AVP:Requiem

By Matthew Rodgers

When the first instalment of this franchise that combines two of cinemas most iconic monsters exploded onto the screen after a gestation period longer than a chest burster it was met with universal derision, and more scathingly, fan base apathy. The PG rating didn’t help, nor did the involvement of quality deterrent Paul Anderson (Resident Evil) as writer/director. Despite this, it still made enough green to give Colin and Greg Strause the chance to up the body count and restore some of the credence that has been sorely diluted from Ridley Scott’s original vision.

With a back of a postage stamp script Requiem (added to the title to surely signal the death of the franchise) picks up at the conclusion of the last film. The Predator hunting ship that contains the ridiculous “PredAlien” - on a par with the awful alien-Ripley hybrid from Jean Pierre Jeunet’s beautifully rubbish Alien Resurrection – crashes on Earth. It’s here that a rag-tag group of extras from The O.C. and Smallville, along with one of the agents from 24, must avoid the acid-splashing beasties for just over 90mins over of uninspired, embarrassing guff.

The egg from which this face-hugging (and that’s bad!) script emerged is Shane Salerno, his mission statement to simply improve on the lamentable but not as bad as everyone remembers original and respect the roots of the franchise. AVP2 starts badly and goes downhill quickly. Instead of the rounded characters that inhabited the universe of ALIEN and ALIENS we get some high-school jocks and undistinguishable military grunts to try and empathise with as they are picked off one-by-one during the poorly lit proceedings. It’s no good using the “but we came to see the monsters fight!” argument because we have seen that before.

Said Xenomorphs and dreadlocked Predators are one of the few highlights of the film but are handled in such an immature, kids with toys manner. On the plus side it’s refreshing in this age of CGI indulgence that the majority of showdowns use models, or harping back to ALIEN, simply a guy in a suit. It adds a level of realism that the rest of the film lacks. The problem is with how the creatures are utilised; ALIEN was a haunted house movie during which the briefest of glimpses were shockingly effective, Cameron’s ALIENS were cloaked in atmosphere despite their numbers and Predator didn’t reveal himself until well into his 1986 debut. Here they are everywhere, just thrown at the screen without any noticeable tension or fear; they are redundant as an element of horror so the Strause brothers splatter the screen with video game violence as a substitute.

A crushing disappointment for sci-fi, and franchise fans alike, and on a more base level it’s just a really, really bad film.