Headscratchers / Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

• I thought the Yautja, as a species, followed a strict honor code that forbade killing unarmed or fleeing humans, so why did the main Yautja pursue and kill the cop upon finding out about his presence? The cop was clearly fleeing and not trying to attack, so what's the deal?
  • I took it as the Predator was there to sort out the mess as its primary role and so could do ‘dishonourable’ acts if necessary.

• At the end of the film, the Predator slowly and impressively takes off its mask while confronting the Predalien. For some reason, the bigger, stronger Predalien is kind enough to wait for him to get ready before attacking.
  • Perhaps the Predalien retained a little of the Predators' fanatical devotion to honor?
  • It's possible the Predalien was just being cautious; the Predator had survived quite a bit of damage by this point and it'd never seen a mask removal before.
  • It was suggested that the Predalien retained some predator psychological traits. If you look closely when Wolf (the predator) is examining the crashed ship, you can see the skinned bodies of the crew hanging in the background.

• That scene where the Predalien 'impregnates' the entire maternity ward of pregnant woman just bugs me. It messes up the entire established Xenomorph lifecycle. And how does the impregnating work anyway? Does the subject needs to be pregnant in order for the baby aliens to develop or something?
  • Word of God is that the predalien was a young queen, and queens have the ability to deliver eggs directly into a host like a facehugger. My guess is that it picked a pregnant host because it offered the hatchling more...ugh, food. Yeah, that scene was horrible.
  • Nope. The Predalien's gender is unclear https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uo2y7JRPWx4. In the Vid, it's called a male MULTIPLE times and a female as well. Also, the official commentary calls it a guy and the Book "Inside the monster shop" calls it the "Top dog" and describes it as "Regal" a term used mainly to describe a King who is usually a guy. I personally think it's a male, which is why it only targets girls. And not only Pregnant ones. In the sewers, it got the homeless woman who WASN'T pregnant.
    • The AvP-R: Preparing for War: Development and Production featurette from the Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem Region 1 Extreme Unrated Set DVD says it's a young Queen.
    • Who says the homeless woman wasn't pregnant? She lives with two guys also the Predalien killed a female nurse rather than impregnate her.
    • "Regal" is applied to women just as often as men. Xenomorphs don't have sexes; even queens are only called "she" because they can lay eggs, but that's a form of parthenogenesis as they don't mate. They're not truly female in the same sense as a female Earth lifeform, and the drones aren't male.
  • As the above Troper stated, it's just to give the baby aliens a little snack (because apparently being inside a body isn't enough food already). It should be noted that ALL the women the predalien implants are pregnant. I also like to believe that the Predalien was a defect, incorporating too much predator DNA which explains it's nonsensical behaviours and impregnation abilities.
    • Who says they're necessarily nonsensical? For all we know, its method could be a close variant on how Predators breed. We've never seen their reproductive process detailed in the films.
    • Carrie wasn't pregnant, either. The pregnant women in the hospital were easy prey.
    • She was supposed to be, it was mentioned in the commentary, there were going to be a few shots of the predalien watching her from the roof and we would have seen she was pregnant. The homeless woman was also supposed to be pregnant.
• Does this film's setting in a small city where thousands of humans live (which is pretty much the exact kind of setting that the first film wanted to avoid, according to its director because it would entail that a lot of people would know about the Aliens and contradict the sense of surprise Ellen Ripley faced when she encountered the Alien in the first ''Alien'' film) as well as how it may have ignored the possibility that the Alien Queen's fatal blow on Scar may have killed the chestburster inside him that emerges just to end the first film on a Sequel Hook, may contradict Requiem's premise?
  • You do remember all the people in that city getting wiped out and only a handful surviving, right? The fewer people that know about it, the more likely they are to be written off as liars and/or crazy by the rest of the world.
• After the ship crashes due to the Predalien attack, why didn't one of the facehuggers attach to the injured and helpless predator? Why did the Predalien kill it instead of cocooning it for implantation?
  • Maybe the filmmakers didn't want two Predaliens in the same movie, which is likely why the facehuggers never went for the dog seen with the homeless people in the sewers.
    • That just seems like a giant missed opportunity. They could have done an amazing fake out by having the heroes (either human or Predator) kill off the Predalien in a big showdown, only to find out that was the small one while they're celebrating.
• Why does the main Predator behave with the mentality of a slasher villain? Case in point: about halfway through the movie there's a bit where a man is threatening a woman with a gun. It's nighttime, they are outdoors, no artificial lighting nearby. The Predator is at least two hundred meters away, the two humans have not noticed it and possibly could not even see it in the darkness if they looked right at it. The Predator glances at them and then shoots the man's head clean off with its shoulder cannon. Why the hell did it do that?
  • Out of Universe? Because whoever wrote the script had no idea how Predators are supposed to behave. In Universe?.....No idea.
  • A misunderstanding of the Predator's honour code. The directors were idiots about this kind of thing.
  • Perhaps it was an attempt to add more detail into the honour code?: Predators don't like people turning against their own kind.
    • Or to elaborate further, it's actually far more in keeping with the canon code than a lot of other examples- an armed individual threatening an unarmed individual with a gun? That's pretty much the opposite of the predator code right there- see Predator 1 and the predator disarming against Arnie.
  • It's explained in many expanded universe materials that Predators dislike armed "prey" targeting unarmed prey. They also have a code of not killing unarmed/sickly prey. Examples include: the little boy with the fake gun (Predator 2), Charles Weyland, until he pulled out Aerosol Flamethrower, (Aliens VS Predator). Hell in one game (Predator: Concrete Jungle) killing unarmed prey caused you to fail the current mission . Ergo, Predators don't seem to like unarmed prey being threatened because it is "unsportsmanlike".
    • In addition to all that, I think that the Predator also targeted the guy because he was threatening a kid, and it's shown that the Predators really don't like hurting kids. Examples include the pregnant woman from the second movie not to mention that little boy with the toy gun (yes that Predator targets him, but it only did so because it believed he was armed and even then, it was unsure enough to scan the toy), so in addition to not targeting unarmed prey, it seems Predators have a soft spot for children... or at least human ones.
    • "Soft spot" is probably pushing it... it's not good sense or good sport to kill immature prey creatures because it's both less of a challenge and damaging to the ability of the prey animal to maintain its population.
  • It could be much simpler. We know Predators don't hunt unarmed prey because it's "no sport." The guy was armed, ergo he was prey. Yeah, Wolf's primarily there to stop the aliens and destroy the hybrid; doesn't mean he can't score an extra kill or two along the way. Makes for a better story to wow the females when he gets home (not that he does, but that's beside the point.)
  • Actually part of the issue here is that Wolf was cleaning up a mess. Much of what we know of the honor code of the Predators stems from the first two movies which were hunts. Hunts involve the predators intentionally making things more difficult on themselves specifically to conquer the challenge. With the exception of the end where the Predator's inner Blood Knight took hold and he just had to fight the Hybrid fairly the rest of the movie is just him wrecking things. Notice in the first movie they were fighting the aliens in melee until the numbers were simply insurmountable. In Requiem he's sniping them. The honor code may not apply here in any solid way.
  • Something that I think is overlooked about this particular scene is that Wolf had just finished applying first aid to himself after being wounded and losing a lot of blood. He's in a vulnerable state at the moment, and then he realizes that there's a guy with a gun relatively close by. Now, in a state like that, fresh off of painfully patching up his wound, he likely had the instinctive response to a weapon and decided to remove the potential threat as fast as possible, even if the guy hadn't seen him yet.
• Something that always bothered me about this movie: throughout it, the Wolf Predator is obviously trying to maintain a low profile, leaving no witnesses and destroying all evidence of the Xenomorphs and his presence. But then, why does he still skin that one cop and leave him out? wouldn't that be leaving evidence of his existence? even if the Humans didn't know that he was a Predator, wouldn't that make them more curious?
  • Not necessarily. If you happened upon a sight like that, you would probably just think some random twisted fuck did it. Humanity has a track record with it comes to cruelty after all and it would be much more reasonable to assume this was human work, unfortunately.
  • Considering he popped that guy's head clean off with the plasma-caster despite the man being no threat to him as mentioned above, it seems Wolf was less concerned about going completely unnoticed and more concerned about containing the Xeno outbreak and preventing Predator tech from falling into human hands. In the original movie the Predator left skinned corpses all over the place. Presumably the skinned cop was either a lure for the Predalien that didn't work, or just a "well, while I'm in the area" sort of thing.
• Also, I've composed what I feel to be a pretty compelling explanation for the Predalien that can be seen here: http://avp.wikia.com/wiki/User_blog:Werebereus/Predaliens