Reverting back to the heavy violence and free-flowing obscenities the franchise is known for, Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem manages to capture the appearance (and infrequently the mood), but never the essence of what made the original films so engaging. The gore is there but the scares are not, and great heroes and heroines are nowhere in sight. The creatures themselves have taken the spotlight yet again, and as marvelous a sight as they are, it’s hard to choose a side when there’s nothing at stake save for the lives of a few tiresome humans.

A Predator spacecraft unwittingly carrying a dangerous Alien hybrid crash-lands on Earth in a small Colorado town. Chaos breaks loose as the deadly creatures are unleashed upon the unsuspecting citizens, and the survivors must band together to stay alive. But the Aliens aren’t the only monsters they must contend with as another Predator arrives to hunt the “Predalien” and the just-as-inhuman military seeks containment.

A character runs onscreen in a blubbering mess, and a bewildered bystander queries, “What was it? What was chasing you?” The response is probably one of the hardest lines for an actor to recite with an authentic voice, especially when the answer is an alien life form. Too often films lose their credibility when just such a character is forced to quiver in fear and spit out responses indicating they have no idea what was chasing them - because certainly no one will believe them if they do. And usually that’s where the audience also starts to disbelieve. One of the key factors that hinders Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem’s implausible plot is that the characters themselves don’t grasp the seriousness of their plight, and so their reactions are ill-contrived and questionable. The fact that most of the victims are teenagers also doesn’t benefit the once bloodcurdling xenomorphs.

The original Alien, Aliens and Predator films made estimable use of an adult cast that handled a situation in which none of them could possibly prepare for, in a manner that suited their mature and weathered personas. Here the Aliens and Predators have been reduced to a Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers slasher film killer, and have lost all of their eeriness and menace. When audiences are forced to root for the inhuman antagonists over the poorly developed lead humans, it’s clear that the studio has a character that they can no longer create a worthy plot for.

The atmospheric and claustrophobic designs of the first three Alien films are partially recreated in this second crossover film, but ultimately the larger sets and earthy locations could easily have been substituted for the shadowy corridors of a spaceship or terraforming planet compound. Since isolation was a key point to the plot of Requiem, it seems a lost cause to deposit the aliens on Earth, where highly illogical creations freely mix with natural earthbound realism. After all, it’s only in space that no one can hear you scream – space aliens just aren’t as threatening on Earth since they so rarely frequent such commonplace surroundings.

As each installment of the once grand Alien and Predator series premieres, it seems that the creators believe that the real stars are the monsters themselves (an arguable point, but one that only requires examining the original films to disprove). With this attitude, the Aliens and Predators receive more and more screen time and the humans are merely left to await their horrendous fates. When such focus on what are essentially the antagonists becomes so prioritized, the human characters become simple fodder to feed the surmounting bloodshed. But what good is all that carnage if the fate of these victims is meaningless? Terror, tension, and suspense all lose their effectiveness when we just don’t care what happens to the protagonists. The tagline of the previous film fits this entry more appropriately – “whoever wins, we lose.” But we’re the audience. Why should we have to lose?

- The Massie Twins