Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is the franchise's nadir, a film that takes the crossover premise of its predecessor and strips away everything that made it intermittently watchable. The Brothers Strause's 2007 sequel moves the action from Antarctica to a small Colorado town, delivers the R-rated violence that the first film's PG-13 rating denied, and produces something that is simultaneously more extreme and less interesting than anything that preceded it. It is a film of almost total creative failure, distinguished only by the honesty with which it pursues its own worst instincts.
At a Glance
Director: The Brothers Strause (Colin and Greg Strause)
Runtime: 94 minutes (theatrical), 101 minutes (unrated)
Starring: Steven Pasquale, Reiko Aylesworth, John Ortiz, Johnny Lewis, Ariel Gade
Release: 2007
Critics Rating: ★ (1/5 stars, the franchise's lowest point)
Audience Rating: ★½ (1.5/5 stars, a genuine disappointment)
Review Breakdown
Plot
A Predator ship crashes in Colorado, releasing aliens and a Predalien hybrid into a small town. A lone Predator arrives to clean up the infestation. The human characters, a collection of small-town archetypes, attempt to survive. The plot is the franchise's most perfunctory, assembling its human ensemble with minimal characterisation and then reducing them with equal minimal dramatic consequence. The Predalien hybrid, which should be the film's most interesting creation, is used as a blunt instrument rather than a dramatic element, its capabilities deployed for shock value rather than narrative purpose. The film's most notorious sequence, in which the Predalien attacks a maternity ward, is the clearest expression of the film's approach: extreme content deployed without the craft or the context that would give it meaning.
Characters
The human ensemble is the franchise's least developed, a collection of types rather than characters whose survival or death carries no dramatic weight. Steven Pasquale's Dallas is the film's nominal protagonist, a recently released convict whose return to his hometown gives the film its most conventional dramatic thread and its least interesting one. Reiko Aylesworth's Kelly is the film's most capable human character, a soldier returning from deployment whose military training gives her a practical competence the other characters lack, but the film does not develop her arc with sufficient care to make her survival meaningful. The Predator Wolf, the lone hunter sent to clean up the infestation, is the film's most effective creation, a professional of considerable capability whose efficiency gives the film its only consistent source of dramatic interest.
Tone
The Brothers Strause pitch the film at a register of unrelenting grimness that mistakes darkness for atmosphere and extreme content for horror. The R rating, which the first film's audience demanded, is used not to create the sustained dread of the original Alien or the physical intensity of Aliens but to deliver gore without consequence and violence without dramatic weight. The film's most significant tonal failure is its darkness, both literal and figurative: the cinematography is so underlit that the action sequences are frequently incomprehensible, which is a fundamental failure in a film whose primary selling point is the spectacle of two iconic creatures fighting each other.
Meaning / Themes
Requiem has no meaningful thematic content. The small-town setting gestures toward a contrast between ordinary human life and extraordinary alien violence, but the film does not develop this contrast with any intelligence or consistency. The Predator's cleanup mission, which could have been used to explore the franchise's established mythology about the relationship between the two species, is treated as pure action mechanics rather than as a dramatic or thematic element. The film's most honest statement about its own ambitions is its title, which promises a conclusion that the film does not deliver.
Direction
The Brothers Strause's direction is the franchise's weakest, a demonstration of technical competence without creative vision that gives the film a visual anonymity that its extreme content cannot compensate for. The action sequences are staged without spatial clarity, the creature confrontations are obscured by darkness and rapid cutting, and the film's pacing is simultaneously rushed and tedious. The practical effects work is the film's most reliable technical element, but it is deployed without the craft that would make it effective. Brian Tyler's score is functional but entirely without the distinctive character that the franchise's best composers brought to their entries.
Cultural Reception
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem received overwhelmingly negative reviews on its release and was a commercial disappointment relative to its predecessor. It is now consistently ranked as the weakest entry in both parent franchises and cited as the creative low point that made the subsequent separation of the two franchises inevitable. The film's darkness, both literal and figurative, has become one of the most frequently cited examples of how not to use an R rating, and its maternity ward sequence remains one of the most discussed examples of extreme content deployed without dramatic justification in mainstream genre cinema.
Final Verdict: The franchise's most complete creative failure and the clearest demonstration of what happens when a crossover premise is handed to filmmakers without a vision for what they want to say with it. The R rating that audiences demanded is used not to create horror but to deliver shock, the human characters are the franchise's least developed, and the cinematography is so dark that the creature confrontations the film exists to deliver are frequently invisible. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is not a film that fails despite its ambitions. It is a film that fails because it has none.