Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

I don't remember a lot about the first movie, other than it being mostly crap, managing to screw with the established continuity for both franchises it involves, and ending with an alien fetus inside a predator. Oh my! That's pretty much where the sequel picks up - a hybrid between the two emerges, messes up the ship kills the other predators, and lands (in a very crashing sort of way) on Earth, where it and some face huggers (Which I guess were on the ship because the predators were studying them? I don't care enough to remember or look it up) proceed to wreak havoc on a small town in the United States. I won't say AVPR is anything close to a good movie, but I did enjoy it more than the first, which seems to be an uncommon sentiment. It's sort of the typical slasher set-up, unlike what we've really seen in either series previously, as it establishes a handful of interconnected and not terribly interesting characters, and then picks them off gradually in increasingly gruesome ways. Not usually my cup of tea, but it's a formula that I guess works and doesn't seem that out of place with the idea of putting either of these sci-fi killers in that setting.

Of course... those killers shouldn't be in that setting in the first place. The predator in the movie is a badass cleaner who comes in to cover up the chaos caused by the incident in the beginning. He doesn't do a very good job of it, as before long the entire town is overrun with aliens and the government has to call in the big guns. But why do they care about the cover up in the first place? They're hunters, not galactic police men. It just leads to another annoying predator who kills everyone he comes across, which is less compelling than the original characterization. Sorry to spoil this crappy movie that you don't care about the plot of, but there's a tie-in at the end to the Weyland-Yutani corporation of the Alien movies, supposing that predator technology helped humans eventually get out into space in a serious way in the first place. Um, okay... so why do they still use flamethrowers and bullets in the future if they have a predator's energy-whatever gun, and how come the company claims to have no recorded cases of the aliens previously in the future? The entire point of the Nostromo's diversion was to get a living sample of one of the creatures, but we're supposed to think it took them that long to get one when there was an outbreak of them ON EARTH during our time? They should have just made their movie with adequately gory deaths and fan-pleasing homages instead of trying to get cute and tying it all together. Also, the Predalien looks too much like the predator. Aliens from humans don't look nearly that human. Oh well.