Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem

This past weekend, I watched Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem.

It's one of the most misogynistic movies I’ve ever seen this side of American Psycho.

Giger’s Alien is a pretty horrid creature with its perverse use of the human body as an incubator after an oral sexual assault from the infamous face hugger, the beast that dehumanizes everything around it.

AVP:R was more violent and disturbing than I remember from what I caught in the theater, since this time, I watched the director's cut.

The first time I tried to see this in the theater, one of my friends was and is a staunch opponent of violence against children, pregnant women, animals, and men, with equal weight given to tall.  

Now they just hate all violence in movies. 

I can't blame them.

The first time I tried to see this movie, he cried out with his signature, “Aw, heelll-naw!” as one of the creatures prepared to assault a pregnant woman, and we left before the true nastiness could begin.

We left and went to get ice cream instead. 

Driven by a compulsion for closure, akin to that of a high schooler, I decided to see this movie again.

There’s a creature in this film that forces a tube down the throat of a pregnant woman, and her throat throbs luridly as it forces its spawn into her lower torso, where she already has a baby, because it only attacks pregnant women.

When taken out of context, the scene is nasty.

When taken in context, it’s the icing on a cake of sci-fi depravity the likes of which we haven’t seen since Event Horizon.

On top of that, characters that should have lived, because they didn’t have sex at any point, die anyway.

It’s a rule in horror movies that if you don’t have sex or do drugs, you don’t die, making nearly all of them an allegory for wildly excessive retribution visited upon youth by outside forces that politicians wanted visited on every one of youth.

If the horror is from space, everyone is apparently fair game, especially the young and/or the pregnant.

In addition to this nastiness, I hate the idea that the Aliens apparently have made it to Earth* on several occasions, making Helen Ripley’s eventually fatal quest to keep them off-planet sadly moot, perhaps even more than her being cloned in Alien: Resurrection. 

A member of the Predators lands on earth, and they are a gangly sort of cross between a CIA agent, a Green Beret, and a park ranger.

The concept of Earth as a sort of intergalactic wildlife preserve is rather funny, but when the only humor of a movie is more from the things you have to think of after the fact, something is lacking.

A good amount of action is spent in a massive sewer system that seems completely out of place in the small southwestern town of Gunnison, Co., standing in for the typical isolated, suburban Mainstreet, USA™, where aliens, zombies, vampires, and werewolves invariably schedule their showdowns with humans and each other in between spring parades, local animal celebrations, Halloween and the Thanksgiving Day parades. 

There are a ton of little continuity issues throughout the film, details that would ordinarily grab my attention are wrong, and details that I wouldn’t care about in any case are over-emphasized.

One of the details I caught was one character coming from the U.S. ArmyMarines, judging from the half-and-half uniform she wears upon her arrival home from Inconsequencistan. 

On the other extreme, too much time is devoted to another character’s really vague back story and his entire “dark past” turns out to be wholly irrelevant in the grand scheme of an alien invasion, as most petty crime wouldn’t make you capable of handling sub-machine guns, let alone an extra-terrestrial shotgun intended for creatures a foot taller than you.

Topping off all this nastiness is the inevitable, “Man is the real monster,” ending in which a shady government organization nukes the entire town of Gunnison to prevent the spread of the deadly phallus-headed Aliens, killing the remainder of the town's initial 5,409 people, minus the survivors who escape on a hospital helicopter, which of course the surviving veteran ArmyMarine knows how to fly as well.

The argument could be made here that somewhere in her backstory, she learned to fly a chopper as a civilian, but that’s giving the production far more credit than they gave me as an audience member.

The final insult in all of this is that after the survivors land, they are confronted by a group of face-painted commandos who insist they were “only following orders.”

That’s not what got to me, though.

What got to me was the surviving woman, who was supposed to also be a member of the military, regardless of branch, should have kicked that guy’s ass until candy came out and asked him if it would be acceptable if she nuked his hometown in the process of “following orders.”

Instead, she shrugs it off and looks wistfully at the sky, where we see her slight resemblance to Sigourney Weaver.

Aggressively terrible as that ending was, it doesn’t compare to the film's actual tacked-on ending, in which a man in a suit, responsible for war crimes at this point after tactical-nuking more people than were killed in 9/11, delivers the Predator’s shotgun weapon to Ms. Yutani.

Dun-Dun-Dun!

This last scene was a desperate grasp for continuity with the series, as Yutani is the other half of the soon-to-be Weyland-Yutani Corp. We met Weyland’s CEO in the first AVP, and, as in this film, we didn’t much care then either.

On a final note, a film snob moment: The finest scenes in any film involving the Predator are the scenes where the Predator is alone on screen and doing its thing, telling a story entirely with physical acting.

Having an actor tell a story through motion alone, rubber suit or not, is always cool. I found it fascinating in the first Predator and still interesting in the second. AVP sorely lacked that little touch, and AVP:R at least had the good sense to bring it back; however, that’s really all the sense it had.

*Seriously, way too many people want to take Ripley's sacrifice away.