Alien vs. Predator: Requiem is the rare sequel that feels less like a movie and more like a prolonged apology that no one actually asked for. It takes the already shaky foundation of Alien vs. Predator and somehow strips away the few things that worked, replacing them with incomprehensible visuals, joyless cruelty, and a grim obsession with being darker without ever being smarter. This is the kind of film that mistakes misery for maturity and volume for intensity, and it collapses under the weight of those bad assumptions almost immediately.
If Alien vs. Predator was a dumb but earnest monster mash, Requiem feels actively hostile toward the idea of fun.
Darkness Isn’t a Personality
The most infamous problem with Requiem hits you almost instantly. You can’t see anything. And I don’t mean that metaphorically. The lighting in this movie is so aggressively dark and muddy that entire action sequences dissolve into abstract shapes and flickers. For a film built entirely around watching iconic creatures tear into each other, that is a baffling creative decision. Horror relies on control of what the audience sees and doesn’t see. Requiem offers neither clarity nor tension, just visual noise.
What makes this especially frustrating is that there are moments buried in the darkness that could have worked. The creature designs, especially the Predalien concept, are inherently interesting. The problem is that the movie seems embarrassed to show them. Instead of building dread, the film hides behind shadows, smoke, and frantic editing, robbing every encounter of impact.
Cruelty Without Purpose
Requiem also leans hard into mean-spiritedness. This isn’t horror rooted in suspense or inevitability. It’s horror that feels like it’s trying to shock you into engagement. The violence is nastier, more graphic, and frequently directed at characters who barely exist beyond their function as victims. There’s no tension because there’s no attachment. The film doesn’t give you time to care, then seems irritated that you don’t.
Even by franchise standards, the human characters are thin to the point of irrelevance. They aren’t heroes, survivors, or even particularly interesting obstacles. They’re just there to be wiped out in increasingly unpleasant ways. That nihilism might have worked if the movie had something to say about it, but Requiem never does. It just wallows.
The Predator Deserves Better
Ironically, the best parts of the movie involve the Predator, specifically when the film briefly remembers how to stage action. There are a handful of sequences where the choreography is clear, the creature effects are visible, and the Predator’s methodical efficiency actually comes through. These moments are competent, sometimes even engaging, and they are the sole reason this movie avoids a complete bottom-of-the-barrel rating.
Unfortunately, these scenes feel like they belong to a different movie, one that understands pacing and visual storytelling. They’re islands of coherence in a sea of chaos. The Predator itself is framed less as a character and more as a walking cleanup crew, which is an interesting idea that the movie never explores beyond surface-level spectacle.
Horror That Forgets to Be Fun
The most damning thing about Alien vs. Predator: Requiem is how little enjoyment it offers, even on a dumb monster movie level. It’s not scary in a satisfying way. It’s not thrilling. It’s not even particularly memorable. Everything blends together into the same oppressive tone, the same murky visuals, the same relentless bleakness.
Both Alien and Predator films, at their best, understand rhythm. They know when to slow down, when to escalate, and when to let the audience breathe. Requiem has no rhythm. It’s just a constant grind, and by the halfway point, exhaustion replaces any sense of anticipation.
Half a Star for Effort, Barely
I really didn’t like Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. It misunderstands what people enjoy about both franchises and replaces atmosphere, tension, and fun with darkness, cruelty, and confusion. The few decent action scenes and flashes of competent creature work earn it half a star by default, but that generosity runs out fast.
This is a movie that feels like a chore to get through, not a guilty pleasure, not a messy experiment, just an unpleasant slog. It doesn’t expand the mythology in any meaningful way, it doesn’t deliver satisfying horror, and it actively undermines the spectacle it’s built on. A 1.5 out of 5 feels fair, and even that is doing a lot of heavy lifting.