during the movie, but I sure didn’t care enough to pay attention.  This movie sucks.