‘Predator’ is 30 Years Old and Timeless
In theory, Predator shouldn’t be a good movie.
In theory, it’s just another dumb action movie churned out by the dumb action movie assembly line that was 1980s Hollywood. In theory, the only twist is that this one includes an alien hunter from outer space. But also in theory, said alien is just there to get shot at by Arnold Schwarzenegger and other One-Man Armies who have and are packing big freakin’ guns.
Hell, another theory can even posit that the highlight of Predator is a scene in which said One-Man Armies show off said big freakin’ guns with mean looks on their faces. Like so:
However, here’s reality: Predator is a goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus of a movie that is widely and rightly recognized as a classic.
In this, the week of the movie’s 30th birthday, one needn’t look far or wide to see Predator being held in high regard. It’s ranked as one of the top 10 action movies ever at Rolling Stone, Empire and Complex. Even in thinking slightly less of it, IGN and TimeOut still rank it as a top-20 action movie.
This is the day to the night-like reception that Predator received upon release. Michael Wilmington’s Los Angeles Times review trashed Jim and John Thomas’ script — which may or may not have been doctored by Lethal Weapon scribe and Predator co-star Shane Black — as “one of the emptiest, feeblest, most derivative scripts ever made as a major studio movie.” Janet Maslin’s New York Times review trashed the finished product as “alternately grisly and dull, with few surprises.” And so on.
Thing is, it’s actually understandable if critics were predisposed to react this way. Today, there seems to be a widening case of superhero movie fatigue. Back then, there was action movie fatigue.
Predator came out toward the end of Hollywood’s 80s action surge and practically begged for a been-there-done-that reaction. As Maslin and Roger Ebert (who actually liked the movie) pointed out, it was basically Rambo with a dash of Aliens. That’s actually not far from the truth, as the Thomas brothers supposedly wrote the script in response to an inside joke around Hollywood that the only thing left for Rocky Balboa (hint: Sylvester Stallone’s other big meal ticket) to do was fight an alien.
OK, sure.
But also, no. Predator’s got everything that Uncle John or anyone else could ever need. Such as…
Truly Limitless Rewatchability
I refuse to believe that anyone has seen Predator just once. If you’re like me, you couldn’t wait to watch it again after the first time you saw it and are now down to watch it [/extremely Mac voice] any time.
Predator ain’t got time to bleed. It’s only an hour and 47 minutes and feels even shorter. It has a simple plot of “Guys go into dangerous jungle and must escape alive” and doesn’t pad it with any extraneous bullshit. There’s constant motion and the dialogue is short and to the point. The movie just goes.
The structure of Predator also demands attention, as its three acts are at once perfectly balanced and totally unique.
The first act plays like a sequel to Commando. That movie is two-thirds Arnold flexing his muscles and spouting macho dialogue and one-third Arnold shooting up a compound full of clay pigeon bad guys. Give Arnold some friends and throw them into a 1980s action scene in which they attack another compound full of faceless, feckless baddies, and you basically have the first act of Predator.
The second act, however, is basically Jaws. Arnold and company are on the run from a monstrous, yet unseen threat that’s picking them off one-by-one. Every death is an event. In between them, the suspense escalates. The action movie has transformed into a horror movie.
Then Predator becomes The Most Dangerous Game in the third act. It’s Arnold vs. the monster in a setting where neither has the advantage. The Hollywood equivalent of a back-and-forth basketball game ensues. The action movie that transformed into a horror movie has transformed into a thriller.
All this would make Predator an easy watch even if it had nothing else going for it. But who doesn’t want to spend time with…
Peak Arnold and Friends
Predator is an artifact from the prime of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career, and is a fascinating entry in his filmography in more ways than one.
Chief among them is that it’s a very different kind of Arnold performance. It’s easy to single out lines like “Stick around,” “Get to the choppah!” and “You’re one ugly mother[bleep]er” as quintessentially Arnold moments. But for the most part, he actually doesn’t ham it up. The character of Dutch is an ultra-serious Army major who’s there to get the job done and keep his men and his principles intact. Arnold plays him as such and does more than just a passable job at it. It’s a legitimately good performance.
That’s only one way that Predator cuts Arnold down from a larger-than-life Action Man to more of a Regular Joe. It’s also a rare movie in which he blends in with an ensemble. He certainly didn’t need to accept such a role at that point in his career, but it’s actually what he wanted.
“I always wanted to do a film like The Wild Bunch or The Magnificent Seven or something like that,” he says in the making-of doc If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It, “where a team of guys work together rather than relying just on yourself. It’s much more realistic.”
It’s a stretch to call Dutch or anyone else in Predator’s tiny cast a truly great, well-developed character. But what characterization there is individualizes them just enough to where they’re more than just plasma cannon fodder.
Shane Black’s bespectacled Hawkins is the goofy yet affable nerd of the squad. Sonny Landham’s mostly-humorous (mostly) Billy is the squad’s quasi-leader and courage compass. Bill Duke’s well-groomed and reserved Mac is the polar opposite from Jesse Ventura’s gruff and oafish Blaine, but they have a friendship that was forged in fire. Richard Chaves’ Hawkins is the squad’s resident shit-talker.
They may be simple characters, but that’s better than bland cardboard cutouts of random Army men. And between their one-on-one interactions, their palpable camaraderie, and the fact that they don’t turn into bumbling, incompetent boobs even after the shit starts to hit the fan, there’s enough there to make them worth caring about.
But it all probably wouldn’t work without Carl Weathers’ Dillon. His status as a CIA pencil-pusher makes him the smug outsider. The squad defines itself by not letting him forget it, and his pragmatic outlook — “You’re an asset. An expendable asset.” — makes him an ideological counterweight for Dutch, who’s more of a Ned Stark-y man of honor.
Plus, what would this movie be without the physical manifestation of their relationship?
In all, it’s a cast of characters that’s easy to root for. And that makes it that much more impactful when they start getting taken out by…
An Executioner, Perfectly Executed
Predator’s eponymous villain may be one ugly mother[bleep]er, but he works because he’s one bad mother[bleep]er.
There’s an alternate universe out there where that’s not the case. This is the universe in which the predator in Predator is the character as originally conceived and casted: a cheap, goofy-looking bug-like creature awkwardly brought to life by Jean-Claude Van Damme.
The first third of the movie would have proceeded unharmed, but the introduction of that thing would have ruined everything else — think the laughable CGI monsters in I Am Legend. Nobody would believe it could take out so many 1980s One-Man Armies.
What I’m trying to say here is this: God bless Stan Winston.
After it was realized that production on Predator had to stop so a real monster could be brought in, Winston provided it. After having worked on The Terminator and Aliens, he knew what he was doing. Throw in an assist from James Cameron, and he became armed with even more monster know-how for the job.
Thus, an iconic monster was born.
But it’s not just the design of the predator that makes it work as a villain.
The reveal of the beast is a flawlessly executed slow burn. The skinned bodies that Dutch and his team stumble on near the beginning hint at what the predator is capable of, but how he hunts and what he is are mysteries that the movie takes time to unravel. It’s not until near the 20-minute mark that we learn he has heat vision. It’s near the 40-minute mark that we learn he has a cloaking device. That doesn’t come off until near the hour-mark. Even then, it’s an hour and 15 minutes into the movie until we get a good look at him, and 20 more minutes pass until he takes his mask off.
All the while, the movie takes care to show that the predator isn’t some mindless beast like the xenomorphs in the Alien series.
He’s literally doing surgery on himself when we first get a good look at him. His craftiness is displayed when he sneaks in and steals Blaine’s body from the middle of the squad’s camp, and again when he thwarts Mac’s and Dillon’s plan to ambush him just as it’s getting going. Toward the end, he almost looks insulted once he realizes Dutch is trying to lure him into a trap.
Why is he hunting humans? Three decades’ worth of mythology tell us it’s because he belongs to a warrior culture that’s defined by trophy hunting. But the original Predator only hints at that, and even suggests he takes trophies to satisfy a personal fetish.
It’s either that, or that one shot of him caressing a skull is meant to indicate he’s a big Shakespeare fan.
And unlike Van Damme, Kevin Peter Hall was an ideal casting choice.
The 5'9" Van Damme was tiny relative to the main cast, and couldn’t do any martial arts in the suit to boot. Fresh of Harry and the Hendersons, Hall was just the guy to bring character to the predator with a physical performance. And at 7'3", he was one of the only people on earth who could look imposing next to Arnold and friends.
Hall wasn’t alone in bringing the predator to life. Peter Cullen, of Optimus Prime fame, did the vocals. Right down to the clicking sounds, which he says were inspired by an “upside down horseshoe crab bubbling in the sun.”
In short, the predator is a shining example of the value of giving a shit. It could have been a throwaway monster. It’s so much more than that.
Speaking of giving a shit, it’s time to mention a name that has heretofore been conspicuously absent from this space…
John. Freakin’. McTiernan.
John McTiernan, man. John McTiernan.
He would go on to establish himself as an A-list director with Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October. But Predator is the movie that put McTiernan on the proverbial map. It was his first major studio movie, and so much of it works because of him.
It was McTiernan who forced the issue in stopping production so a new predator could be made. He actually shot footage with the JCVD predator and sent it to the studio as a warning. Doing so not only resulted in a better monster, but also caused a delay in production that allowed McTiernan to assess what the movie had and didn’t have, and to adjust accordingly.
It’s also because of McTiernan that the cast of characters works so well. He pushed for Weathers to play Dillon so Arnold would have an actual actor to play off of. And in the making-of doc, he revealed that he wasn’t there to suppress his actors:
“All the way through this, I was stealing a Robert Altman technique of: if you can, get actors who can bring something to the table and then turn them loose. I keep my mouth shut about it, but I actually came from theater. So I like actors. Studio executives think that that what they want was guys who love cars and guns and stuff like that. ‘We gotta get a guy who loves cars and guns to do an action movie.’ So I would sort of hide the fact that I maybe ever knew anything about actors or that I liked them.”
It’s also because of McTiernan that Predator is so immersive. The jungle (shot on location near Puerta Vallarta, Mexico) comes off as the ultimate oppressive environment in part because he crowds as much foliage into each shot as he can. But McTiernan also takes care to emphasize it as a lush 3-D space, frequently placing objects of interest in the fore, middle and background.
One thing McTiernan can’t take credit for is the attack on the guerrilla compound that ends the first act. Nor would he want to. It was shot by a second-unit director and, as McTiernan said in his audio commentary, has a “stuntman” style marred by “static shot after static shot.”
But I’ll wager this is a happy accident that helps lay the rug that’s ultimately pulled out from under the audience. The action-to-horror-to-thriller scheme could only work if the movie succeeds in selling the action part first. The conventionality of the compound attack works in that regard.
And don’t overlook the role that violence plays in the bigger equation.
The squad makes wiping out a compound full of bad guys look easy, but do so with violence that’s relatively tame. It doesn’t look like ED-209 is in the house when guys are getting shot. It looks like this:
Compare that to the predator’s kills. Hawkins gets two blades across his face. Blaine gets his chest blown open. Mac and Poncho get their brains blown out. Dillon gets his arm blown off and stabbed so hard he loses his gravity privileges.
Billy, ostensibly the squad’s ultimate badass, is seemingly spared a grisly on-screen death. But his fate is actually worse, as it’s him who gets to serve as a demonstration for the predator’s trophy-harvesting technique:
I’m not aware of McTiernan speaking about it directly, but it seems fair to credit the director for the fact that the movie doesn’t skimp on the gore. Especially considering that this particular director’s mind clearly leaned toward the subversive when making Predator.
I mean, it’s literally a 1980s action movie in which a bunch of 1980s action heroes get chopped into mincemeat. The modern equivalent of this would be a movie in which Thanos shows up and tears the Avengers limb from limb. To boot, Predator even makes the effort to mock one of the defining features of 1980s action heroes.
Consider the jungle shootout previously mentioned as arguably the highlight of the movie. It makes for great eye and ear candy, but it’s very much on purpose that it was ultimately pointless.
McTiernan added that scene himself, saying in his commentary:
“What I was really doing was to quietly ridicule the desire to see pictures of guns firing. All of this is sort of a moral separate piece here, and in order to do it I set up the circumstance where there were no human beings in front of the guns. In fact the point of all the firing was, as the man says as soon as they stop shooting, ‘We hit nothing.’ The whole point was the impotence of all the guns. Which was the exact opposite of what believe I was being hired to sell.”
As a movie that turns a John Q. Everyman into an action hero, it’s typically Die Hard that’s seen as both an action masterpiece and a movie that subverts the genre. But McTiernan did the same thing with Predator, and the result is no less entertaining.
Add up all these qualities, and you get a movie that was probably destined to strike more of a nerve with general audiences than it was with critics upon release. And over the long haul, it sure helps that Predator…
Hasn’t Aged a Day
Seriously, though. Predator may be 30 years old, but it doesn’t look a day past three years old.
There are some things within it that scream “1980s!” There’s Arnold’s mere presence. And Blaine’s MTV shirt. And the fact that American soldiers are after bad guys in a South American jungle and not a Middle Eastern desert.
But that’s pretty much it. The movie plays off of the contemporary political atmosphere, but doesn’t revel in it. Blaine’s shirt aside, the characters aren’t running around making references to a bygone pop culture era. The squad’s garb and equipment are dated, but not to an extent that they no longer work on a thematic level.
On a visual level, it’s not just because of McTiernan’s direction that Predator holds up. The special effects earned an Oscar nomination and still work well today. Both effects can certainly be done better now, but neither the predator’s heat vision nor his cloaking device look like cartoons.
And of course, there’s Alan Silvestri’s score.
He scored Predator two years after scoring Back to the Future, and to similar effect. His music for Back to the Future provides a playful sort of energy that fits like a glove. His music for Predator provides masculine energy that fits like a glove, but which also underscores the movie’s creeping sense of dread.
It’s also not as dated as some of the era’s other action movie scores. Some, like James Horner’s score for Commando, were way over the top. Others, like Brad Fiedel’s score for The Terminator, were a little heavy on the synth.
In fact, a fun experiment is comparing some of Fiedel’s chase music:
To some of Silvestri’s chase music:
One of these things now sounds kinda goofy. The other does not.
And that’s…Yeah, that’s pretty much it.
When Predator came out 30 years ago, it was understandably derided for being just another dumb action movie. But we know better now, for we can see Predator for what it really is: a hugely entertaining, expertly made and low-key intelligent movie that has aged like a fine wine.
This is a birthday very much worth celebrating. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go do so by watching Predator.
