aliens v predator: requiem

The weekends DVD rental was Aliens v Predator: Requiem (or AVPRR as they rather sensibly re-named it).

I'm not sure I'd quite go so far as to say it was poor, but it wasn't great either.

Let's start with the positive - there were some fairly good fight scenes between the aliens and predator. There was also an appropriate aliens/predator total disregard for the humans approach.

One of the points of aliens and predator is that they're actually more horror than they are sci-fi and that means characters die randomly and in bucket loads, whether we as viewers like them or not.

It also tried a fairly neat trick - plopping the aliens and predators down in the middle of domestic life. The rest of plot was meant to resemble a soap-opera or similar and then bam! aliens and predators hacking and slashing their way through the town.

And there's a fairly cool coda/prologue type moment at the end.

However, the problems were myriad.

Firstly and most importantly it was way too dark. My guess is that this was almost necessary due to budgetary constraints. The film only cost $40M, so I guess making it pitch black means you can get away with more on the SFX front. Problem is that meant it was frustratingly difficult to see, well, anything. I had to slam the brightness way up on my TV :/.

Secondly, the whole normal suburban life thing kinda failed to be interesting. The characters were a little dull and predictable and it was difficult to really care about them. This whole aspect also seemed to be dumped wholesale about half the way through. When the aliens and predator really start doing there thing this aspect becomes almost totally irrelevant.

There were also a lot of weird things that didn't make any sense, mainly involving the predator.

At the beginning there's a whole thing with a distress signal. This is only answered by 1 predator, which seemed odd.

Then that predator behaves oddly when he finds the crashed ship, like he knew one of the other predators personally, but it's not really properly explained.

He then also behaves strangely when killing the aliens, using some weird blue fluid to dissolve them and any trace of them. Why, exactly he does this is not readily apparent. No predator has ever done anything like that before :/.

And if it's so that the humans don't catch on, firstly that makes no sense - predators don't give a shit about us - but also later on he kills a human and does the whole skinning them thing. So it's okay for humans to find that, but not traces of the aliens? Odd.

There's other stuff too (especially the Peed-Alien), but you get the point.

Overall I wouldn't really recommend it.