The official trailer for the Strause Brothers' Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem arrived in 2007 and announced the franchise's most comprehensively failed entry with a visual darkness and dramatic incoherence that, in retrospect, accurately signals the film's most persistent and most damaging qualities. The trailer's most immediately striking quality is its relentless darkness, with the small-town setting, the Predalien hybrid, and the creature confrontations conveying the film's intentions as a rawer and more brutal entry than its predecessor. The Strause Brothers were visual effects artists making their feature debut, and the trailer reflects both the ambition and the limitations of that background: the creature design is visually interesting, the staging is competent, but the narrative intelligence that made either franchise's best entries so effective is conspicuously absent. The trailer puts the Predalien front and centre, and delivers the hybrid's visual identity with enough clarity to establish its considerable interest despite the surrounding darkness. What it cannot disguise is that the film around the creature has very little to offer beyond the darkness itself.
First Impressions
The trailer is immediately rawer and more unrelenting than the first film's marketing, with the Colorado setting and the Predalien conveying the film's intentions as a more grounded and more brutal entry. The darkness that would prove the film's most damaging quality is already evident in the trailer, which is either an honest signal of the film's priorities or an unintentional warning about its central flaw. The small-town setting is a reasonable creative decision on paper, grounding the crossover in a recognisable human environment. The execution is where the film, and to some extent the trailer, falls short.
What the Trailer Reveals
The trailer establishes the small-town Colorado setting, conveys the Predalien's threat, and glimpses the film's creature confrontations with enough visual force to establish its horror ambitions. The hybrid is shown with enough specificity to establish its conceptual interest, and the footage identifies the combination of suburban setting and creature threat as the elements behind the film's most defensible creative decision. The Strause Brothers intend to deliver a more viscerally intense entry than Anderson's film, which is an achievable ambition. Whether the film delivers anything beyond that intensity is a question the trailer wisely does not attempt to answer.
Music and Sound
Brian Tyler's score gives the trailer a sonic urgency that suits the film's raw and unrelenting register with reasonable effectiveness. The musical choices convey the film's horror ambitions with a tonal confidence that the film around them does not always deserve. The score is driving and tense, which accurately reflects the trailer's priorities even if it cannot compensate for the dramatic thinness of the material it is accompanying.
Most Memorable Moment
The first sight of the Predalien, shown with enough visual specificity to convey the hybrid's striking design, is the trailer's most purely arresting image: a demonstration of the film's most interesting new creative element and a preview of the one area where Requiem can claim to have added something to the crossover mythology. The creature design is inventive. The film built around it is considerably less so, but the trailer at least makes the Predalien feel like a reason to watch.
Trailer Verdict
A raw and punishing trailer for the franchise's weakest entry. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is the low point of both franchises, and this trailer's relentless darkness accurately, if unintentionally, signals the film's most persistent problem. The Predalien is a genuinely interesting creation. Everything surrounding it is not. The trailer makes the former feel like a promise. The film fails to keep it.