Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

The start-up of this B-movie is great. Beginning on a predator ship, a crash, alien "face-huggers" rampaging through the forests, a predator planet, a predator who goes to Earth to find out what happened. Seriously, the film is not flawed up to this point. But then it starts to run out of breath, the atmosphere ceases to build up in any way, and most importantly - night comes and the power goes out in the city. The darkness annoyed me to no end. Everything that took place in it was unclear - especially the predator-alien fights, which were also confusingly edited. What follows is boredom interspersed with occasional eating, shooting, skinning someone (it's spectacularly filmed, yes), which culminates in a fairly decent scene at a hospital. Towards the end, the film picks up again, but to be honest, I wasn't in the mood for it after an hour and a bit. So I give both stars to the great beginning and the decent ending... (02/21/2010)

The script is great for this type of film, even though it lacks original ideas and the characters are not depicted in detail, but it’s action packed and without any boring moments. What the directors made from it, however, is sadly a different story. The hard to follow, badly edited action scenes, which make up about 80% of the movie, look like a direct-to-DVD C-movie with Michael Paré. Especially the shootouts with the army will make you shake your head in disbelief. That’s too bad, because the decent production values and cult status of Aliens and Predator put together could have amounted to a spectacular B-movie. (01/02/2008)

What bothers me most about this crossover series is the fact that the creators have sucked the soul out of two icons of horror sci-fi, leaving us with only a marketing product. It’s dressed up and packaged to attract the masses and neutered enough to hurt anyone drawn to the series with any sort of sympathy. The Brothers Strause understood the task perfectly, but in looking at the individual parts, they didn't understand a single one. And so they ride a wave of references (mostly to Cameron), which they intersperse with fashionable zigzags between the boundaries of correctness (dead children and pregnant women, an interesting kill list). The result is an unwanted B-movie dominated by... the Predator. His sovereign hunting instincts entertain about as much as the Aliens have been relegated to the role of expendable insects. I’d say that kids would be entertained, but my 13-year-old brother told me that it would be better to adapt the game than to create this... shit (I added). (08/08/2009)

The potential is there, both space monsters are still an irresistible attraction for viewers, but the resulting dud is something that even those for whom the names Alien and Predator never meant much do not deserve. The level of B-ness was truly unbearable, whether it was the routine and impotent direction or the utterly insane and chaotic editing, where probably even the crew couldn't find their way around. Thank God that Rodriguez fixed everything with his Predators. (02/03/2013)

I didn't expect anything extraordinary from this, yet the result negatively surprised me. Even in the context of the genre, it's a desperately clichéd spectacle that resigns to nothing more than a run-of-the-mill shooter that steals from the sci-fi genre. It is definitely not a horror or sci-fi, just a cheap action movie. I don't know the budget they had, but the majority of the film is drowned in darkness, and such poor lighting is quite rare - only a total blackout at the production site could excuse this. The editing is chaotic, at times the viewer has no idea who is shooting at whom, who is screaming, and whose blood is splattering everywhere. I haven't seen the first film, and after watching this, I have no desire to. I get the feeling that after this discrediting of the subject matter, no one will ever make Alien 5... Overall impression: 10%. (01/20/2009)