You walk out after watching Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem or AVP:R and you wonder just how much the scriptwriters and the producers are going to flog a dying horse. True, there was excitement – once. True, people were obsessed with the clash of the titans – once. However, sometimes it’s just time to close the chapter and leave well alone. What was Fox thinking? Where was the arsenal here in this storyline with very little interest to get the audiences pouring in? Well, the writing now seems to be on the wall – it’s time to lay the saga to rest. If this had happened in its heyday, it would have been a pretty good requiem, not a ho-hum, thank goodness that’s over and done with!

The 2003 AVP or Alien vs. Predator just didn’t have the momentum to be carried forward to another sequel. In AVP:R, one of the first things you notice is how the canvas seems to have shrunk. Is it something relative? Are our expectations to blame? Or does the smaller budget have something to do with it? Whatever the reason, the promise of an apocalypse like Independence Day fades off to a damp squib. It starts off all right. It continues from where the earlier AVP left off with a dead predator and suddenly, out of the body pops out – surprise, surprise - an alien baby. All this aboard a spaceship hurtling through space away from Earth. From then on, somehow there seems to be a suspension of belief. After mowing through the crew, the spaceship is back on an earthbound course and crashes into the Colorado mountains and what do you know – suddenly there’s a proliferation of  alien spawn and the population of Gunnison, Colorado is about to be history. Enter our hero – a predator who will have to figure out how to contain these dangerous hybrids between aliens and predators. Through all this is woven human-interest stories that involve people in Gunnison like the sheriff, played by John Ortiz, the black sheep of the community, Steven Pasquale and Kristen Hager and Johnny Lewis who play high-school sweethearts and the story is punctuated with humor that doesn’t raise more than a smile now and then. The whole point is that these poor souls are probably being set up to die anyway so why the diversions?

Well, all things considered, AVP:R is probably a tad better than AVP even though a lot of sequences and shots look like they have been taken from there. In fact, every action shot looks like it’s been taken out of AVP and plonked down here. AVP was pedestrian and maybe in some ways AVP:R rises a little bit from that extreme position. For one thing, it is shorter and that is very welcome. And while the acting is, truth be told, terrible, the special effects are good and so are some of the shots. The acting is probably made even worse thanks to a screenplay that has cheesy dialogues and very tacky plots. The setting is Earth so what was needed was a scope that was so vast that it blew off all the other movies of this genre. However, sad to say, as small as the cast is, the space and the scope are probably even smaller. So out go the thrills, the fear and the tension.

What really went wrong? In retrospect, maybe this whole alien versus predator thing has either been done to death or just isn’t interesting in today’s context. Maybe one just shouldn’t have put these two together. Maybe what worked wonderfully well in comic books just fizzles out when it comes out on celluloid. Maybe…maybe…there are so many reasons, how can one really tell? The only thing that viewers are left with is that awful taste in the mouth (no, not the popcorn)….boring, simple boring. Now for a requiem, nothing could be worse.