The first five minutes of Aliens vs Predator – Requiem has shown up online and it has shocked the hell out of me… by not being terrible. The movie seems to waste no time getting started, and the first five minutes are veritably packed with action. It has a man getting his arm melted off by Xenomorph acid blood and a kid taking a face hugger to the mug. This is my kind of opening scene!
The first five minutes also seem to set a precedent of dumbness – who would discharge an energy weapon inside a space ship? Why doesn’t the crash set fire to… anything at all? But fuck it – while these two franchises were briefly the high water marks for scifi action, that time is long behind us, and we’ll have to settle for dumb, hard R-rated fun. And look at it this way: the first five minutes of this one are more fun than the entirety of the first AVP. The only problem I have with the clip (besides the general silliness of the Predator home world – why did we need to see that anyway?) is that the thing is so tightly edited that the footage feels breathless, and like the movie could conceptually be 78 minutes long. Not that I’m complaining.