Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (2007)

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem arrived on Christmas Day 2007 with a mandate so modest it barely qualified as one: put two franchise monsters in a Colorado town and let them sort it out. The Brothers Strause, plucked from their visual effects shop, deliver exactly that. A Predalien escapes a crashed scout ship, a veteran Yautja nicknamed Wolf arrives to clean up the mess, and the residents of Gunnison become inventory. The lighting is punishingly dark, so much of the carnage registers as texture. Critics were unkind. The box office was not.

From a cultural standpoint the film is a void, and an instructive one. The ensemble is a standard-issue small-town cross-section, assembled along 2007 studio convention with no evident design behind it. Reiko Aylesworth's Army reservist fights to protect her daughter, which grants the proceedings a capable female presence, though the film frames her as a survivor and stops there. There is no queer content and no racial commentary; Gunnison's townspeople are an undifferentiated body count. The nuclear strike that ends the story is a plot device, not an environmental parable, and the Yutani Corporation appears as franchise furniture instead of a target. Nobody lectures. No thesis about bodies, minds, or history is offered. The movie wants only to show us a Predator stapling a Xenomorph to a wall.

This is, in its crude way, restful. A film with no argument to make cannot lose one. Requiem is dumb, murky, and largely unloved, and it is unpretentious to a degree that now reads as archaeological. We classify it accordingly: a creature feature with nothing on its mind but the creature.