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)

It's as if you were walking around a fair's House of Horror with exclusive exhibits, but you couldn't see anything because there’s a blackout. In the night scenes (which make up two-thirds of the film), the Straus brothers deliver confusingly edited action sequences drowned in darkness, in which many times you have no idea who is killing whom, who is shooting at whom, and whether this creature is a predator or an alien boss. The brothers prove with their script that they can squeeze some water out of a rock, but they shouldn’t have got behind the camera. (04/20/2008)

My mom summed it up with a pretty accurate statement: “They messed up the whole thing with those people." And I agree with her (it reminded me of those two episodes of General Hospital I saw), and I just want to add that they messed up a lot more things. To start off I would add a little more light. Just remember the first or the second Predator, which played out during the day for the most part. Well it is what it is. The main Predator is a nice guy as always and the aliens are revoltingly revolting as usual. The problem is in the Strause brothers’ directing, because they didn’t manage to create the right atmosphere. The plus is, that they fulfill some fans’ fantasies. The Predator planet and children used as incubators are probably the most interesting ones. And for that its three stars. (02/08/2008)

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)

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)