The basic moral of "The Monkey's Paw" is something that I come back to many times when I'm reviewing films, particularly long-awaited ones. "Be careful what you wish for." After the sanitised PG-13 disappointment of the first AVP movie, the people behind the next film decided to make it R-rated, as "it [was] what the fans want[ed] from the series." And so, for our sins, we got Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem.
Starting off at pretty much the same point that the previous film ended, we see the Yautja ship flying off with Scar's body lying in ceremonial repose until his Chestburster emerges and it's got the Yautja facial tusks. It quickly grows to its full size and starts massacring the crew and the ship crashes in the woods outside a small Colorado town called Gunnison. One Yautja manages to send off a distress call before he dies though, and on the Yautja homeworld a sole Yautja "cleaner" receives the call and suits up to head to Earth to deal with things. Meanwhile, a hunter and his son come across the crashed ship, the PredAlien and a pair of Facehuggers that also escaped from the ship. While this is going on, recently released felon Dallas arrives back in town and is met by the town sheriff Eddie Morales. Dallas meets back up with his younger brother Ricky, who's having problems both with a girl he likes and her bully boyfriend... but this generic teenage drama is sadly not pushed aside as the hunter and his son turn up missing, aside from a severed arm. The Yautja Cleaner arrives on the scene and starts getting rid of any and all evidence that the Yautja or Xenomorphs were ever there, but he's too late and the Xenomorphs have started to multiply, helped by the fact that the PredAlien has a new and rather horrifying method of implanting Xenomorph embryos into pregnant female hosts. Chaos quickly overtakes the small town as the Xenomorphs run amok, the Yautja Cleaner chases after them to kill them, and a rapidly dwindling number of humans try to survive and escape...
Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem has several good ideas in it - the very concept of the PredAlien, further showing us how the Xenomorphs take on traits of their "parents" and the Yautja "Cleaner" who became known as "Wolf" after the character with a similar job in Pulp Fiction being the two big ones. The film was also considerably more bloody and violent than the previous film, which was, of course, one of the biggest complaints people had about the first AVP. So surely this means that AVP: Requiem is a welcome improvement to the series?
...Well, about that.
First off, someone forgot to pay the light bill while making this film. Yes, I know there's a part in the film where Wolf tries shooting some Xenomorphs in the town's power station and things explode and the town gets hit with a power cut, but there are still several scenes that are shot in near-total blackness and involving black glistening creatures, sometimes fighting a cloaked opponent, and it's nigh-on impossible to see what's going on. The first time I saw the film I wondered if this was down to possibly watching a bad quality copy, but rewatching it for this review in High Definition I now know that, no, the problem lies with the cinematography. I had to sit hunched forward to watch the film because if I sat back in my chair I literally couldn't see details on the screen, and making people sit in a physically uncomfortable way to watch your film is never going to be a winning formula.
Second, a problem from the first AVP film has continued into this one - there are too many damn humans for a film called Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem and not Aliens Vs Humans and Predator: Requiem. What's even worse is the petty human dramas that get shoehorned into the film as well. I cared not a jot about Ricky and Jesse's burgeoning romance, or about Dallas' life post-prison, or about any problems the returning female Army veteran might be having with her family (and while we're mentioning her, she was clearly placed in the film just because someone thought that, since the other Alien films had a strong female protagonist, this film needed one as well, and never mind that this woman's sole purpose in the film appears to be the ability to fly our plucky survivors out of the town via helicopter). And on that subject... The film is so determined to make Dallas the protagonist of the film that it has the sheriff bringing a recently-released felon along with him to investigate crimes, asks his advice and even follows his lead until one point in the film, and I'm pretty sure their disagreement at this point is to both pare down the core cast some more and further make out the sheriff to be rather useless. Suspension of disbelief is one thing, but they puff him up so much I wouldn't have been surprised if he'd had a fist-fight with Wolf at some point... and won.
Yes, there's more gore in AVP: Requiem than in the last film, but some of it feels like it's been put in to be edgy rather than anything else. Within ten minutes we see a child get a Facehugger to the, well, face, showing us that, yes, this film's not afraid of shying away from stuff like that, but later on the scenes with the PredAlien and the pregnant women in the hospital feel a little like the film is trying to deliberately shock us, because hey, pregnant women and babies! Seeing them harmed is really shocking, right? We're a grown-up movie, really! We've got an R-rating!
In the end, AVP: Requiem takes a shot at improving on the previous film with more gore and more references to the lore from previous films... but between its poor cinematography and ridiculous focus on the humans, yet again, rather than the Xenomorphs and Yautja of the film's title, and its even more ridiculous bigging up of a character with a one-line backstory to try to carry the whole film means that it falls flat on its face and ends up woefully poor.
