It’s probably best not to judge a film like Alien Versus Predator: Requiem by the Jam Scale. Minorities are horribly represented. There are only two non-white people in this whole suburban town, the Latino sheriff, and a black nameless teenager. The sheriff does get quite a lot of screen time which is very nice. And no one seems to care that he’s not white which is even better. But in the end, I didn’t really go into this thing expecting diversity.

AVPR starts off where the first one ended. The Predators are on their way home from picking up their dead friend when the cute Predalien bursts forth from his chest. He grows up surprisingly fast enough to ambush one of the Predators who was tending to an Alien skull. The pilot fires on the Predalien and blows a hole in the hull sending their craft hurtling towards the woods in middle suburban America. Of course, the Predators were carrying a whole mess of face-huggers in stasis and when their ship crashes, the face-huggers escape to grab onto a father and son who happen to be hunting in the woods when the Predator ship crashes. Awesome start!

If you were to come in after this opening stuff, you might think you’ve walked into the wrong movie. It’s like someone switched reels and started playing something off of the CW like “One Tree Hill” or “Gossip Girl” or some other shit show with pretty people that you just want to kick in the fucking teeth. Blech. This will be a great DVD release because you can fast forward all the lame people shit.

The best part about the first act is the arrival of our lone Predator. The adverts for the film make it seem like a whole army of Predators will descend upon middle America to layeth the smacketh down on the Alien infestation. But no, we get one Predator. We do get a short glimpse of the Predator home world. That was pretty sweet. And I liked this Predator. He’s got some new toys we haven’t seen yet. A nice little Predator survival kit with weapons and gadgets and this blue glowy goo that disintegrates Alien carcasses to erase all trace of them. We also get quite a few good scenes with the Predator doing some investigation trying to figure out how the ship went down and where all the face-huggers have gone now that they’ve escaped. Honestly, if the entire film followed him instead of inter-cutting more lame “One Dumb Hill” shit, I would have loved it.

As you can imagine, the Aliens quickly infest the town. They spend quite a lot of time with the people in the first act in an attempt to make you care for them, but really, when the face-huggers grabbed them, I couldn’t help but laugh.

There was a lot that I liked about this movie. The body count is freaking huge. The Predalien hybrid was pretty badass. Okay, so the dreads kinda look stupid, but this thing fucking tore shit up! I also like that the entire town gets infested. The Aliens spread quickly through the suburbs as you’d expect. I wanted more Predators to show up, but our lone Predator was quite the badass. Aliens keep throwing themselves at him and he just tears right though them. He even takes the Predalien on hand-to-hand, no weapons and no helmet. Quite the stud of a Predator.

The people I could have done without. I kind of understand why they were included. One, you need something for the Aliens to infest. Otherwise, no movie. Second, you need viewpoint characters to sort of explain what the fuck you’re seeing. This is where the people utterly failed. There are about five or six stories that are introduced that don’t relate to each other other than they all occur in the same town. Each of these subplots have their own characters so it’s hard to get attached to any of them as the scenes jump between to give them just enough screen time. When they are finally thrown together because they’re all running from the Aliens, it turns into an Escape From the Suburbs movie. Instead of giving us insights into the Aliens, our viewpoint characters run the fuck away. Instead of recognizing that the Predator is hunting the Aliens and might be able to help out, our viewpoint characters shoot at him every time he shows up. If the people are just going to be cattle used to bread Aliens, why bother giving us their back stories? Granted, there’s enough shown on-screen that we don’t really need too much in the way of explanation. But if that’s the case, I say fill it with more Alien and Predator action and cut out all the bullshit.

Overall, I enjoyed AVPR quite a bit. If you do go, pay matinée prices as I think you’d be quite upset if you paid full price. Even better, you could wait for the DVD to fast forward all the people stuff. Trust me, you won’t be missing a thing. Also, you must go in realizing that this is not fine art by any stretch of any imagination. This is Super Geek Wars fully realized on the big screen. Total B movie goodness right up in here.

Oh, and it’s probably better with a group of really drunk and loud friends. This is definitely a movie that deserves running commentary.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 7:04 pm and is filed under Movies, Remix, Sci Fi, Comic Book Flicks, Jam Scale Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.