Aliens versus Predator: Requiem

I knew going in this was going to be bad. The Onion, who I usually trust, gave this an F, which surprised me since they are usually pretty stingy with those. (They rely heavily on the "gentleman's F" -- the D). I sort of liked the previous Alien versus Predator movie, which I thought did a pretty good job within the parameters of the PG-13 rating -- the buried temple with hidden passages had a kind of goofy boy's adventure novel exuberance, and I thought it was cute how the human became the "sidekick" rather than the savior. Not a good movie really, but I found a lot of reasons to cut it some slack.

If you were looking for the essence of the word "perfunctory" AVPR would be a good place to start. At 94 minutes long it is so boring you cannot believe you are not sitting through an extended cut of My Dinner with Andre. I understand that all movies have the potential to be boring, but I felt that there was some kind of lock on how boring a Predator-Alien movie could be, as opposed to say, a British period piece. You feel that on a scale of 1 to 10, one being the most boring, a monster movie that has inherited some good basic creature designs, and has a pretty good mythos to draw on, could not really get below a 3. And yet here is Alien versus Predator: Requiem. The most boring movie I have ever seen. I cannot put my finger on what was really the cause. The humans are the most awful kind of cardboard cutouts, but I feel like I have seen movies with cardboard cutout characters that were bad movies of course, but still not anywhere near this purely "check your watch every five minutes" dull. From Dusk Till Dawn 2: Texas Blood Money, for example. One person I saw it with claimed the problem was long shots, but I am not sure that was it. I know one thing that hurt a lot was the rigorous insistence in the first half of the movie to the structure "A scene with the creatures, a scene with the people" so that when you cut from an alien to something in a child's bed, you know the thing in the bed is a fake-out -- it was just her own hand reaching for something on the night-stand. It HAS to be a fake-out because the film cannot break from the patterns it establishes.

I think at least one culprit is the total lack of respect for both the Aliens and the Predators. It just feels like the directors -- and yes it actually took two people to direct this movie -- took everything for granted. You know what the monsters are so no effort is put into reintroducing them. The monsters worked before, so no effort is put into rethinking them. The Predator-Alien hybrid is barely distinguishable from the Predator or the Aliens. I actually thought at one point it was killed, and realized later that that fight was just between the Predator and a regular Alien. And the Predator-Alien does nothing new. It is just maybe a little bigger. In the fights they just lumber after one another, and it is assumed that is interesting enough, even though you can barely tell who is who, or see anything that is going on. The Predator does not seem to be very skilled. The aliens do not seem more threatening than large tigers. There is no thought given to the specifics of the creatures at play.

The film has a lot of problems but it is the boredom it causes that is just fantastic. Algebra-class level dull. The next film could be called Alien Versus Predator: The Sailboat Race, and it would be better just for the absurdity.

Movies like this make me appreciate Southland Tales so much more. Whatever went wrong there, Southland Tales is at least up to something, is at least pushing the edges of something. If I said it was boring that is only because too many good movies made me forget what the word properly meant.