Having broken free on a Predator spaceship and slaughtered the entire crew, the agile Aliens crash-land on Earth along with the vessel. Immediately implanting larvae into a random earthling and his son, the creatures dive into the sewers, where they begin to feed on the local homeless population. A fellow hunter of the deceased Predators, having received a distress signal, flies from his distant planet to restore order.
By the time he reaches the creatures, several tragedies have occurred: a pizza delivery guy, in love with a pretty classmate, gets punched in the face by her boyfriend; the delivery guy’s brother, returning to town after serving time, discovers that it’s not easy for a former convict to find work; and the Aliens, finding that the homeless aren’t enough to satisfy their hunger, attack the town.
The Downfall of Cosmic Horror
An entire horde of Aliens living in the sewers of a small provincial town is genuinely terrifying. Equating a cosmic monster, an infernal embodiment of pure and incomprehensible evil, to mutant rats can only be done by people who have lost not only their conscience but also any hope of salvation. In the title “Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem” (2007), the most important word is definitely the last. The final installment of the franchise is a requiem not only for the series but also for the avid curiosity about space that people of the “Star Wars” program era and government telescopes, keenly catching messages from other civilizations, once possessed.
A Lack of Focus and Vision
The issue isn’t even the hurried script, which doesn’t provide a single character to focus on, or the helpless direction, which mixes Aliens and Predator into a poorly distinguishable mess. Although, of course, it’s astonishing that even the mutant resulting from the forced crossbreeding of an Alien and a Predator looks like a vague, toothy blob, while the Predator himself is not an embodiment of battle but some bucolic Turgenev-esque hunter, whom even a rural cop can approach unnoticed.
The problem lies in a kind of sinister naivety. The Strause brothers, who directed the film, seem to suffer from lumbago – their spine doesn’t bend, and they can only look at the sky by falling flat on their back. All that remains is what’s before their eyes: politics, problems with the government, and all that stuff. They seem to be trying to correct the humiliation of humanity in the Alien and Predator sagas – the humiliation from encountering the unknowable, the mystery, the assertion that we are not only not alone in the Universe, but we are also helpless in it. In “Requiem,” the xenomorph invasion of Earth is not a clash with the metaphysics of evil and battles, not a war of worlds, but something like an ecological disaster, like the Colorado potato beetle. The fact that the beetles have huge teeth and acid instead of blood doesn’t change anything – the answer is the courage of the common man and a good bomb if pesticides don’t help.
The Loss of Heroes
The effect, however, is the opposite. If there is no universal evil, there is no good either, and neither the mighty Dutch nor Lieutenant Ripley is possible in this world. The former is probably interrogating insurgents in Abu Ghraib, the latter is suffering from clinical depression in some backwater.
Space is just a meaningless hole, suitable only for housing satellites for TV. All that’s left are either rats, or mice, or Aliens in the sewers. And us.