[Series Minded is an irregular feature here at T&KSD, wherein we tackle the entire run of a film, TV, or videogame series in one fell swoop]
Predator, 1987 - d. John McTiernan - Disney+
Predator 2, 1990 - d. Stephen Hopkins - Disney+
Alien vs. Predator - 2004 - d. Paul W.S. Anderson - Disney+
Predators, 2010 - d. Nimrod Antal - Disney+
The Predator, 2018 - d. Shane Black - Disney+
Prey, 2022 - d. Dan Trachtenberg - Disney+
It was a holiday Monday last week, and I twisted up my ankle real good/real bad the week prior, so with no prior engagements, it was just time to sit on my ass and binge a franchise. This is the kind of thing I would have done a couple times a month 20 years back, but responsibilities (house, kids, pets, job, etc) being what they are, I maybe do it once a year. I've generally lost the ability to sit and focus on just watching movies all day, or at least lost the ability to not feel guilty about doing so. But, with my bruised and swollen ankle needing some down time, the rest of me felt liberated about it too.
I haven't watched Predator since probably the mid-90's, and while I liked it okay then I wasn't as into it as I thought I should be given my geeky tendencies. Over the years I've grown more and more dismissive of it, thinking all the overly-macho action films of the 80's and 90's were just complete regressive fluff for stuck-in-time dudes who never grew up, and lumping this one in with them.
I was wrong, Predator is an amazing (action) film. It's pretty close to rock solid from start to finish. It builds its tension and its threat impeccably well, and pays it off just as well. The sheer size of the Predator on its first reveal when next to another person is awe-inspiring. And it's kind of cool that there's always another trick in its bag. It was such a blank slate in 1987, there was no preconceived notions of what a predator was or could be. It's not just a creature, it from an intelligent, spacefaring species, one that seems to have built its whole civilization around hunting things across the universe.
Everyone in the small cast are all terrific, and this is one of Arnold's finest roles, not just because there's not a tremendous amount of dialogue, but the lines he does have he delivers so purely in character, and one could totally see him as respected leader (governor perhaps?). Even "get to the choppah" is delivered more emphatically than parodies and memes have you believe.
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A Christmas Movie???
Predator 2 is not a great action movie, nor a good movie in general, but as part of the Predator franchise, it's secured its place and purpose.
Though released in 1990, it's set in Los Angeles 1997, where the streets are extra grimey, crime is rampant, gang wars are a daily occurrence and everyone has a gun. Our heroes are a multicultural special task force of police detectives, led by rebel Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) trying to tamp down the feud between the Colombian Scorpions and the Jamaican Voodoo Posse. Harrigan is described as violence-prone, obsessive/compulsive personality, with a history of employing excessive physical force.
The drug war really speaks to the times it was created in, the tail end of the Reagan-era war on drugs and the feeling of these two gangs at war (and the cliches and stereotypes employed around the Colombian and Jamaican character) is right on the line of grossly racist and comically over-the-top. As much as Harrigan and crew are trying to stop the feud, it's the Predator's intervention that brings it to an end. But the Predator witnesses this special crew of cops doing their job and begins hunting them down one-by-one. Meanwhile, there's some government-types in unmarked helicopters who are trying to control the investigation into the various new massacres.
There's the bones of an interesting plot here, just enough to provide a framework for elaborating upon what we learned about Predators from the prior film, but all the connecting tissue is so sloppy. Scenes transition in nonsensical ways ... in one scene the Predator is in a graveyard stalking Harrigan, the next he's crawling on the roof of a subway after Maria Conchita Alonso and a train full of armed passengers. Again, Reagan-era NRA at full power, everyone should have a gun... hard to tell if it's satire or serious here. And when the Predator attacks on that train, dozens upon dozens of shots are fired in the dark and somehow, in that confined space, with that big a target, the Predator is completely uninjured (despite 75% of its body being unshielded).
The envisioning of L.A. seems like spitting distance from future New York of Escape From New York or future Detroit in Robocop, just an utter trash heap threatening to implode at any second. It's hard to remember, but in the late 80's it felt like the whole world was going to descend into rampant, unfettered, random violence... at least if our genre fiction were to be believed.
There's some really fun stuff in this film: a nice set piece or two (mainly the Predator ship); some out-of-place but genuinely funny comedic moments (Predator in the old lady's bathroom); a few really nicely shot or composed sequences (that long pan across the cityscape into the penthouse window of the couple having sex, for all its salaciousness, is an amazing shot, and memorable), and a lot of really neat Predator stuff, even if the VFX aren't always that great.
Beyond the hoary dialogue, Reagan-era paranoia, kinda badly shot action scenes, and janky internal logic, it's possible the biggest reason the film doesn't quite work is that Danny Glover is maybe, possibly miscast? After playing the straight cop to Mel Gibson's wild dog in Lethal Weapon, it's Glover's turn to be the wild dog and he never quite seems the part. Glover is easily doing the best acting in the film (Ruben Blades' Danny Boy was easily my favour of the crew though), and if he were presented more as an everyman than as the "rogue detective" then it would have played more to his strength. As the Black Men Can't Jump In Hollywood pointed out, if they wanted a Black lead action star in the film it was basically Glover as the only option, or Carl Weathers, but they'd already burned him in last film. Wesley Snipes had yet to establish himself and Eddie Murphy would have been too comedic for the role.
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It would be 14 years between movies featuring the Predator, but the hunters lived on in a series of comic book mini-series that started in 1990 and continued deep into the 2000s at Dark Horse Comics. Along the way, there was a genius stroke to build upon the easter egg of the xenomorph skull seen in the Predator's trophy case in Predator 2 and combine two 20th Century Fox titles into one, afterall, the Predators are the greatest hunters in the galaxy, and the Aliens are the deadliest creatures going. Thus was born Aliens vs. Predator. From what I recall of the comics, it took place in more the timeframe of Aliens and really built up the Colonial Marines, an elite task force of alien hunters. [N.B. apparently the first Alien v. Predator story from Dark Horse predated even Predator 2's release. Did the comic influence the film or vice versa, or were they just happy independent constructs?]
Anyway, the first cinematic Aliens vs. Predator movie, from noted B-movie action director Paul W.S. Anderson (Resident Evil) was atrocious. I saw it in theatres and wanted to leave. I hated it, and have had no desire to rewatch it.
But rewatch it I did...for about 40 minutes, and that's about all I could take. The main cast - consisting of Sanaa Lathan, Ewen Bremner, Lance Henrickson and others, are all doing fine with what they're given, and I even like the little set-up they give them. It's really more the film's interpretation of both Aliens and Predators that I just utterly despise. The Predators a millennia or two ago built a temple on Earth where they keep a shackled Alien queen who makes her babies into a sacrificial chamber where supposedly willing participants allow themselves to host the xenomorph bebes so that the Predators can then hunt them.
Honestly, if this took place in the year 2200 or on a completely other planet, I would have far less problem with the set-up, but taking place on modern day Earth just makes so many headaches for both franchises. It's like it's punching one franchise in the throat while kicking the other in the balls. It really doesn't care about either of them in any capacity. There's no love behind this film and it shows.
The Predators and their ship have a shitty 2000's update to them that makes them look like their wearing the backs of chrome-plated IMacs on their faces. The alien queen thaws out in literal seconds, starts producing babies in minutes, who are ready to impregnate hosts no time later, and who come bursting out of chests after one scene transition. It's all so hyper accelerated, it's like the filmmakers are saying "yeah, we know, we're just trying to get to the cool stuff without any of the tension".
True to W.S. Anderson, this feels like shitty B-movie versions of things from two much better series. This sucked so much that I skipped Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem which was well advertised as having a much smaller budget and it looks like a step down from even this seeming nadir of a project.
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By 2010 I had sold off all my old Kenner Aliens and Predator figures (I kinda still regret it) and really wasn't participating much in either franchise. I had long before stopped reading any of the Dark Horse Comic series and I didn't really have any interest in watching Predator movies, when word started circulating that vaunted hipster fanbait director Robert Rodriguez was involved in the next Predator movie. Having tapped stylish Hungarian-America director Nimrod Antal to direct a story he'd had festering since the early 90's this was the most promising news Predator had had in a long time.
The film did well, but didn't shake the ground culturally or critically. I didn't get to seeing it in the theatres, and I think I rented it on DVD back when that was still a thing you could do (this blog existed when I first watched it, but thoughts after viewing was not recorded).
It has, no word of a lie, one of the all-time great opening sequences of any action movie. Black screen, ambient windy wooshing noise, a POV flickering of the black, to find Adrien Brody awakening in midair, falling, stunned, coming to the realization of what's happening, desperately fumbling for a parachute release, getting close to the tree line before it finally deploys and hitting the ground far harder than he would like, but not enough to hurt him seriously. Then it's a Lost-like encounter of others who have similarly found themselves in the same predicament and the mystery of why they are there, and what they are going to do about it.
The reveal is (spoilers for a 12 year old movie) 8 or so players on the field are all soldiers or killers of a type and they are on basically an alien game preserve (we do come across other aliens too) that are hunted for sport by the Predators. There are even two tribes of Predators, a larger tribe members who hunt the smaller members of the other tribe. I think the intonation here is that this larger tribe likes to collect then hunt packs in packs, versus the other Predators we've encountered to this point, who are more solitary in their hunting and like to go to the prey's native environment.
We don't get a lot of insight into the human "predators" that are being hunted, but we don't need to. We get just enough to hang our hats on, no more, and in a film like this --which really does bring back the picked-off-one-by-one horror movie trope of the original-- we don't need to invest too much in this crew of kinda bad people (yet we kinda like them anyway. I mean Alice Braga, Danny Trejo, early Mahershala Ali, Walton Goggins, Topher Grace and some of the more unknows, all likeable enough a crew of personalities). Brody is the lead and he's a really chilly, no-nonsense, out-for-himself, prick of a man, and he sells it well. By the end, as well, Brody makes a case for being an action star.
The film is very propulsive, and flows incredibly well. It's a 2 hour film following a sort of half-day span of time, but it never feels like we miss a beat. The film looks great, even with 12-year-old effects, it's still pretty top notch. Antal knows how to use light, shadows and colour to its full effect. The greens of the forest planet they're on are very, very lush, and when the lights go out, Antal, his cinematographer and lighting crew do an impressive job.
I really like Predators. It's not the strongest told story of the series, but it's got the most science fiction within it, and therefore I'm really drawn to it.
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I avoided The Predator because reviews had painted it as an utter fucking mess of a movie, and fan reaction was pretty solidly displeased with it. Plus, the director, cast and crew all seemed to want to distance themselves from it so I expected it to be unwatchable, thus I didn't bother watching. But, in this Predator series rewatch, it was a gap, and my completist mentality got the better of me.
To start, it's a bad Predator movie. It moves completely away from the series' tropes of hunter vs hunted, and instead lands more in Aliens vs. Predator territory where it's trying to build out the mythology of the Predator, but in ways that are too revealing, destroying much of the mystique, and also pushing too far into "fate of the world" type comic book movie bullshit. Predator, like Aliens, as a series, is about small-scale survival, hunter vs hunted. This is not that. It's an "everyone's chasing the maguffin" story, which isn't what anyone wants out of a Predator film. (We also don't want Predators talking, having their dialogue subtitled in english, or translated by computers, or speaking direct fluent english...and yet, here we have all four...)
Shane Black reteams with Fred Dekker on a script that seems like a remnant of the 80's, in both good and bad ways. It's entirely too glib about its violence, and its treatment of mental disorders and the neurodivergent is such that it's clear the writers don't truly understand them, and are using them as the comic relief or the superpowered autistic cliche. But, if you're able to put that aside (not that you should), the pithy Shane Black-isms are mostly pretty fun (but nobody's really coming to a Predator movie for the comedy). He writes fun characters and character dynamics. And, breaking from his own tropes, Black sets it at Halloween rather than Christmas, capturing much of the Monster Squad feel at times.
Unlike with Predators, where the thinness of the characters is all we really need out of them, here the "Group 2" crew (consisting of Thomas Jane with tourette's syndrome, PTSD suffering joke teller Keegan Michael Key, inexplicably English Alfie Allen, head trauma pilot Augusto Aguilera, and suicidal Trevante Rhodes) are all singular characteristics rather than characters, when we need them to be much more if we're expected to be more invested in them. We don't understand any of their motivations beyond "they're soldiers", and there's back stories set up, but they feel untold. Boyd Holbrook is the lead, but he's a genuinely unlikeable character. His motive is both to kill things and to save his son, likely in that order. He's kind of a dick, but at least not as big a dick as Sterling K. Brown, who heads the special ops group looking to recover and contain all the Predator shit. While I really liked Brown's scenery chewing, and the joy he places in not really caring about anything but his own objectives, there's a lot less joy in Holbrook's very dismissive attitude towards pretty much any situation. He's not charming or likeable enough to get away with the attitude he has. Olivia Munn is the badass scientist who is chasing down Predators for her own uncertain reasons. She's fun in the role, but I was completely lost when it came to why she was doing what she was doing in any given situation.
The film ends with a coda, revealing the Maguffin, that seems explicitly devised for establishing a sequel, and it's real, real bad. It's definitely a reshoot, and Holbrook looks embarrassed delivering his final lines.
If this had been a movie about a completely new alien race, rather than Predators, I think it could have played much better.
(Toastypost, we agree)
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After swinging big into mythos for The Predator, along comes Prey with a title that immediately separates itself from the franchise, despite being so faithful to the spirit of the franchise and also tying itself squarely into the series with an easter egg connection.
Prey takes place in the early 1700s in the Northern Great Planes. We meet Naru, a Comanche woman who is trying to break from the expected gender norms of her tribe and become a great hunter. She has been raised with the expectation of becoming a medicine woman which she learned rapidly, but had greater aspirations. Though not accepted by the other hunters in her tribe, they begrudgingly acknowledge she is their best tracker, but they mock her for even thinking she could be a hunter. Yes, she is smaller and not as strong as the men, but she's smarter, more calculating, and more aware of her surroundings...which puts her on the trail of something stalking her tribe, something far more dangerous than a mountain lion.
Tractenberg really lets the film breathe. There's no anxiousness to get to any particular reveal, or point of action, it all seems to come when ready, but in the meantime we live amidst the trees and streams, nature feeling so very alive and undisturbed...until the white men make themselves known. French trappers, who came across a herd of buffalo and skinned them all, disrespectfully leaving the remainders to rot. Secondary threats in a film filled with them for Naru. Trachenberg really takes in the land via cinematographer Jeff Cutterm who effectively captures the isolation in establishing shots, but in doing so it comes back in providing the sense of connectedness the tribe has to the land.
Amber Midthunder (Legion) is amazing in the role, much of which requires her to just be physical or expressive. Not every actor is so capable of conveying so much in their face, often multiple emotions coming through in a single shot. But most of all Midthunder seems to understand Naru's dogged perseverance, she's so great in inhabiting the reality of the many, many moments where she has to pick herself up after a heavy blow, or a loss, or a shock, or facing insurmountable odds. What's more is Midthunder's very personable, very affecting relationship with her brother, Taabe, played by Dakota Beavers. Taabe looks out for Naru, and deeply cares for her, but he also has trouble seeing past the traditional roles of the tribe. The other hunters are far less kind than him, but even with this underlying thread of animosity, there isn't any real conflict between any one character and another. They are one tribe, and what they do is for the good of the tribe. Even Naru understands that, but feels that the good she can do is not what others think for her.
Culturally, this is huge. Along with being the first major studio film to have a Comanche language track (would that the film were shot with the characters speaking it). It's the first primarily indigenous-starring cast of a major Hollywood franchise, particularly one that features no "white savoir" lead or non-indigenous players in Native American or First Nations roles. It tellingly strove for cultural accuracy (while allowing for playing a few things up for a sci-fi action franchise), and succeeds as a film as a result. It's a damn entertaining, exciting, thrilling, cool movie that both hints at the power of Native stories, and also reinvigorates a franchise in the process.
[Toastypost, we agree]
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Rankings:
1. Predator
a very close 2. Prey
3. Predators
4. Predator 2
5. The Predator
6. Alien vs. Predator
DNW. AvP: Requiem
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