STUDIO: 20th Century Fox
RELEASE DATE: April 15, 2008
STARRING: Reiko Aylesworth, Ariel Gade, John Ortiz, and Steven Pasquale
WRITTEN BY: Shane Salerno
DIRECTED BY: Colin and Greg Strause
FEATURES: Two Commentary Tracks
Added-Footage Marker
Five Making-of Featurettes
Design Photo Galleries
On-Set Photo Galleries

Hollywood has seen its fair share of brothers teaming up to direct a film - the Coen Brothers, the Wachowski Brothers, the Brothers Quay, the Farrelly Brothers, the Pang Brothers, the Polish Brothers, the Hughes Brothers, and so on - but perhaps none of these cinematic siblings have had a feature debut as lifeless, hacky, and dull as Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, a sad legacy that the Brothers Strause will have to carry into their adjoining plots at the failed director graveyard. Honestly, the Brothers Solomon or Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as the Super Mario Brothers could’ve directed a better movie, and we should all thank our lucky stars that Fox’s superior Alien Quadrilogy DVD set exists to remind DVD enthusiasts everywhere that there was a period, back before the dark times, when the Alien movies, frankly, didn’t suck. But even though 2004’s Alien vs. Predator was a toothless corporate shell of a film – particularly with its series-first PG-13 rating – after watching the R-rated AvP: Requiem, you’ll find yourself awash with nostalgia for Paul W.S. Anderson’s original AvP, wistfully thinking, "Boy, at least, there was a basic level of competent filmmaking in AvP" and "At least, they remembered to light scenes before they were filmed back in ’04."

So, if you haven’t picked up on it yet, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem isn’t a very good movie and, even at home, you’ll feel cheated out of the hour and a half you spent fast-forwarding through it. The movie picks up where Anderson’s AvP left off, with an Alien/Predator hybrid (a “Predalien”) bursting out of the chest of one of the Predators who survived the first movie. For no particular reason, this act causes the ship to crash back to Earth, near a small Colorado mountain town. At this point, the Brothers Strause boldly choose to leave no cliché unmolested, giving us scene after scene of middle-America character introductions that we’ve all seen a million times before in other better films. There’s the ex-convict returning home, the small-town sheriff with the heart of gold, the underprivileged bad boy with the crush on the hottest girl in school, the father-and-son hunting team, the female soldier (i.e. late-act Ripley replacement) just home from Iraq – it’s a veritable parade of Wal-Mart stereotypes throughout.

The two-dimensional character introductions are particularly galling because, during the DVD featurettes, the Strause Brothers wax on and on about how they introduce "three or four characters you’ll fall in love with" and then follow them through the film. Ten bucks says that I could hold a gun to the head of anyone who saw the movie, even recently, and, for fear of their very lives, they couldn’t name even one of the characters from AvP: Requiem. They’re that disposable. Needless to say, the Predalien (with a horde of facehuggers in tow) escape the crashed ship, the lone Predator assigned to clean up the mess lands on Earth, and the poor doomed citizens of Gunnison, Colorado are caught in the cross-fire. I’d get into more plot specifics, but there aren’t any. There’s just people stumbling into dark hallways, aliens killing them, the Predator hunting, people running, more dark hallways, more alien kills, more hunting, a few seconds of alien vs. predator grappling, and wash, rinse, repeat, over and over again.

Visually, Requiem is, at once, the darkest, muddiest, and cheapest-looking of any Alien or Predator movie to date. The creatures are perpetually swathed in darkness, and it immediately becomes clear that, instead of a stylistic choice, it’s more of a device to hide the various FX flaws. During the making-of-extras, the Strauses state that they wanted to do as much in-camera as possible, which is admirable, but they simply don’t have the talent to pull it off. The aliens have never looked more like men-in-suits, and the Predalien, in particular, despite the potential in the concept, is almost never fully visible on-screen. The sad fact is that AvP: Requiem looks a million times worse, FX-wise, than either Aliens or Predator, and both those movies came out over 20 years ago. There’s simply no excuse for the creatures to look this schlocky. And beyond the weak narrative and the awful visuals, there’s a weird sadistic streak running through the film that’s pretty unsettling. Yes, we wanted more R-rated kills after the weak original AvP, but Requiem is filled with scenes where children and pregnant women are implanted with alien fetuses (we know where that leads), and moments where it’s implied that the Predalien devoured a maternity ward filled with newborn babies. Alien/Predator movies need an ample amount of gore to succeed, but the sheer sadism that the Strouses display - towards characters you don’t care about, no less - is really kind of sad.

In terms of the DVD itself, the screener copy that I received was rife with compression distortions and other grain that a big-ticket Fox release (even a crappy one) really shouldn’t have. The Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS Surround Sound tracks, on the other hand, come across nicely, particularly in the scenes with the quiet sounds of the facehuggers scuttling towards their prey. The coolest feature on the disc is the “extra footage marker” (this is an unrated cut of Requiem), which, if enabled, prompts an icon to appear on-screen to let you know when you’re looking at footage that didn’t appear in the theatrical cut. There’s a stills gallery (no trailers or TV spots, though) and a surprisingly robust series of 5 making-of featurettes that actually go nicely in-depth on the pre-production and filming process. There are also two commentary tracks, a lively, nicely paced track by the Brothers Strause and producer John Davies, and a rather dull, dead-air filled track by FX supervisors Tom Woodruff Jr. and Alec Gillis. The featurettes and commentaries are, unquestionably, informative, but the problem is, once you’ve actually seen the movie and then you see the Strause Brothers talking about the film’s emotional subtext and comparing their movie to Ridley Scott’s original, you can’t help but think - "Man, have they got their heads up their asses." I suppose it’s endearing that the Brothers Strause obviously take so much pride in their first feature, but it’s more than a little depressing once you see the result of their prideful effort, a film that drags two of the coolest movie monsters of the past two decades down with them.