Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem is not a good movie, and it's not only because it is poorly scripted, acted and directed. We expected all those things. The problem is that you can't have any real fun with it. Sure, heads explode and there is enough gruesome gore to make a fanboy happy for weeks. Unfortunately the characters are so one-dimensional you couldn't care whether they live or die and the fact that the film is so damn dark it ruins the potential of really seeing anything.

Colin and Greg Strause, referred to with as much ego as possible as The Brothers Strause, were brought on by Fox to direct AVP2 in what only seems as an attempt to pay very little for a film that was guaranteed a specific amount of money as long as it was released in theaters. The brothers proved they are excellent with special effects, but as far as telling a story goes they are miserable.

The film centers on a small Colorado town in which a Predator spaceship crash lands. The ship was filled with alien face huggers, a half-breed Alien/Predator known as a Predalien and a bunch of Predators. The face huggers set out to impregnate humans with aliens and the Predalien sets out to impregnate kids and pregnant mothers. A call goes out to the Predator home world where a Predator heeds the call and heads to Earth to clean up the mess.

People die, bombs drop, heads explode and pregnant mothers give birth to baby Predaliens. All this happens to a cast of characters you would prefer they die rather than try and remember their names. Seriously, I actually got to the end of the film and never noticed one of the main characters had already died. Perhaps that was because the entire film happens in the dark. Seriously, this film is basically black with silver highlights. I am running an HD DVD up-rez player on a 42" plasma through a Pioneer Elite tuner and while the picture looks good, you absolutely can't see a damn thing. Even when I shut all the blinds and turn off all the lights it was hard to make out several scenes. Not a good thing.

As for special features, the disc comes with unrated footage added in and an unrated marker that you can turn on or off telling you when new footage is shown. This I actually wish more films would do since I traditionally only see the movie once in theaters and when the unrated DVD rolls around I really have a hard time telling the difference from the theatrical to the unrated version, that is unless it is story changing as it was with I Am Legend.

Next you have a group of five featurettes, which are all pretty generic, and there is even a little comment at the end of "Building the Predator Home world" in which Colin Strause says:

There were talks at one point of us trying to get an Alien home world, and actually it was going to be the final shot of the movie. It was something we did concepts for; we kind of played around with it... It was just one of those things that felt a little forced in so I think it might be better to explore it in the next movie."

He says it in such an off-hand way that I don't think you should really get your hopes up too much for an AVP3 considering how much it seems everyone hated this film, but who knows. If the Strause brothers will come back for another $3 paycheck perhaps it will get made.

There are also some photo galleries, trailers and a couple of commentaries. The commentary with the brothers is great considering it was recorded before the film was released. I imagine they would be crying, or refused the commentary, had they known at the time Fox was not going to screen the movie for critics and it was pretty much universally despised.

Traditionally I would also blame the failure of this film not only on the directors, but also on writer Shane Salerno, but the brothers made it obvious in their commentary that they had a lot of input in the script and wildly approved of it. Too bad for them they may have just shot their directing career in the foot before it ever got started.