YMMV / Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

• Awesome Music: Though Brian Tyler is often criticized for lacking originality, it's hard to deny that he does an impressive job melding the Alien series' use of "Psycho" Strings and howling brass instruments with the more tribalistic and percussive orchestration that is iconic to the Predator series. Some highlights from this film include: "Taking Sides", "Decimation Proclamation", and "Requiem".
• Badass Decay: This has been happening awhile give or take, counting films, games and whatnot, but Requiem reduced the aliens to cannon fodder. Any kills they made were simply Red Shirts.
• Base-Breaking Character: Jesse is either an uninteresting Satellite Love Interest who diverts attention form the more interesting characters, or a charming, well-acted love interest who could have improved the movie if the filmmakers had let her do more than just run around after Dallas and Ricky and then get impaled for the sake of angst.
• Contested Sequel: Two groups of fans were split more or less when it comes to the movie: those who like it for its action scenes, increased gore, badass Predator and horror elements, and those who hate it for the needlessly high level of gore, the poor lighting, the Aliens' nonsensical behaviour and violation of pretty much everything we've ever learned about them, them getting slaughtered by a single Predator, and the glee the movie seems to take in killing children.
• Creator's Pet: As confirmed by the commentary track, the directors are big fans of the Predators and don't much care for Xenomorphs. Accordingly, the lone Predator in this movie fares improbably well against the Aliens, even in hand to hand combat.
• Just Here for Godzilla: At the very least, the Yautja Wolf is one, and possibly the only, reason to watch this movie. As highly flawed as the movie was, his scenes told more of the story than the Humans' did.
• Magnificent Bastard: "Wolf" is a Yautja dispatched to contain the Predalien and Xenomorph outbreak in Colorado. Arriving on Earth and honoring his fallen comrades, Wolf uses deduction and a jar of acid to track down and eliminate all traces of Xenomorph presence, using laser traps and his bevy of weaponry to carve through dozens of Xenomorphs with ease. Taking time out of his mission to kill a gun-wielding scumbag threatening a woman and child, Wolf murders a local deputy and uses another man as bait to lure more Xenomorphs to their doom. Meeting the otherwise unstoppable Predalien in single combat, Wolf deals a killing blow against the monstrous creature and spends his last moments roaring defiantly in the Predalien's face even after it impales him.
• Narm: The infamous "The government doesn't lie to people!" line. At best, it IS funny, but not for the reasons the makers most likely intended. At worst, it's groan inducing.
• Rooting for the Empire: Since the humans are helpless borderline stock slasher victims, fans tend to root for Wolf (the Predator), as he is the Lesser of Two Evils and is quite liked thanks to his array of gadgets and his Cool Mask; to the point many are disappointed the film didn't entirely focus on him.
• The Scrappy: The majority of fans disliked Chet (the Predalien) because of its outlandish reproduction method that contradicts and even outright renders the previous life-cycle obsolete and the dumb things she does, like standing idly while Wolf removes his equipment (honor is no excuse when it comes to an animal). Her design also received some criticism.
• So Bad, It's Good: To some people, the film and its quirks (attempts on teen drama, classic horror traits, bad lighting, questionable plot and downright bad script, among many others) are pretty entertaining in a special light.
• Special Effect Failure: Actually more of a Lighting Failure. The suits are fantastic... but unfortunately, the film is so darkly lit that you can't see them.
• Squick: What the Predalien does to its victims — especially that pregnant woman.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: At one point, the Predalien and several facehuggers attack a group of homeless people living in the sewers. One of these people had a dog. In Alien³, it is revealed that a facehugger impregnating a four-legged animal, such as a dog or an ox, would produce a quadrupedal variation of the Xenomorph known as "The Runner". If one of those facehuggers attached itself to the dog instead of one of the homeless people, we could have had the chance to see two powerful Xenomorph hybrids in the same movie.
  • The movie almost entirely skips over the Predalien slaughtering all the Predators on the ship at the beginning. Which is especially noticeable when the last film established it's a big ship with at least one Elder onboard who was marked for successfully hunting Aliens.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: A common complaint is that the film tries way too hard to be as disturbing and viscerally disgusting as possible. The filmmakers' intent was for it to be more of a straight-up horror movie than its predecessor, in line with the previous Alien films. Unfortunately, they cranked it up to eleven by giving the Predalien the ability to breed by shoving its fanged tongue down the throats of pregnant women, injecting larvae into them, where they somehow make it to her womb and devour her fetus to mature into a snakes nest of chestbursters. All these horrible events finally culminate in an extremely heavy-handed Downer Ending with the government nuking the city. The result is a film that many consider too sadistic to enjoy. The "bleakness" part also gets more literal with many critics and viewer reviews complaining that the parts of the film that would have been enjoyable (like the titular conflict) were barely watchable because of how darkly lit the film is.
• Too Cool to Live: Wolf, as some people wished he would've avoided the status quo of killing the Predator thanks to putting up one hell of a fight.

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