Like the A-Team I feel I’m writing here for an audience who wonders what kind of movie this is, rather than because I have some insight burning to get out. Hopefully that’s a good enough reason.
If you think Predators are neat, and by this I mean, the idea of Predators absent any specific instantiation of them, if you watched the movies and read the comics, if you’re over 30 and you’ve got kids and you’re raising them to love all the stuff you loved growing up and you’re looking forward to taking them to see “a Predator movie” then this movie is for you. You’ll love it. Stop reading.
If, on the other hand, you love Predator, the original film from 1987, and think it was special and have never really given a shit about any of the Predator stuff that’s come since, and you’re wondering if this movie will be like that movie, then no. It won’t be. Stay home, save your money. Or go see A-Team, that’s lots of fun.
The original film is a snapshot of the Summer Action Movie in transition. The first 20 minutes of Predator is a 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie. Commando, Conan, Raw Deal take your pic.
But after the movie opens with an homage to the Commando-era action movies, it does something extraordinary. It goes into the jungle. The movie itself goes into the jungle with the heroes and the Predator destroys those 1980s ideas just like it does the characters in the movie. The characters in the film are not prepared for what’s in there, because they all just walked off the set of other 1980s action movies. Where they win. They always win. The Predator’s arrival announces that those kinds of heroes cannot survive in the new action movie. Muscles and guns are no longer enough. It’s going to take smarter, leaner heroes, everyman heroes like Mel Gibson or the balding Bruce Willis to save the day from now on. It reinvents Arnie and allows him forever after to be smart enough to continue making action movies in the ’90s. There was no indication, going into it, that this was the movie you were in for. You look at the cast and you think you’re getting a Walter Hill movie. Nothing could be further from the truth.
That was the virtue of the first movie. You had NO IDEA what was going to happen next. Presuming you haven’t been so oversaturated with culture that you know the entire story without having seen it. That first time, it was pretty intense. Especially if you grew up in the 80s and presumed Action Jackson and Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura were going to make it.
Certainly there are many members of my generation who loved Predator because the alien was bad-ass, for which see paragraph #2 above. But I think for some of us, it opened our eyes to the idea that an action movie could be a little clever. A little smart. Encourage us to think. Show us heroes who think, and who persevere and win not only because of oiled muscles and oiled guns, but because they’re smart. That’s something I’ve been missing recently; heroes who have a virtue other than being pretty.
Predator showed you a real jungle. They went and filmed in a real jungle and the location scouts did an excellent job picking a place that let John McTiernan put his camera anywhere and create whatever feeling he wanted. Confusion, claustrophobia, or vast open space, awe. At one point, the camera gives us a shot and you felt like you could see and understand the shape of the jungle. Where everything was. Just as Arnie is figuring everything out, we are figuring the jungle out.
This movie, the jungle feels like a series of sets. There’s no sense of space. No sense of reality. Just props. Robert Rodriguez is famous for making great movies on the cheap, but this may be an instance of a little too cheap. John McTiernan had the benefit of being bankrolled by a huge studio.
McTiernan is a genius at this stuff. Predator, The Hunt for Red October, Die Hard, The Last Action Hero, The 13th Warrior. The dude invented the smart action movie. Rodriguez is pretty good, he might have been able to pull of a real spiritual sequel, but Robert Rodriguez didn’t direct this movie. Nimród Antal did. I haven’t seen anything this dude has done, so I will give him the benefit of the doubt and say, this movie was outside his brief.
It’s much more like a Twilight Zone episode. It opens just like Five Characters in Search of an Exit. But why? The whole purpose of that opening on the Twilight Zone was to keep you asking questions. Here, that same opening is used explicitly to avoid questions and answers. You already know why they’re there. You might not know who they are, but you know who they are.
Rather, this movie uses that opening because it wants to get straight to the action. It wants to dispense with story and character, plot and dialog, and just show the audience a bunch of dudes being hunted down and killed by Predators. It’s Fanservice. The whole movie is essentially fanservice. Without characters having sex with each other.
There’s a character in here with literally two lines of dialog who exists solely so there can be a fight between a Samurai and a Predator. That’s fanservice. That’s a pretty good definition of fanservice. I haven’t seen everything ever made, but if I had, I’d probably still think the scene from this movie where a modern-day Yakuza on an alien planet re-enacts a scene from The Seven Samurai complete with katana, against a Predator, was Plato’s Ideal Fanservice of which All Others are Mere Shadows.
Now, certainly there’s an audience for that. There always will be. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that I am not that audience. The audience for this movie believes it when a character says “I’ve been in every jungle on earth, and this don’t feel right. Too hot for Africa. Wrong season for Indonesia….”
In that sense, it deploys a lot of comic book logic and characterization. Characters who can tell a guy is a member of the Yakuza because he’s Japanese and wearing a nice suit. Characters who can speak with authority about fighting in every jungle in the world.
Adrien Brody is the only actor who makes it through this movie with his dignity intact. No one else is given anything to do. But Brody, while wasted, at least shows us some of the charisma and acting chops that won him an Oscar. The rest of the cast, some are very fine actors, but they could all be replaced with random people from Central Casting and the movie would not suffer for it.
The movie never seems to take its own premise seriously. Apart from one line, no one in the movie thinks to wonder why Topher Grace’s character is there. Probably because it’s so obvious as soon as anyone starts to think about it.
You put some extreme people in an extreme situation, the expectation is we’re going to see humanity pushed to the extreme. Das Boot in a jungle with aliens. Alas here, everyone knows they’re in a Predator movie and so no work is done to show us anything but the absolute minimum required by the plot. The Scene Where He Won’t Tell Them His Name. The Scene Where He Says ‘I Work Best Alone.’ The Scene Where Two of Them Don’t Get Along. The Scene Where They Become Friends.
There are many people for whom the fun of moviegoing lies in recognizing those scenes. Execution plays no part in the process. They expect those scenes and so, if you put those scenes in front of them, they are satisfied.
For good or ill, I am not that kind of moviegoer. Happily there are plenty of other good movies!
Popularity: 16% [?]
There was a point very early on in the development of the last game I worked on where the director of the project asked me to write an imaginary trailer for the rough outline of a story we had.
