TAKE ONE Presents... - The Xenopod 6: ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM (2007)

Episode Date: September 27, 2023

You crash in the Colorado forest and discover a small town overrun with people discussing ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM and why its gratuitous nastiness and deeply conservative undercurrents make this the most unpleasant film so far in the Alien franchise. Is there any interesting critical insight to pull from this literally and metaphorically dark film?Content warning: body horror, death, infant death, child death, pregnancy, sexual imagery, nuclear power.Our theme song is Alien Remix by Leslie Wai available on SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/lesliewai/alien-remixFull references for this episode available in Zotero at https://www.zotero.org/groups/5642177/take_one/collections/7PX55M97This podcast was recorded during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn’t exist.

Get away from her, you bitch away from her, you bitch! Hello and welcome back to the Xenapod, a podcast where we're watching all the alien franchise films in order, contextualizing them, and critiquing them. I'm Simon Bowie. I'm joined, as always, by my co-host, Jim Ross. Hello, Simon. How are you doing, Jim? Good, good. I think I was probably doing better before I watched.

this film but you know we'll get into that so we're watching aliens versus Predator Requiem this month the 2007 film continuing the kind of versus Predator sub-franchise that we sort of started and discussed a little last month with Alien versus Predator before we start I just want to make a brief note that this film was produced by 20th Century Fox which is now owned by Disney, which is one of the members of the AMPTP, a body which is currently refusing to negotiate with the major unions in Hollywood, the WGA and Sagafter.

I want to acknowledge that this podcast was recorded during the 2023 WGA and SagaFRA strikes, and without the labour of the writers and actors currently on strike, the film being covered here wouldn't exist. So I just want to make that clear. We're in solidarity with the unions. Aliens versus Predator Requiem came out in 2007. This was, as I say, a follow-up from Alien vs. Predator. And this was the only film I think we're covering during this podcast

that neither of us had seen going in. So I imagine this was your first experience of aliens versus Predator Requiem now. Yeah, it was. You know, and I think it came out that long ago, and I've kind of paid so much attention to other alien films. and other Predator films, frankly. It was hard to go in not knowing anything about this or its reputation.

But watching it for this edition of the show is the first time I have actually watched it from start to finish, which is not to imply that I kind of started watching elsewhere, but I'm not going to sit here and say I hadn't seen clips here and there of bits and pieces in the trailers and stuff. It's the first end-to-end viewing of it I've taught. Yeah, and we're certainly aware of its critical reputation. which is bad.

This is the lowest rated, consistently the lowest rated of all these films. You know, I thought the scholarship on Alien vs. Predator was scarce last month, but there's basically no academic scholarship on this. We're going to be doing interpretations based off ourselves. But there is a thesis by Kate Egan, who looked at atmosphere and audience evaluations of the alien. film series, where she basically asked a lot of respondents, you know, what they thought about the alien films, which ones they thought were better or much worse than the original alien. And Aliens versus Predator Requiem is consistently regarded as much worse. I don't think there

are any respondents on her survey who think it's better or much better than alien. Although interesting, there is a tiny, tiny uplift. There's a tiny, tiny uplift in the bar. I'm sure it'll be linked to in some of the sources we've got. There's a very, very tiny uplift on the bar that says, as good. And I really want to talk to the five people. So someone, at least someone did.

Who have such a low opinion of alien or such a high opinion of this film that they think these films are equivalent, that these are as good as each other. So this film comes out in 2007, which is three years after Alien vs. Predator. We talked in the last episode about how there was a plan for the next Alien vs. Predator film that didn't come to fruition from Paul W.S. Anderson.

Instead, they got a script from screenwriter Shane Solano, who turned in two scripts, one of which was a predator ship crashing in Afghanistan during the war on terror, which would have been very topical at the time and the other was a predator's ship crashing in small town America which is ultimately what they went for the fox wanted a special effects focus they wanted a creature effects person to direct the film and ultimately went with the brother Strauss

who were a pair of special effects practical effects people around Hollywood at the time doing these kinds of B-movies and I think this was their directorial debut yeah this was their first film they did want to make an alien versus predator film set in the future in the time period of the alien films but were told that they couldn't

they were told to do the present-day earth small town America thing but they did manage to get in elements of what they wanted like the predator home planet there's a brief shot of the predator home planet so yeah produced in 2007 this comes out in the United States on the 25th of December 2007 Christmas Day

which is utterly but which feels but I've actually looked at the other stuff that came out on Christmas Day that year and it does seem bizarre but I suppose this is this is the dying art of counterprogram yeah I mean I'm gonna run through it but you know if you don't want to go see the bucket list or cent trinians or the water horse a legend of the deep go see aliens versus predators Is this a thing? Do films come out on Christmas Day? Because I'm not aware of this.

Didn't the Force one of the Star Wars sequels come out on a Christmas team? I know it came out in December, but Christmas Day? No, December 4, December 18th. Well, I think the main thing for me, I mean, it's probably an American thing, right? As evidenced by the fact, this is the American release date. It's probably an American thing, right? Because

in Britain, I don't think you'd even get a loss. Or at least certainly in 2007, it might be different now. But in 2007, I don't think you've got a lot of cinema's open on Christmas. No, exactly. Perfectly, honestly. It's one of the very few days that our capitalists overlords actually give us off. Because of Jesus. So it comes out on Christmas Day, 2007 in the United States, comes out on 18th of January, 2008 in the UK.

I actually found a trailer for Aliens of the Predator Requiem that uses Silent Night. It uses like a creepy silent night version to make it look like a creepy Christmas horror film. The actual film isn't set at Christmas and has nothing to do with Christmas. Which spares as the interminable

is Alien versus Predator Requiem a Christmas film? Decidedly not, although they tried to mark it as one, market it as one for some reason. I think the tagline was it's going to be anything but a silent night. Budget of 40 million took home 130.

0.2 million at the box office. So it makes its money back, but not by a huge amount. And we're not talking massive amounts of profit. So 2007, what a time. It's a year before Iron Man comes out and starts the Marvel Cinematic Universe. And I do have things to say about that later on, because I think you can sort of see some of the embryonic elements in this film, oddly enough but the highest grossing film of the year was Pirates of the Caribbean at World's End which I think is the third

Pirates of the Caribbean film Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix which is the fifth Harry Potter film Spider-Man 3 which is the third Spider-Man film Shrek the third which is the third Shrek the 3rd which is the third Shrek film Transformers Rattah 2A

Simpsons movie I Am Legend so a lot of freequels coming out this year and doing well A lot of bad three-quels as well actually as well I don't think any of them have... Or in my view anyway. I mean, those two pirates of the Caribbean films are...

Like, I have some fondness of the first one. This one's pretty good. It was quite fun when I saw it. But the two sequels were just crap, really. I mean, they're just overlong and dull and, like, you know, they have their moments. And then Spider-Man 3, also not good. Another overstuffed thing. I can't actually remember anything about Shrek the 3rd, frankly.

and I think you're pointing I'll be interested what you say later about like Marvel because you can even see the seeds of you know ridiculous franchises

beginning here because I've just noticed the fifth highest gross in film there is um Transformers which of course is I think as we record

this is on to its is it seventh is it the seventh one I'm thinking so I think we just got Transformers 6 and it was the bumblebee spin off

right so I think has been like separate. Yeah, I mean, we've been through quite a bit of film history from 1979 onwards, but I think here in 2007, we're seeing the start of the blockbuster model that we're in now. So here we have Transformers. We have 300, so we're starting the kind of Zach Snyder ascendancy that will culminate in a load of nonsense around Justice League.

We're getting into a more recognizable blockbuster paradigm. Yeah, and I mean, it's quite a contra. I mean, if you look at, it's even just the type of films that you're looking at here, right? Because I just looked here, curiously, you probably mentioned it on the original episode we did on Alien, but I'm looking at the, you know, the highest grossing films in the US and Canada in 1979. You just look at the contrast here, and you've got the top grossing film in America that year was Kramer versus Kramer. Wow.

You know, I mean, like, the idea of a film like that, the idea of a film like that making, an alien itself was number six on this, right? And don't be wrong, it's not completely free of, like, sequel and franchise fairly. Like, you've got Star Trek, the motion picture at five, you've got Rocky two at three, right? But then you've also got Apocalypse now. I mean, like, I mean, the idea of a film like Apocalypse now, like beating out something like Star Trek, the motion picture or frankly even, it's just, it's kind of remarkable to me. So just that little snapshot contains a little bit of kind of interest about how that landscape has changed. Yeah, I hadn't looked at this before, because I didn't start.

reading out the highest grossing films of the year until a few episodes in. But yeah, Kramer versus Kramer is quite the number one. I take your point about Apocalypse now, but I think there's a kind of Oppenheimeriness to that that we're seeing replicated this year. Yeah, you know, you're right. Oppenheimer's... As literally as I said it, I thought Oppenheimer,

like given the context, we're recording this. Clearly Oppenheimer is going to be one of the highest grosser. I think that's because we're kind of... of getting to, we're kind of, yeah, I think, and maybe part of that is we are kind of getting towards this point where, I don't want to jump the gun on the, anything you say about the NTCU, but we have had a couple of, like, by their standards, flops recently with that, right? So I do think we're kind of getting, we're getting to the end of its period of invincibility, let's say, the box office. I don't have exactly going anywhere anytime soon, but I think,

I think it's lost that kind of like, you know, Kevlar-plated, you know, too big to fail type thing, yeah. So they were the big films of 2007. In December when this came out, we've just had Juno, came out at the start of December, the Golden Compass, which is the Philip Pilip Pullman adaptation, I Am Legend comes out, National Treasure Book of Secrets, and on the same day, Christmas Day, like you mentioned, we have the bucket list, St Trinians, and the day after, there will be blood, which I believe is one of your favourite films. Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. I found it quite funny to see that it came out of the day after that, really.

It's proper contrast. Yeah, I love there will be blood out there. I'm still kind of, I've said this a lot recently, and I'm just running through films in my head to see if I still agree with this, and I think I do. For me, certainly on some American cinema, I don't think there's been a better film than There Will Be Blood since There Will Be Blood came out, right?

So I do think, you know, and I think you can make a case for a couple of things, but certainly in American filmmaking, I think it's the best film of at the time we record the last 16 years or so for me. Anyway, we're not talking about there will be blood, otherwise we'd probably have a lot more positive things to say, I'd hope. Point on to say, end of December 2007, if you're in America, you can go to a double bill of there will be blood and aliens versus predator, and what a barbenheimer that would be the film basically picks up immediately or almost

immediately after alien versus predator when the predator from that film gets loaded onto a predator ship takes off into space and there's a sting just before the credits of the a pred alien an alien predator hybrid bursting out of its chest Cut to credits, fade to black. This film picks up immediately with the pred alien bursting out of the predator and rampaging through the predator ship. We see the ship crash on Earth into the woods and there's a load of facehuggers on board.

We see shots of facehuggers in tubes and being experimented on and they immediately go after a hunter in the woods and his son who happens to be with him. There's a brief shot, as I mentioned, of the Predator Homeworld, where a signal from the ship goes to this Predator homeworld, and a lone predator picks up the distress signal and goes to Earth to hunt the Pred alien to make sure that the threat is contained.

We're then introduced to... There's a number of scenes introducing our human characters. Dallas arrive on a Greyhound book. bus. He is a kind of all-American bad boy with a leather jacket. He's just got out of prison. He's kind of a, I've written in my notes, he's kind of a Bobby Briggs from Twin Peaks type, except Bobby Briggs was knowingly a parody, the satire, and Dallas does not seem to be knowingly a parody or a satire. He arrives on a Greyhound bus, and he bansers with the sheriff of the town, Eddie, who I guess used to be his friend, but, you know, that he had,

they ended up on different sides of the law. And importantly, this is about as much as you find out about their relationship. I'm sketching out these characters. That's as deep as this goes. We are quickly introduced to Dallas's younger brother Ricky, who works at a pizza place. And I will be astonished later in the film

to work out that he is supposed to be a high school kid because he looks in his early 20s. all the teenagers in this do go back to the woods a cop goes down to the sewers and arrests an unhoused man as if that will help I'll get into the kind of

conservatism of this film later but the homeless man's dog brings an arm to the cop and the unhoused man so they start a kind of investigation in the forest as to where this hunter

might have gone to we also briefly see Ricky brother deliver pizza to some jocks and to his love interest Jesse. We cut back to the hunter and his son in the forest and a chestburster bursts out of the hunter's chest. I think we also, do we see the child get chest bursted or is it just implied? No, we see it.

We don't see a full shot of it, right? So you see the kid kind of like struggle a bit, then there's a close-up on his chest where there's then some blood on the shirt and then the chest burser comes out. And then I think it cuts to black after that. So you do see it, but you don't see it in a full shot in the same way that you do with the father. And basically, it continues the trend at the start of this film with the absolutely abysmal editing because basically there are just constant cuts to black in this like first 10 or 15 minutes. There is no floor structure to this, right?

That's one of the many cuts to black that we've already had. the editing style changes a bit as the film goes on but it doesn't it certainly doesn't improve but no so we do we do see it but we just don't see it particularly clearly probably mercifully in this case but that's a that's a trend that will develop in this film of not seeing things particularly clearly frankly yes um but i i honestly think this is quite a promising start to the film i think the crash landing is interesting i think the infection of a child is interesting, but then they don't do anything with that. And later in the film, as the film develops, we'll understand that infecting a child in this way is pure shock

value, because there's a lot more shock value to come in a way that becomes very gratuitous, and we'll talk about it later. But I think the setup has promise that is entirely undelivered upon. I don't disagree entirely, right? Because I think it's up to this point, it's at least, when we say up to this point, I'm pretty sure we're still within the first 10 minutes or so with the film here, right? Okay, this is, like, this is not something that, like, persists for particularly long in the film, but it's at least, I feel like it's trying to do something at least slightly different, right? And I'll come back to where I think this had maybe had better, potential than where it is, meaning the setting. I think this kind of set up that have come up with had a bit of potential. It doesn't

really go anywhere. But I don't disagree. I think the setup is interesting enough. I mean, it's not without its ridiculousnesses, right? I mean, the way this spaceship crashes out of the sky, I mean, I would have expected the US military to be on it within

about five minutes, frankly. But, you know, it's not it's not without promise as you see I will consider yeah I'm going to mention this here because I might want to mention it later on as well but mentioning the US military not being on the

alien ship plant crash landing on the planet if this is just after Alien vs. Predator then there's just been a huge explosion in Antarctica that is never remarked upon at any point through the hill I know you can you might be able to cover things up in Antarctica quite easily

It's a, you know, deserted wasteland. But, you know, you'd think the military might want to mention it. Anyway, we are introduced to the last of our kind of main characters, who is a US Army soldier, who is returning home to her husband and daughter. She's bringing her daughter high-tech military equipment as a present, night vision goggles, and that's a source for a lot of letterbox jokes. It's like, oh, I wish I'd had Nightvridge and Grogles to see this film. But the, yeah, the kind of arc with this mother-daughter is that the dad is better with the daughter than the mum.

She feels bad about that. It's not an actual emotional problem because they make it clear that the daughter does love the mum. She's just not telling her. So it kind of diffuses the complexity of that storyline, and it never goes anywhere anyway. I don't know why I'm bringing it up. it's also not particularly great or deep storyline anyway as the father of as we record an 18 month old children will have these ridiculous preferences from one night to another

I was like no I want mommy to do this no I want daddy to do this it means absolutely nothing there is absolutely no depth through it whatsoever like it really is just the whims of a kid right and I think it is the one part of this film that I actually related to is just like that just like when you're on the like the rejected end of that as opposed to the kind of accepting end of it just that that like kind of like little tiny moment of being absolutely crushed i think uh i think i think i think the actor sells it quite well there but it's not you know it's not the springboard for anything particularly deep and that's it's kind of it's kind of the film in microcos it never goes anywhere

and spoiler it's not going to be resolved the daughter never says i love you no so there's some scenes where Ricky talks to Dallas and they're very macho and tedious I made a note that their house number is 5224-1-160 which I thought was an absolutely wild house number

you get some long roads in Glasgow but you don't get up to 5,224 with a dash needed to indicate more houses we cut to a scene in the sewers where the unhoused community are infected by facehuggers.

The unhoused people apparently weren't taken him by the cops after all. But the pred alien kills a woman down there, and we see the predator land and scout the predator ship for supplies and to clues. He sets it to self-destruct. Then Dallas and Ricky, because one of the bullies threw Ricky's car keys into the sewer, Dallas and Ricky go into the sewers to retrieve the car keys. the car keys and there's something almost down there, rats are running away, they hear some noises. Now these sewer scenes really establish the look of the film, which is way too dark.

You know, I should have mentioned at the top, I ended up watching this film twice because we were going to record earlier in the summer, but I had something on, we had to reschedule it, and then we got stuck with summer stuff. So we're recording it now in September. I ended up watching it twice to refresh my memory. The first time I watched it on my projector, and I know what I'm doing with projection, more or less. I know how to ensure that a film is correctly lit

and looks good based on the light in my room. Second time I watched it on TV, and both times were too dark. I think the TV time was a lot darker than on my projector, where I spent a bit more time adjusting it, but it's still way too dark. You can't see anything in these sewer scenes. Yeah, and I think that's, in terms of the look at the film, right, and much has been written and said about this, right? So I don't think we're not necessarily going to add anything new on that front in terms of the look at the film. But it is remarkable to me, like, that this is the aesthetic choice.

that they went for. And let's be clear here it is a choice, right? You know, I mean, like there's a lot of debates out there in cinema about kind of, like, oh, you know, or Christopher Nolan sound mixes deliberate, or they're just poor, blah, blah, and he says it, and then, you know, at the time we're recording this, we've had the flash with its, like, bad CGI and the director claiming it's a choice

and it's not, that's it, right? This is definitely a choice, right? It's far too, it's far too consistent across the film. The brother Strauss came from visual effects. So they know how things look on screen. They did a lot of practical effects on this film. There's very little CG. Apparently only the alien ship, a predator ship is CG. But they should know how to make things look good on screen. And it kind of downplays a little bit like

what strengths this film does have as it goes in, right? Because, so the idea of this pred alien, right? I kind of like it, right? I kind of like it, right? I kind of like it in a sort of creature feature fan art sort of way. Like, you know, like if you were to combine a predator to an alien, what would it look like? What would it do? Okay, fine. You know, I think what's apparent from this film is you cannot stretch that out into a 93-minute feature film, but, you know, whatever. I mean, I'm interested in the idea, right? But I think what surprised me about this is, is just how little of it you actually see, right? And that's, like, that's really what in 2007 was probably getting people through the door, right?

It's to see these things fight each other in the setting, and, you know, it's probably teased a little bit at the end of the previous film, obviously, right? You know, because it basically, what this thing actually looks like when you can actually see it, right, is it essentially looks like, to me, it looks like a predator, but it has a xenomorph tail, and it has, like, a xenomorph head. head but with the predator dreadlock type things and then the mandibles right it's got the mouth of a predator the kind of head of an alien the dreadlocks of the dreadlock tendles of the predator

and you know it's big and it's hulking and like you know I mean it's an interesting enough concept but you never you barely see it you know and both kind of in terms of how much you glimpse of it because of the editing which I've already mentioned which I think is abysmal

You know, it's that kind of like rapid fire Cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, cut, you know, constant, constant sort of like, you know, I mean, the bottom of the editing room floor must have looked ridiculous But then on top of it, the thing you said, the lighting. I mean, like a lot of the time, even when you do get a full shot of it, very length of period of time, the lighting is such that it's either very dark

or it's outdoors and it's raining and it's a silhouette with a lot of like specular highlight on it so really it's effectively just a big amorphous black mass yeah I think it's difficult to tell when you're looking at a pred alien or if you're looking at a regular xenomorph and or a predator yeah they very much blur into one another partly because it's so dark and partly because I don't think the film you know talking about the lack of promise of the film I don't think it builds on the pred alien in any interesting way. I don't think it

differentiates itself from the xenomorphs in any interesting way. It doesn't seem smarter than them. No. It does not seem that there seems to be some kind of deferral to it on the part of the xenomorphs. But that's not done interestingly or nothing comes out

of it. I think something that I think just to take a pause to talk about at this point are those sewer scenes, right? Because one of the things that we've said here is that the opening of the film is I don't know if I'd go so far as to call it promising

right but it perhaps kind of in the case you know this this concept is maybe not beyond saving as a sort of like very you know non-serious kind of schlocky horror film right

there's potential there it was at this point right where the sewer scenes and in particular the scenes with the police and the homeless people, where I was just like, this is beginning to feel bit nasty and exploitative now, right? There's very much a lack of empathy at all in those scenes in the way that they are presented. And the film and the script, actually, in my view, goes out of its way to characterize these people as disposable, right? And the reason for that

is after kind of initial attack and that woman who gets attacked is coming in. There's a very throwaway line in there. Something about kind of like, oh, I hope you saved some for me, right? Thus implying, like, clearly they're meant to be, you know, alcoholics or drug addicts, and that's a bad thing. And these are people are, you know, they're down here for a reason. And it's just, it felt so unnecessary. It just felt it.

Like, as with so many films that would, things that will happen in this film, it's so unnecessary. And I just, that was the point where I really did start to tip over. And there are other instances in the films we go on. I'm sure we'll talk about them. But that was the one where I was, I did find myself going, eh, it's not that this is just kind of like a gory reveling in the gore film. This is actually a bit of a nasty, regressive little film, actually. Yeah, it's a bit of nasty piece of work.

I think there is, as you say, this will come up throughout. But I think there is a real conservativeness in. the social implications of how this film treats unhoused people, children, service workers. Generally, these working class people, or non-working people, are punished by the film, whereas the film's heroes are kind of arms of state repression, their cops or their soldiers. Or there is the reformed criminal, and the reformed criminal has been rehabilitated. he is fine now, he's a productive member of society

because he's been to prison because he's been through this state apparatus whereas the unhoused people and the service workers that will get punished later are not they are like you say ripe for punishment and it's kind of gross

and look and look don't get me wrong I mean we're talking about alien versus aliens rather versus predator requiem and I'm sure there's probably people out there who are kind of like screwed you're really you know this is a stupid kind of like you're reading too much into this well i've got news for you you're listening to the wrong podcast then right so that's the first thing but i think more importantly it really was that line

that kind of stood out to me in the sewer scenes because there's it adds nothing right it adds nothing so or at least it adds nothing in a plot sense right it doesn't add anything to kind of like our um understanding what's going to happen it doesn't change anything about what follows in terms of the attack of the xenomorph or anything like that. It's purely there for colour and that is a decision which has been made in the script it is a decision that has been made in the edit to hub that in. And my question is why?

And really, it doesn't leave you a lot of places to go because if it's a very deliberate way of painting these throwaway characters I don't agree with that and I think it's a very aggressive approach. If it's genuinely is just, a throwaway thing and it's not been thought about that that much, then that's not much better, to be honest.

Like, it's maybe slightly less actively malicious, but it is kind of like malicious by, you know, negligence I would say. I've got a lot of notes about laziness in my notes. So I do think it is the latter. I think it's a lack of thought on the filmmakers

part, but I think it's a lack of thought and a laziness that tends towards the status quo, which is conservative and conservative. And so I think either way, it doesn't shake out well for the film or the filmmakers. So there is a search party for the Hunter and his son, who have by this point been chest-bursted. The predator, who is called wolf, by the way, never comes up in the film, but the predator's called a wolf, which is a reference to Harvey Keitel's cleaner character in Pulp Fiction.

the predator sees a human and the predator chases and slaughters him hangs him up in a tree and flays him I don't know why the predators come to earth to get rid of this pred alien I'm not sure why he takes the time to flay a cop

who isn't worthy prey for the predators it would seem it is also a bit confusing because the film has already gone to lengths at this point to show Wolf I should say

this seems to be accepted lower from this film but I don't see this actually said anywhere It's never said in the film but you know Scar was the predator in the last film

I've never said that they just pick up these nicknames and the summaries and I'm getting my information from or refer to them yeah I mean there's a certain amount of amusement

to me that kind of like the name comes from like you know Winston Wolf and Pulp Fiction because that's essentially what he's doing. It's just, as we'll get into, compared to Winston Wolf and Pulp Fiction, extremely bad at his job, frankly. And this is kind of like a very good example of it, because the film has gone, now, you could argue whether the script kind of like ends up making him look

essentially incompetent in my view, because the film's already gone at great, to great lengths at this point to show him using this sort of like blue liquid out of a canister, which seems to like decompose organic matter or something, right, in an attempt to remove of like, you know, predator tech because he blows the ship up, right? You can't leave any trace. To remove traces of predator tech and remove traces of any xenomorphs

or xenomorphs or xenomorphs or all the rest of it. But he just takes this aside to just skin it. Yeah, I'm not sure why he does it. You know, and I think unfortunately, like to refer back to your laziness question, right? This is not really thought about it in the script, and the script has written pretty lazily around this point because I think basically it was thought that we're making an R-rated film and this will look cool.

Yeah. This is what Predators do, right? They hunt people, they string them up. Well, no, in the early films, the Predators have a kind of moral code, you know, based on hunting and dominance as it is, but it is still a moral code. I'll talk about Star Trek again and how some writers misunderstand what the Klingons are and how the Klingons react to things and how their culture. is kind of structured around honour and battle but they are not vicious, they are not savages. This one positions the predator as

doing these hunting things but there is no reason for this predator to be doing those hunting things. He's not here to hunt humans or scared cops. So anyway, Dallas is despondent about getting a job and he floats with a waitress in a local coffee shop he catches up with the sheriff.

The waitress's partner turns out to be the dude who was just killed and flayed so the sheriff goes out looking for him Ricky the little brother flirts with Jesse his love interest and she invites him to go swimming at 10pm at night

horrible swimming time and at this point they've mentioned that they're in class so I'm thinking oh they're college students or they're university students who happen to live here now you see this is really interesting you interpreted it that way because I Because with the age that these two appear to be, right,

I was under the impression that they were former classmates. Right. That they went to school together, and they had now left school, and there were references to when they were in class. So I was like, oh, okay, right, she's, you know, doing whatever, and he's got his, you know, pizza delivery dig or something, but they used to go to high school together. It was only once we got to this point,

and she makes a reference to taping the lock after class, right, as a way that that's how they get into the school swimming pool. I'm like, oh, sorry, they're meant to be high school students right now. I realize they're supposed to be high schoolers. I was like, wow. Because these actors must be in their 20s. They don't look like teenagers. Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Not that they act like teenagers, particularly, apart from the kind of generic script. And that is completely the case. I looked up the I looked up like a bunch of the actors afterwards and certainly the woman who plays Jessie she's four years older than me

you know like I was I think when when this film came out I would have been just about to turn 24 so you know not great what am I talking about

no it's a god about you I've just got my own age on no she'd be about to turn 24 I was about to turn 21 still that's right that's how you know I'm getting on about I can't give my date Exactly, exactly. Anyway, the point is just very much not high school age. That's whatever way you slice it, basically.

Wolf goes hunting in the sewers for the xenomorphs. It's incredibly dark, little action sequence, but the xenomoths get away. A waitress and a chef, they're killed by xenomorphs. You see the spine being pulled out of the chef. This is what I mentioned about service workers being punished in the film. They're the people who happen to be killed first. Despite everything that's going on, the sheriff goes to a bar to meet Dallas, and he gets a call about a disturbance, and together they go and investigate. The predator pursues the xenomorphs to a local power plant, and the town's power gets knocked out through crossfire. Meanwhile, Jesse and Ricky are swimming. They've broken into the high school swimming pool, and they're going swimming.

she strips down to her undies and they kind of flirt and kiss a bit and a fight breaks out. We see some swimming xenomorphs in the pool who don't look nearly as good as the swimming xenomorphs in Alien Resurrection. I kind of want to mention the film's male gazey approach to young women because, as I've said, this young woman gets stripped down to her underwear. The boy doesn't, Ricky doesn't. It's, you know, a kind of very traditional male-gazy approach to young women, where they get stripped on camera and the men don't, and they're the objects of sexual desire, and the men aren't.

Also, the shot choices during this scene, actually, are so. they are so male gaze cliche to almost be at the point of parody, frankly. I mean, especially bearing in mind that this film comes out in 2007, right? And I'm sure we'll talk about the fact that it basically, like especially by the time you get to this point, it resembles a slasher film, right? So it really is at the point now in the film, particularly with a scene where it's at the point of parody, frankly. but it appears to be entirely I mean sincere is the wrong word

but it appears to be genuinely taking that approach there's not a lot of nudge nudge wink wink were subverting this somehow right this film does do the occasional thing which I think is you know flirts with being subversive but this is not one of them no and you've mentioned the word slasher there

and I think it's worth talking about the genre of this film Because the alien films have a complex relation to genre and subgenre. So the original alien is both a science fiction film and a horror film. It's a kind of haunted house in space. And the other films adopt various different genre trappings. So we've got the action film in aliens. We've got the prison film in Alien 3.

We've got the kind of blockbustery with art house sensibilities of alien resurrection. This film's very much a slasher. or almost straight up a slasher movie with the aesthetics of a monster movie so in this case the slasher isn't you know Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees the slasher here is the xenomorph

and the predator kind of since he just kill people for no reason and so it kind of adopts these genre tropes of the slasher in a very lazy way so we've got the woman as sexual the young woman as object of sexual desire. And we have these generic horror movie tropes around the xenomorph turning into a generic movie monster. And very pointedly, it picks up the kind of

final girl stuff of Carol Clover. Carol Clover's seminal work on the slasher, men, women and chainsaws talks about the final girl and how slashes punish sexuality. in these films, so you end up with a kind of vaginal, final girl who is pure but attractive and attainable, whereas the women who have slept with men in the film all die and get killed. These are kind of genre tropes of the slasher film and how they treat sexuality. And you mentioned sincerity and irony here.

if you look you can see a perfect example of this being ironized in the cabin in the woods the josh weeden film which will take these tropes and do self-aware parody of them later but this isn't doing any of that it doesn't seem this is just straight up lazily taking these tropes because it thinks this is what a film is and that's why i think it's laziness rather than maliciousness when we have all these conservative themes these conservative undercurrents because I just think it thinks

that this is how films are made and it hasn't thought about it Yeah, no, I'd agree with that and I think there are certain things it does, the only thing I would say in opposition to that is it does do certain things later on I mean, you know, I mean, obviously

you know, as we said before, we're not concerned about spoilers or so this. You know, like, the thing, the girl who's set up, who, certainly in the early part of that film, fulfills this sort of like almost final girl type role, or would, right? Because she isn't the final girl.

She dies before the end. But this is where we then swing back to kind of what you've already mentioned about who is rewarded in this film, because I would argue that if you look at the, the Kelly, I think is the character's name, the, you know, the United, the soul, yeah, the army mum who comes back kind of in the opening stretch film.

She's the one who's rewarded, right? And it almost tries to say that I find it absolutely fascinating that character because that character and what she's capable of doing in terms of kind of like, you know, utilizing military hardware and all the rest of it, and then she's got her daughter in the total.

It's almost setting up this kind of like pseudo-rippley type character, right? It's very, I feel like that relationship is set up very intentionally to almost echo the new Ripley relationship in aliens, which I think is in it, which I think much like the other Alien versus Predator film and other ones in franchise, it harks back to that in some ways more than it does alien, right? Even the opening titles, it has that

kind of like, you know, the central flash of light thing and the title emerges in the same way it does for aliens, but not for alien, right? So, you know, in terms of what it's referencing, you can see it there. But that relationship is set up as this pseudo-Newt Ripley type thing and to my mind the way it's executed and kind of like the type of character that she is and the background she has and what she's shown to do it just fundamentally

misunderstands what was going on with that relationship and that character it's just I find it remarkable and this is where like your point about the laziness comes in I find it remarkable that a film that ostensibly inhabits the same

trans media franchise as that film right and I understand like with the way with the way that we've interpreted, like you've got various different roots into this kind of like body of work, right? But you can still think of alien as the original text to a certain extent, right? You know, if you take back and take a kind of a bird's eye view on it. So if you're making something that's a part of that, I find it remarkable that alien and aliens kind of like maybe being the first two, something which so fundamentally misreads that relationship and that character, I find quite incredible. You know, I mean, if they don't sound completely different,

it's just an addition, that's fine. But this, to me, it very deliberately harks back to that. No, and it has to, because there is a direct line from Alien to this film. This is going to prove to be a dead end for the franchise that they will have to go back on and find another route. But at this point in 2007, this is just one, more or less one straight line to this film. You know, Prometheus won't come out for another few years. to all intents and purposes this is a canonical sequel to uh well prequel technically to to alien no so we get a scene with the army mom and the army daughter uh she sees a monster outside with the

night vision goggles and her dad is slaughtered by a xenomorph power in the town has gone off because of the fight at the power plant so sheriff eddy calls the national guard and calls for the evacuation of the town. The teens from the swimming pool go to the power plant for some reason where they talk directly to the sheriff and to Dallas

who immediately leave the scene of this far bigger issue to go investigate a disturbance at a swimming pool. Wolf has been ruined so he administered us some predator first aid while we see the town being evacuated.

Dallas who just got out of prison a few days ago asked for guns and the sheriff immediately obliges to take him to steal some weapons from a sporting good store and I suppose they just have hunting rifles in camping stores in the in the US again I think this shows the kind of conservatism of the film in that our we're getting our core hero group at this point that I'll just refer to as the group of survivors we've got Dallas the sheriff army mom army daughter Ricky and Jesse

and our hero's survival relies on this easy availability of hunting rifles and of shotguns, which could only happen in Smalltown USA because, well, thanks to the Second Amendment. So there's this kind of sense in that it's great to have guns. It's fine to just have a shop full of guns in the middle of the high street that you can break into and get some hunting rifles, just in case you need to take down some monsters that have suddenly appeared. And the sheriff still would find with it. The National Guard arrives, and a company of guards is immediately slaughtered by a group of sneaky xenomorphs. It's a scene kind of reminiscent, but not as good as that scene in aliens, where the exact same thing happens to the colonial Marines.

But crucially, in aliens, you could see that, see them. You can't see them in this film. It's way too dark. I think it's raining by this point, which reduces visibility on film further. The Army Mum and the Army Daughter, as I've mentioned, stumble into the same sporting goods store and also a couple of stoners are added. We don't have to worry about the stoners because I'll be dead in the next scene. So I'm not quite sure why they're introduced other than to up the body count.

At this point, I thought they might want to sit down and speculate about what these things are. I think any group would sit down and think, what are these monsters? Are these aliens? That raises huge implications for our life on Earth. But because this is in the slasher mode, I think they're just viewed as generic monsters, they're just generic evils. So no one, apart from the army colonel that we'll get to in a couple of seconds, speculates about what these things are. As I've mentioned, there's no link to an explosion into Antarctica a few days ago.

They are just monsters. The next shot is of the pred alien walking around a hospital and he looks in on some newborn babies and we see a shot of the newborn babies crying while the pred alien stands over them and there is a pregnant woman who is immediately killed by the pred alien and then infected by the alien and these scenes are just kind of as you said exploitative. just kind of gross and it seems that they're purely there for shock value to imply that the pred alien has killed a bunch of newborn babies and that he has killed on screen a pregnant woman and it feels gratuitous it feels totally gratuitous to me this this violence against

children, babies and pregnant people yeah and I think the problem the problem with this scene is, also, you do need to look at it, in my view, in the context of the film itself, and also, right, whether people like it or not. And again, like, again, I could be accused of overthinking aliens versus Predators to Requiem. As I said before, we're listening to the wrong thing if that's, that's kind of what we're going down here. In the context of the film itself, right, this scene on its own would necessarily be an issue, right? Right. I mean, there are films out there where they go for kind of extreme horror. Things are a lot more extreme than this.

This is kind of like rather tame in the grand scheme of horror, right? I'm perfectly aware of that. And I can't believe I'm making this comparison. But I'm thinking of Don't Look Now, where at the very start of the film, a child dies. And it's deeply affecting and it propels the rest of the narrative. This isn't that kind of death of a child. Right. So that's not the sort of thing we're doing here.

It's a little bit like, and this is why I link it back to it and kind of string these things together, the line in the sewer about kind of like, oh, you say something, the way it paints those characters, right? There is no reason for this to happen, right? And on its own, if the film is just going for shot by it, there is room for films that do that, right? But this film, within its own context, right, you then put that together with things like the, you know, the breaking into the gun sword, the free availability of guns, the way that the establishment kind of like characters are generally, not all, but generally rewarded, the very regressive kind of like portrayal of the homeless people in the sewers. You put all these things together and the film kind of gets rid of any benefit of the doubt they might have, right? And I think it is a regressive lazy characterization. You then zoom out further, and you look at this in the context of the gender politics of certainly alien, but I think you can add aliens to this as well.

You can certainly add Alien 3 to it, right? We spoke about that on that particular episode, right? And it's just so, it's just so at odds with what has been done with this creation, right? the xenomor, what has been done with this before, right? The AA's lazy, it's taken this idea and what it's been used for

in other films, and it's then just basically just taking the aesthetics and applied it to just bog standard cliche slasher setup, but it's made it even more kind of exploitative and nasty than that, right? And you think about the way

that a lot of this stuff is, you know, the preponderance on female victims in this film, compared to alien, let's say, where, of course, the first victim, famously, is John Hart. It's a man, right? And that's what kind of gives

its subversive edge in terms of how that, how the victim of the various different members of the crew plays out, and then aliens, it does kind of, you know, again, it built on it in an interesting way. We discussed that. This film does none of that,

and the fact that it's doing it within this series of films and with this creature is what makes it just kind of like really stand out is just so regressive and lazy. You look at the progressiveness of a film like Alien, which is explicitly anti-capitalist

and the kind of the way that the xenomorphs kind of represent the rapacious nature of capitalism and how these working class people, these truckers in space, stand up to it. You know, I

I feel the need to apologise to James Cameron for our Aliens episode where I said that he didn't get that about Alien because the brother Strauss really don't get that. They don't get it in a spectacularly ignorant and lazy way. Norr, I think maybe does the studio because one thing that I hadn't noticed before that you mentioned at the start is that there were two kind of settings

proposed for this, right? Smalltown USA which is where, of course, as she can gather, the film has ended up, or Afghanistan, yeah, right? Right. And the thing is, right, there are a couple of ways I think this storyline could have had potential. And the thing is doing that, right, if it had been with a more intelligent, less lazy script, let's see. I can see potential for this in like an Afghanistan setting, because you could focus on something similar to what Alien Resurrection tried to do with looking at kind of military industrial complex and its role in kind of, you know, weaponizing things and things like that. I could, like, you know, I'm not a screenwriter, right? Right? So I don't think I'd be able to write that film, but I can see how there's potential there, right? Where you could weave some sort of interesting idea in there. Here, not only is it much more difficult to do it, the film shows no interest in doing it, right? As we mentioned with the way it treats its key military character. I mean, I suppose the counter examples, the way that the National Guard gets slaughtered off very quickly, right? But that's more a weird kind of aliens homage than anything else, right? I've said that I think the film is conservative,

and I think the heroes are cops, military, and the reformed prisoner. I think there is a tension in how it treats the government, but I think it's still within the frames of this conservatism. I think the government is treated as this faceless body. The US Army is treated as this faceless body, who are overreaching like there is too much government control over this town

in that they can just nuke it for no reason the government is portrayed as something that lies to people it's a body that misleads people and treats people as disposable but the human representations of that power of that state power

are fine if you're an individual who works for you know the cops or the army that's noble and good if you are the government as body as governmental whole that is bad and i think that's the kind of essence of modern conservatism where you know big government is terrible big government tells you what to do but individual representatives of that power cops soldiers are good and heroes and to be lorded yeah i'd agree with that. And I think that the way that the Dallas character, right, so the reformed convict, if you like, fits into this, is it kind

of has that actually that I find quite often in American films that have a slight conservative which are not necessarily that common given the politics of a lot of creative people in Hollywood, but

that idea where big, there is suspicion of big government, as there is in this film, as you said, but there's a very conformity attitude to individual citizens, right? So, and this is something that actually I found in Oppenheimer, and the way it presented the Oppenheimer character, kind of like, you know, there's this kind of like celebration of individualism, but there's suspicion of non-conformism,

and it's this kind of like weird, confusing dynamic, which I think you see in American, so you actually do see it here, I think, right? And it's, it does have a conservative attitude, but it's very, it's very suspicious of and tends to punish characters who don't fit within kind of the notion of what they should be, right? So, like the stoner characters who show up in the storm

or then murdered within about five minutes. That's kind of an example of it, right? They're not part of the... They're like the unhoused people that we saw earlier. They're not part of society. Exactly. They have abdicated their responsibilities to society. And so we can just watch them get slaughtered and feel nothing.

Eddie the sheriff contacts an army colonel who tells them to go to the centre of town for an airlift. Army Mom is suspicious but she none that lets hijacks an ATV to get there They're wandering through the streets at this point And I just want to note that there's a lot of flipped over cars For some reason

I'm not sure why a xenomorph Would feel the need to flip over a car And again, I think it's just a lazy representation Of small town USA falling Is a bunch of flipped over cars in the road And I think there's something interesting there With the dominance of the automobile in America and the kind of automobile

is symbol of American industry being inverted, flipping over, that means America has fallen. Again, I think that's fairly conservative. And doesn't make any sense, I don't know why Xenomorph would flip a car. It's also, on a more practical

note with the way the films play out, it's a little bit, it was wildly unclear to me by this point in the film. How many Xenomorfs were loose in Gunnison, Colorado? Unclear. Because the Colonel gets like a heat, map up and there's dots all over the town. The entire

town seems to be engulfed in xenomorphs which doesn't seem to be the case in the town like it seems deserted for big stretches of it as I'm going to say we're going to learn that aliens have made their way to the hospital and seem to be building a nest there

for some reason but yeah the town doesn't seem engulfed I'm also not sure why Xenemos haven't gone into the forest into the woods. They seem to have entirely congregated on this town, which is very convenient for the nuclear strike at the end, but I'm not sure why they would do that. So as I've said, Army Mom is suspicious of the colonel, and the survivors despite to, they have a discussion about

it. We get the great line, this is crazy. The government doesn't lie to people. Even for a conservative film, this seems naive. Yeah, that was quite light. I mean, by this point in the film, the dialogue has just gone off the cliff I mean it wasn't exactly kind of like you know award worthy before this point but then you know

it's degenerated into you know like they literally just seeing shit out like that's obvious the one that stood out to me I think shortly after that is like they go past like some of the army

like stuff and say there may be weapons and equipment we can still use you know like this has just said Out, like, it was like, you know, come on, let's say. That's the video game prompts. This is the narration telling you. Yeah, exactly. Stop and look around.

Yeah, exactly. Press X to pick up this, you know, rifle, you know. So the swive is split up. Eddie, the sheriff trusts the government, he goes to the airlift. Dallas, army mom, and daughter, and Ricky and Jesse. And one of a guy who is picked up, who isn't given a name and hasn't been in the film before, go to the hospital, They think there'll be a helicopter.

In the hospital, the Predalian is making some kind of nest. The Predator is also there. Wolf is there chasing the Pred alien. Jesse is killed by the Predator as punishment for her teenage sexuality. Ricky stands still for five seconds and he gets gut by the Predalian. Because again, he's a service worker and he must be punished. In an early draft of the film, Ricky died there. He gets torn apart in the same way.

as a bishop in aliens, but Ricky actually survives and is pulled away to the helicopter. Dallas finds a predator gun and he works out how to use it, and so he holds off xenomorphs so the Army Mom and Ricky can get to the chopper, which is a quote from Predator.

I just about rolled... I got to be on it. I did not know about that bit before going into this film, I just about rolled my eyes out of my skull when that happened. And genuinely, I wasn't really expecting to see

this in this film. This film is also kind of replete with this. One of my major bug bears of cinema, as we record this in 2023, is kind of like sequel and spin-off itis and kind of like, you know, I got that reference, I understood that reference

meme, right? And this is one of those, right? Unless you have... flash earlier. Yeah, well, yeah, exactly. That, and then, you know, there's a lot of it in a lot of the legacy sequels that are kicking around and that sort of thing. And I wasn't expecting to see that much of an example of it that early, but it really is

here, and that's one of them, right? There's another one I mentioned, kind of like the relationship between Army Mum and her daughter. There's a line about kind of like, you know, monsters being and that obviously harks back to the alien's conversation

when you knew, kind of like, you know, my mum said there are the monsters, but there are, but but this one, the Get to the Chopper line, which I would say probably is probably it's probably the most famous line from Predator, I would say. Like, I think that's what, you know, I think

maybe, you know, you're one ugly motherfucker is probably kind of like there as well, right, or what the fuck are you? But I would say get to the chopper is kind of like, you know, that's one of the stock Arnold Schwarzenegger impression, I would say. And it's just, it's delivered so flat. and with like no flair whatsoever

it is purely there as a kind of like aha ah ah ah that's from predator that's from predator that's from predator I've seen predator I know that ha yeah they've referenced predator it's just you know it's it's it's

it's on a par with kind of like you know when I watched free guy right and people ought to go at me for this because there's like well free guy it's set in like a fictional video game right you know like obviously he's going to have stuff like this, when he, like, brings out Captain America's shield and he, and he brings out a lightsaber or something, which, of course, are things that are owned by Disney, we made the film, blah, right, you know. And I just like, oh, God Almighty, this is just like, get some ideas, just get some ideas. But here, it's not even fun. Like, you know, there's at least something vaguely amusing about Ryan Reynolds wielding a lightsaber, right? You know, I think it's empty and it's pointless, but, like, it's at least a fun image. you know, but like

this like really just guys standing on a murky hospital rooftop in the dark wet in front of a chain link fence and one guy says like get to the chopper

pause for half a second and then we move on with the scene it's just it's just the laziest emptiest shite there's no joy to it no exactly I don't think I've mentioned it

but this character is called Dallas as well. Exactly. The name of the captain. Exactly. That's the other reference that is in here. It feels so lazy. That's not a clever reference. That's just the same name. That's just naming your character the same

as another character in this same franchise. You have no connection. So no, I mean, by this point the film is really just degenerating completely. And I'd say I wasn't expecting to see an early, what to me feels anyway, an early example of

I get that reference filmmaking, right? Which in my, in my view, peaks with Ghostbusters Afterlife, but that's a conversation for a different day. Yeah, but this is kind of what I mentioned

earlier towards getting to a recognisable blockbuster paradigm of today. You can see the seeds of it in this film. Yeah. This film is sowing the seeds for the kind of lazy filmmaking we'll get in the 2020s. So the Army Colonel,

who we were interested in, Introduce you later reluctantly orders a nuclear strike on US soil, which has huge geopolitical implications, I'm sure, and it crashes the helicopter that survivors have taken off on. The predalian and Wolf were facing off on the hospital rooftop, and I don't know, it looked like it got to a standoff by the time the nuke gets detonated. I think there's a deleted scene where Wolf has a self-destruct device, like in Alien v. Predator, but he gets his arm cut off by the Pred Alien, so he can't trigger it. The helicopter crashes because of the nuclear explosion, and the survivors are left to presumably succumb to the massive radiation poisoning they've received, and will die within the next few hours or days.

But for now, Army Mom tells Army Daughter that the monsters are gone, despite her having no way of knowing that, and that's the end of their arc. The army daughter never tells them that she loves her. That arc just ends. They don't even seem to be that close. I don't know that Army daughter gets a line through this whole action sequence up to this point,

and Dallas and his brother are also safe. There's a last scene where the army colonel takes the predator gun to a figure that he refers to as Miss Yatani. and says you know here's some advanced technology and Miss Yutani says I get that reference

I get that reference I get that reference that's like the company I do that I get that reference yeah Miss Yutani says this technology is too advanced for our world and he says

this isn't for our world is it Miss Yutani a line that I'm not sure what it even means I have to be honest in the moment I was listening to that I was like

so hold on are we saying that the mining equipment that Mulayland Utani go on to develop is based on Predator Tech? Is that what this means? I believe that's meant to be the implication. And how does she get that from a small predator

rifle exactly? Yeah. But I'm not sure how the Army Colonel speculates from this gun that this is going to lead to a generation of interstellar travel. Like, I just, I don't,

it's just weird. I feel like that last scene it's trying to go for the whole kind of like it's trying to go for the thing with the Terminator films where kind of like you know one of the pieces of the destroyed Terminator is brought is brought to like you know what you know Miles Dyson

at CyberDine systems and like you know that's you know it's kind of like the self-fulfilling prophecy thing here I don't understand what it means I just don't you know combined with the fact that you know like canonically this is taking place

after the Predator films right? Yes. So they were going to have a character from Predator 2 in this but they couldn't work. Danny Glover as it was said it was initially kind of like meant to be coming back for this I think but yeah it's

a weird line I don't really get it it's another example of what you've already brought which is the laziness of it right basically they want a reference to the later film and this links back in and validates its existence somehow. But they've not really thought about how to do it.

And that's really what it comes down to, I think. So this comes out a year before Iron Man. And if this film were being made three, five years later, this would definitely be a post-credit scene. Yeah. Because this has real post-credit scene energy. Yeah.

In that it's almost unrelated to the main plot. and he's just there to set up future installments or to have a nice reference in it. So, yeah, again, we're seeing the embryonic forms of what will be a blockbuster paradigm, having a post-credit scene at the end of the credits. Here they put it before the credits because they don't know to do that yet. But within a few years, Marvel will set up. And you can put a scene after the credits and people will sit. People will sit and wait and watch it, even if it's short,

makes no sense. Yeah, it's entirely a post-credit scene, right? And I think it... The thing I don't really understand, right, is it trying to set it... Because I know that there was originally, like,

there was meant to be a plan for another alien versus predator film, right? Is it meant to be setting that up? You know, and it's just... But it's just a case of, I don't really understand what the point is of this in, right? I don't know if it's trying to validate its existence. I don't know if it's

trying to set up a sequel. I don't know if it's trying to do both. But it's just, again, another example of this film, and I think the script in particular, I mean, we've spoken about kind of like the look at the film and the cinematography and all the rest, but in particular, the script's total lack of thought for any of the things it actually tries to do. Yeah, well, the brother's shafts were keen to do a third alien versus predator film. They They wanted to develop a third film, which was set in the same time period as the alien films. So I guess they wanted to show how this Predator Tech led to Eutarnie and then Whalen Uthani, you know, becoming the company that we see in the alien films.

But obviously they never do that, because that film is never made. And so it just kind of hangs there. Like I say, there is very little scholarship on this film. There's a few articles which mention it, obviously. as part of the alien franchise, but they're not critiquing it or talking about it in any meaningful way. We might have just done the main interpretation

of this main critical interpretation of this film. But I did find an article called about by Tamara Shepherd called Rotten Tomatoes in the field of popular cultural production, which is about Rotten Tomatoes as a site and how it perpetuates certain, ways of film criticism which I'm sure we both have opinions on

oh yeah but it's quite an interesting study in terms of Alien versus Predators Requiem it quotes Joe Layden from Variety who says that the final scene has a meaning which will be lost on anyone who isn't intimately familiar with arcane aspects

of the alien mefos so that's the end of the film I think it's a nasty film I think it's a conservative film I think it's a gratuitous film and I think as we've mentioned a lot of this comes from laziness don't think it's malicious

I think it's just lazy and ends up being conservative by default yeah I'd agree with that and I think it's like it you know because I think the thing to just to head off any sort of issues that people would have with this particular interpretation of it

I don't think either of us are saying it is nasty because it is conservative, right? I think both of us have quite left-wing politics, but that's not the criticism here. It displays its conservatism in a very nasty manner, right? That's the key thing here. The way that it adheres to where people fit in society and its opinion on kind of like the status quo and the role of authority figures versus the government that employs those authority figures it puts it all out there

in quite a nasty way and I think it does that through laziness but the end effect isn't terribly different right and it really was the scenes I think in the hospital and the sewers that really stuck in my craw about kind of like you know like take a step back and think about what you're saying here

you know and like just and it really didn't really didn't sit right with me and I think it is all the more jarring for what we've said given like how how diametrically opposed certainly the first film in the series is to that and I think the way that

aliens kind of like plays with the idea is maybe not necessarily opposed to it but it's a much more intelligent film than ones that have fallen and then you come back to Alien 3 and the way that it looks at it's just it's a very lazy film and it's very much

it's standing on the shoulders of giants and falling flat on its arse anyway, basically. Yeah. I think to pick up on your point of it's not nasty because it's conservative. It is nasty and conservative. I think

there's plenty of films that I like that are conservative that I like and that are not nasty. I was talking to, I went to see Jurassic Park for the 30th anniversary screenings in cinemas because I've never seen it on the big screen or hadn't until I was a since I was a kid.

I had a discussion when my friend afterwards, like, is Jurassic Park a conservative film? Because there's a lot about distrust of science and holding back progress and accepting things the way they are, accepting a natural order that are very conservative. But I don't think, even if it is a conservative film, and I think Michael Crichton was certainly a conservative writer. You know, you look at his climate denial novels, and you get ample evidence of that. But I think Michael Crichton was certainly a conservative writer, you know, I don't think, you know, Jurassic Park isn't a nasty film by any means. Like, the kids are threatened, but they are not pruriently threatened

in the same way that children and babies in this film are. Yeah, yeah. And who the film chooses to punish, you know? Yeah, and there's no questioning within the film of any viewpoint, right? I think that's the other thing, because it's a Jurassic Park, right? I love Jurassic Park, yeah. Yeah, I love Jurassic Park, right? And Jurassic Park has that element

And is Jurassic Park a conservative film In the way that you describe Yeah, I can see that reading, right? I can see that to a certain extent. It's a discussion now. But yeah, but there's a dialogue But also there's a dialogue within the film about that, right? Because whilst you've got this thing about

kind of accepting the natural order of things, the flip side of this is that basically the film probably has quite a complicated relationship with itself in the sense that like the commercialisation of what happens, Jurassic Party is seen as quite crass and arrogant, right? And that's ultimately the downfall of it, right? So in that sense, it's almost the capital. Yeah, it's like the capitalist element of it is what ruins it, right? So, and you know, obviously, when you think about kind of the amount of lunchboxes

that were sold off the back of Jurassic Party, it makes it quite a complicated relationship with itself, right? But the point is, I think you could definitely put that reading that kind of you've put forward there with Jurassic Park. I think that's there. But there's a dialogue within the film. Within this film, there is no such dialogue. The closest you come to it, the closest you come to it is perhaps kind of the individual army

mum, Kelly, kind of like being the hero versus kind of like the more faceless bodies of authority being suspicious and not to be trusted. That's maybe the closest you come to it. But it's just there is no willingness to have that discussion within the script, because the film's not

intelligent enough to do that, where something like Jurassic Park, I think is. it does have that dialogue within the film. This does not. Yeah. There's a dialogue within Jurassic Park, like you say, that makes it interesting to discuss and interesting to think about

and hard to pin down. In the same way, I think you can pin this down very easily. Yeah, and the same thing, the same thing exists within, you know, the rest of this series, right? Because you've got that anti-capitalist streak in alien

and then you have that slightly more complicated relationship between kind of, you know, militarism and opportunity and kind of all the rest of it in aliens. Again, these films kind of exist with a diet. You know, like frankly, it's even there to an extent in Alien Resurrection, right? Which I think as we discussed on that episode

is not a film that I think is very good and I think it kind of takes the wrong thing from the films that have inspired it. But again, there is at least that interest in thematic conflict that does not exist here. You know, this is a very shallow film. And I think it's actually quite interesting in respect. And, like, you could make a case that this film achieves what it wants to better than Alien vs. Predator, the preceding film.

I think you can make that argument. It achieves what it wants to better. I think it's just the bar it sets for itself is so low. It's so low that, like, you know, I mean, you can just trip over it. And I think that's what this film does, right? So I think there's an argument you can make there. But again, even the preceding film, Alien versus Predator, has more of a dialogue going on within it about what the characters are doing and why they're doing it than this film does.

And that's really saying something, because that film was very very. very, you know, we talked about kind of the parallels between that film Prometheus, right, which obviously we'll go on to talk about later in the series, but like, it's at least has some interest in it. It doesn't execute it very well, whereas this film, it executes exactly what he wants to, but it doesn't really want to do anything. Um, you know, does that make it better per se? No, I don't think so, but it's kind of a case of what are you doing with this film? I don't really know what, anybody, what they're doing? Actually, more accurately, I do understand what they're doing

I don't really know why they want to do it with this setup, with these characters and creatures and all rested. Yeah, exactly. Well, I certainly think we're at the bottom of the battle. I think it's all, it's all uphill from here, right? From here. From here. Yes. Yeah. From this point onwards. Now that we have finished the Aliens vs. Pirates of Requiem episode.

Now that we're at the bottom with the ocean. with a rock tight or food. Yeah, it's all up hill from here. So, that's Aliens versus Predator Require. I'll do a quick round of xenobiology. This film muddies the waters even further for this sake,

by the way. It muddies the waters a lot. It's very confused about what it wants to do. I'm not sure it has a clear idea beyond what he's written in the script. I mentioned in the last episode that fans were upset at how biased

the film seemed to be towards xenomorphs and that the Predators seemed ineffective and were made ineffective in Alien vs. Predator. This film has the inverse reaction from fans where fans say that there is a blatant favouritism of the Predator from the Strauss Brothers. And in the audio commentary

for the DVD of the film, the Strauss Brothers are accused of mocking alien fans. because the predator seems to dispatch so many xenomorphs so easily and even gets blood on himself, acidic blood, which does not affect him. The xenomorphs are also displayed as relatively unintelligent, that they just seem to be animalistic, monstrous creatures which we talked about. But in terms of interesting xenobiology stuff, what do we learn that's new? I think we only learn that xenomorphs defer to the pred alien.

For reasons are not entirely clear. The reasons aren't clear. And that the pred alien is able to directly infect a host, the pregnant woman in the hospital, with multiple larvae, which are referred to on the Illion versus Predator Wiki as belly bursters. Now, these aren't seen before or since, but one of the Strauss brothers, Colin, said that the pred alien, is kind of a baby queen

a phase between a warrior alien and a full-blown queen so they do this thing with implanting embryos whereby the baby queen can form this whole mini army to set up a hive for a queen

nice don't make any sense to me given that this is a mix of predator and alien it doesn't show any of that mixing that genetic mixing that we've seen in other films. And we've already seen

in previous films how a queen chestburster can spontaneously evolve in a scenario of no other aliens. So I'm not sure how this fits into what we already know. But the other thing being is not entirely...

Listen, we are fully getting into the territory of overthinking a lazy script probably, but it's also not entirely clear to me why the predalian, right, which is established, very firmly to have, you know, developed from a predator and it has, you know, and it continues this idea of kind of like, you know, the xenomorph picks up traits from its host in the same way that you've got the alien three, you know, one that scuttles around on all fours because

it came out of a dog and this sort of thing, right? It's not, it's not 100% clear to be what, like, one, why does thinking impregnate directly is the first thing, but secondly, why are the things that then come out just vanilla xenomorphs, you know? I mean, I realize, have come out from a human but that human was impregnated by a hybrid and it's not something that you're thinking about a huge amount like in the moment

in the film but it's one of those things where when you're looking at it afterwards in the sort of scenario we are now it's another example of like where I don't think I think basically Colin Strauss's like explanation there it screams of retroactive justification to me really

yeah I don't think it works at all. I don't think it makes sense. And it feels, you know, we've talked about this film, period gratuitousness. I think the belly burster is just there to make it look like the fetus

of the pregnant woman is moving around and it turns out to be chest bursters coming out of the belly or belly bursters. And it doesn't make sense and it doesn't work. No. Like so much of this film. It's interesting.

I found a lot more to talk about in this film than I was expecting, right? I don't think I don't think any of it was positive but I was surprised with I really was expecting just a kind of like

slightly ill thought out not necessarily particularly well made kind of you know be movie type thing right what I got was a lot nastier than I was expecting. You know, and we've referenced the sewer scenes

multiple times now, we've referenced the scenes in the hospital. I was surprised how apart from the rest of the series this stands, even in comparison to its own sub-franchised starter and Alien versus Predator, even in comparison

to that. And I think this probably will represent the most marked departure from the kind of tone and style of films that we're seeing in this series compared to the other ones. Yeah. Yeah. I've said, I think this is the low point.

And we're getting off the sub-franchise now and going along the different route that the Alien franchise took. So we're going next month to Prometheus, direct lead by Ridley Scott, as kind of, I guess it's a sequel to this film, but a prequel to the Alien franchise. quadrilogy.

I think of it has a contested place to this film in that this film is not really canon anymore or is an entirely different

kind of transmedia strand to Prometheus which we're going to talk about next month. Until then thank you very much for listening.

Please rate us five stars on Apple podcasts I understand that does a lot for letting other people discover us,

tell your friends We're on Twitter at at the Xenapod and on Blue Sky at at the xenapod. So please follow us there. As this is coming out in a few days time on the 1st of October, I will be doing the Great Scottish Run for Mind, the mental health charity. I'll be running 10K. So if anyone would like to sponsor me quickly before the October 1st, date, you can find the details at

run.simonxaX.com and sponsor me there should you want to. Do you want to plug anything, Jim? Not really, no, my brain's a bit fried from watching that bloody film, frankly. No, I think, you know, I think we're going to be going back to I find there's a lot to talk about in the films that we're

about to come to in this series. I'm surprised how much we got out of Alien versus Predators Requiem, to be honest. But, you know, it's a good show. Like and subscribe, as they say, and all that stuff, right? But yeah, no, I don't have anything to plug directly. I think as this comes out, I'll probably be getting into some London Film Festival coverage on Take One.

So TakeOn Cinema.net, you know, the site that we push us through and is associated with. So, you know, there'll be plenty to talk about there. So check that out. And hopefully there'll be a lot better cinema than Alien vs. Predator Requiem. Super. Well, until next month when we cover Prometheus, I'll just end by saying, this plan is stupid, let's just leave town now. Game over, man! It's game over! You know,

you know, Oh, No. Thank you.