It isn't that I had high hopes for Alien vs Predator - Reqiuem going in... I saw that the movie was coming on in HD and I grabbled it on my DVR for whenever... no biggie. So I wasn't surprised that I was disappointed... but I was surprised at why I was disappointed.
Turns out the directors pretty much abandoned any higher aspirations and made a slasher flick, straight up. And I'm not a big fan of slasher flicks. There was no rhyme or reason to who was going to die or when, and no suspense in the build up to those deaths at all. The asshole jock who probably has it coming? Just as expendable as the nice girl at the pizza shop who had a bad day. Characters we kinda wanna care about? Unimportant when the ultimate goal is a body count. No lessons learned, and no reason or redemption. Yippe!
The first two movies weren't exactly milk-fed, but at least they were classy. Even at their most unsettling, they were never gratuitous. Unrelenting, maybe, but I think they knew where the line was... they showed you just enough awful to get the point across and then let that linger in your mind while the folks on screen tried to stay alive (and boy did it linger...).
But not this time! A precocious little kid on a hunting trip with dad comes across a crashed ship in the woods that's crawling with facehuggers. This ain't my first rodeo... I know bad stuff's gonna happen. But is it really necessary to see the little guy's chest ripped open? Wasn't that sort of implied when it happened to dad just a few seconds earlier? Or what about the hospital at the center of town? You know, the one without an empty bed in the maternity ward? Do we need to see a room full of expectant moms strung up and screaming while babies that clearly aren't theirs burst from their bellies? I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that we don't. I'm pretty sure Ridley Scott and James Cameron would have passed that exit and kept on driving.
If you're a gaming fan, it stands to reason that you might be an Alien fan as well (see also: Brian's cat names). So let me save you the trouble on this one: don't bother. It's not fun, it's not funny and it's definitely not worth your time. They might as well have called it Freddy vs Jason and set the bar where it belongs.
(Extra credit: Check out the pic of the directors on IMDB - straight out of central casting. And yes, they released it on Christmas. Nice touch.)
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