This single image is magnitudes better than anything in either of the two AVP films.

So while waiting for the new episodes of Dexter and The Walking Dead to be posted, I figured I would have a look at the latest copy of Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem that was bundled with the Predators box set. I guess I was hoping that somehow, the “Unrated” title actually meant “Rewritten, re-cast and re- shot”.

I was wrong.

I’m a pretty forgiving guy when it comes to movies. Just ask Jonathan; he’ll tell you that I can find “good” in movies that leave most people shaking their heads. Waterworld, Hard Target, and Deep Rising are pretty good examples of movies that I own and enjoy that aren’t really… well they’re not fine art. I don’t care if the movie has little to no artistic value as long as it lets me escape for a few hours and takes me into the story.

Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem is one of the few movies I that I get genuinely angry about while watching.

This is an amalgam of two amazingly lore-rich franchises that was a very clear misstep with the first one (Alien Vs Predator) that just went “fuck it… let’s see just how bad we can make this movie” with the second one.

If you don’t know the basic premise between Aliens vs Predator… well… that’s kind of it. You have the greatest hunter ever conceived, the Predators, against the greatest prey, the Aliens. These two together are an amazing idea. There is a tonne you could do with these two to make an amazing movie.

In the other mediums in which this particular pairing has been tried, there have been some hits and some misses, but they had a lot of neat ideas and for the most part were fun to read or play (in the case of the AvP game).

Fox, in it’s infinite wisdom, seemed to think that these two monsters would be better suited for a teen slasher flick than a science fiction film that could have been a wonderful thing.

Watching this game for 4 hours would have been a better use of my time.

I’m going to quickly run through a few of the more asinine things in AvPR:

1. The title. WTF. Requiem is defined as “A hymn, composition, or service for the dead.” There is none of that here. Well, there’s a lot of dead. But what exactly the service or hymn is supposed to pertain to, you’ve got me.
2. This whole conflict is supposed to take place in small town somewhere in what looks like the northwest of the US. This small town for some reason has a nuclear power plant as well as a massive sewer system. Seriously. What is it about sewers? Not every little tiny place has a massive sewer system that would rival the Paris underground.
3. Neither the Aliens franchise, nor the Predator franchise have ever dealt with teenage angst. There’s a reason for that. Whoever decided to mash American Pie into this damn thing should be drawn and quartered.
4. The Pred-Alien hybrid… thing. It was already established in Alien 3 (a fine film ruined by studio meddling) that an alien can come out of any creature without much change to its physiology. In that one, the alien bursts from a dog, and it’s just an alien. From an overly nerdy standpoint, this makes sense; the face-huggers are simply implanting eggs into a host as a parasite. They’re not breeding with the host. Why the hell should the alien take on the characteristics of the host body?
5. What the hell is the Predator doing there? He’s not on a hunt, I don’t think. He strings up a few people at random. Then he uses this green goo to make bodies disappear. He doesn’t take any trophies. If he’s there to simply clean up the mess, then why doesn’t he just nuke em from orbit?
6. A dude running around with a predator shoulder-cannon as a pistol? What is this? Duke Nukem?
7. The French-kissing Pred-Alien pregnant-woman breeding thing was just… gross and inappropriate. It was like they were looking at this and going “how can we make this more stupidly gross? I’ve got it, we’ll have the Pred-Alien shoot eggs into the bellies of pregnant women at the hospital and then have them be belly-bursters!”
8. Where the hell did the national guard come from? (There may have been an actual call for help for them, but I probably missed it as I was to busy crying into my hands at the apparent death of two of my favorite movie franchises in one go).

So, after crying my way through it, I really started to think, I could write a much better AvP movie. I probably wouldn’t, but I figured it would be fun to write up here some ideas and things that SHOULD have been so damn easy to get right to make a better film.

A better premise.

First, let’s look at some of the tropes of the Alien and Predator franchises that are cool that should have been included.

Predator:

1. Really cool weapons. This was one of the things that each of the Predator films and the first AvP actually got right. They’ve got these awesome toys. In the first predator we were introduced to the wrist blades, the spear and the shoulder cannon. Then in predator 2 we got that brutal net thing, some darts, and the disc. Then in AvP they had some cool throwing ninja star things and much longer wrist blades (a lot of people gave me shit about the longer wrist blades, but I think they made a lot of sense considering that the Predators weren’t hunting humans this time, they were hunting these acid-for-blood bad-asses so they needed to keep their distance.
2. The Predator ship and technology. This isn’t just the weapons; the Predators seem to have this really distinctive design in everything from their armor to their ships that I really dug the look of. Plus, that awesome field-medic kit that we got to first see in Predator 2 when Danny Glover cut off the Predators hand.
3. The fail-safe bomb. Each of the Predators has that nifty power-glove thing on his wrist that makes things go boom.
4. The creature design itself. That face…
5. The hunter attitude. These guys aren’t just dropped into a war, they go out and hunt things that can kill them. They actively seek out the most dangerous game in the universe and try to bring it down as a right of passage or a lifestyle.

Aliens:

1. The Xenomorph. The Giger design of the Alien creature is scary. This is the thing of nightmares. There are many articles written on the matriarchal/patriarchal struggle in the Alien series and the phallic imagery of the Alien creature itself, but what it boils down to is this is one scary looking bastard that oozes acid and will rip you apart.
2. The environment. LV427 is a hostile place. The entire future presented in these films seems to be one of total corporate culture fused with new-frontierism. The ship designs from the Nostromo to the Sulaco to the Auriga they evoked power and size and an attempt at man trying to control the environment. Echoed in the terraform machines of the colony on LV427. the whole man vs environment is prevalent.
3. The Marines. If there is one single thing that could have made both AVP and AVPR magnitudes better it would have been setting them in the Alien timeline and having the marines involved. The pulse rifles. The attitudes. The marines were grade-a badasses who ran smack into a bunch of dudes who were worse than them.
4. The strong female lead. I won’t get to deep into the female roles within the Alien series as there are dozens of articles written on it.
5. The queen and the hive. Just when you think the alien itself couldn’t be scarier, there’s a two-story egg-laying version of it that lives in the slimy, mucuss-y hive thing.

Both of these franchises also have wonderful sound design and musical scores. The pulse-rifles (as mentioned above) and motion detector from Aliens are both very recognizable, as is the alien screech. Predator perhaps even has a leg up in the audio department with very characteristic sounds from the Predator itself as well as the Predator technology.

So what basic premise would I have done to make an Alien Vs Predator movie?

Simple; something similar to Aliens and drop a Predator or 10 into the mix. It’s not original. It’s what was done in the game.

And it worked. It was awesome.

"Weeeeeee!"

Sigh.

Anyways, Walking Dead should be done soon. I’m gonna post this in rough form and maybe add something to it tomorrow. Just wanted to rant about it.

Thank the FSM that neither franchise was fully abandoned and we got a decent Predators film and Ridley Scott is now working on another Alien film.