Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (2007)

You can't bloody see anything. That's my review, really. Half a star, don't bother, goodnight. But since you're here, let me explain exactly how Aliens vs Predator: Requiem manages to be not just a bad film, but an almost impressively, cosmically bad one.

There's a specific kind of Hollywood cynicism that produces films like this. Nobody sat down with a genuine passion for these franchises, nobody lost sleep trying to crack the story. This is a film assembled from spare parts by people who looked at the modest box office of the first AVP and thought: we can do that again, cheaper, darker, quicker. And when I say darker, I mean that almost literally. The entire film is so underlit it looks like it was shot through a bin bag. Action sequences, monster reveals, character moments (such as they are), all of it swallowed up in a murk so impenetrable you spend half the runtime squinting at what might be a Predator or might be a wall. It's one of the most visually incompetent films I've ever encountered, and I've sat through some proper nonsense in my time.

The script, if we're being generous enough to call it that, throws a group of small-town American characters at us and expects us to care about their survival. I couldn't tell you their names now if you paid me. There's a soldier, a love interest, a kid, some other people. They wander around in the dark making terrible decisions while a Predalien (yes, a hybrid, because apparently that's what we needed) tears through the town and a Predator arrives to clean up the mess. The franchise logic is already strained beyond breaking point, but here it just collapses entirely. Nothing connects. Nothing means anything.

The CGI is atrocious, which is almost forgivable given the budget, but the darkness feels like a deliberate cover-up strategy. If you can't see the dodgy effects, maybe you won't notice them. Except you do notice, because the whole experience becomes a chore of trying to work out what's happening on screen at all. Good action filmmaking is about clarity, geography, consequence. I think about something like Apocalypto, a film that put me through the wringer physically and emotionally because I could see every inch of the chase, every threat, every desperate lunge for survival. That's what tension looks like. This is just noise and shadow.

And honestly, the closest comparison I can think of in terms of sheer chaotic, incoherent blockbuster filmmaking is Transformers, which at least has the defence of being visually overwhelming rather than visually absent. Both films mistake busyness for excitement, but Requiem doesn't even manage busy. It manages murky.

I genuinely cannot call this a guilty pleasure. A guilty pleasure has something in it, some daft charm, some memorable set piece, some performer clearly having a good time. This has none of that. It's joyless from the first frame to the last. The first AVP was no great shakes, but it had a certain dumb, watchable momentum to it. This makes that film look like a carefully considered piece of genre craft by comparison, which is a sentence I never expected to write.

Half a star, and that half is being generous to the idea that somewhere, in some cut of this film, there might be a serviceable monster movie struggling to breathe. I doubt it. But I'm in a charitable mood.

Don't watch this. Seriously. Watch something else. Watch anything else.

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

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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Related on Movies With Macca

More from the 2000s: Kirikou and the Wild Beasts (2005) · Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004) · Daredevil (2003) · Apocalypto (2006)
More action: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · The General (1926) · Hand of Death (1976) · Daredevil (2003)
More science fiction: Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) · Fantastic Planet (1973) · Nightmare City (1980) · The Long Walk (2025)