Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (2007)

The Alien and Predator franchises had spent decades as separate beasts before 20th Century Fox, Davis Entertainment and Dune Entertainment brought them crashing together in Paul W. S. Anderson's Alien vs. Predator in 2004. That film was divisive, to put it charitably, but it turned enough of a profit to greenlight a sequel almost immediately. The result was Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, released in the United States on Christmas Day 2007 (a scheduling choice that tells you something about the studio's confidence, or lack of it). The premise this time drops the action out of an isolated Antarctic setting and into a small Colorado town, where a crashed spacecraft deposits a PredAlien hybrid and a wave of Alien offspring on an unsuspecting civilian population. A lone Predator then arrives to contain the outbreak, which leaves the locals caught somewhere in the middle. On paper, shrinking the scale to a small-town horror scenario sounds like a reasonable idea. In practice, the execution is another matter entirely.

Behind the camera are brothers Colin and Greg Strause, who made their names in visual effects work before this became their feature directorial debut. It is worth noting that for fans of science fiction and genre filmmaking more broadly, the weight of expectation attached to the Alien and Predator names is considerable. Both franchises had, individually, produced some genuinely influential entries in the horror and science fiction canon, the sort of films that loom large over anything carrying their logo. You can see how that legacy connects to other science fiction pictures from the same era that have come up on this blog, including Fire in the Sky (1993) and Futureworld (1976), both of which demonstrate what the genre can achieve when handled with a bit of care and imagination. The Strause brothers, working from a screenplay by Shane Salerno, were stepping into very large shoes.

The cast is headed by Steven Pasquale, Reiko Aylesworth, Sam Trammell, David Paetkau and John Ortiz, a group of largely television-familiar faces playing the assorted townspeople trying to survive the carnage. None of them were household names at the time, and the film does little to change that. Aylesworth, perhaps best known then for her work on 24, brings a polished but unremarkable screen presence to her role as a returning soldier, and the rest of the ensemble are given similarly thin material to work with. The 94-minute runtime suggests a lean, efficient genre picture, which makes it all the more frustrating that the film still manages to feel like hard going. This sits alongside the other big-budget American genre productions of 2007, including the similarly effects-heavy Transformers (2007), as an example of the era's appetite for spectacle over story. Whether that spectacle lands, of course, is the question.

I'd say it's one of the worst movies I've ever seen but you can't bloody see anything. This is a shameless cash-grab that somehow manages to make the first AVP look like a masterpiece in comparison. The plot is nonsensical, the characters are utterly forgettable, and the film is drenched in darkness literally, you can barely see half of what’s going on. The action is poorly choreographed, the CGI is atrocious, and the direction is all over the place. It’s like they took everything bad from both the Alien and Predator franchises and mashed them together into one incoherent mess. I can’t even call this a guilty pleasure, it’s just a chore to sit through. Complete waste of time.

And I think that about covers it, really. There is something almost impressive about how thoroughly this film squanders its own concept, because the idea of a creature feature set loose on an ordinary American town is not inherently a bad one. Films like Phone Booth (2002) prove that tight, focused genre filmmaking can thrive on limited geography and a simple premise. This has neither the focus nor the nerve to commit to anything. What lingers, beyond the frustration of watching a screen that is mostly shadow, is the sense of a production that was rushed to market on the back of a recognisable name rather than any genuine creative impulse. Sometimes a franchise entry arrives and you think, well, at least they tried. This is not one of those times.

Rating: ½  | Year: 2007  | Watched: 2025-04-10

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Trailer

▶ Watch the official trailer for Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (2007) on YouTube

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