Predator by Paul Monette
In which Schwarzenegger faces an unfamiliar enemy.
“It wasn’t a man exactly, but a vision of a man, tortured and perfected by a mind that longed to advance the species and make it triumph in the jungle habitat. Replication wasn’t good enough. In homage to the warriors it had tracked all day it sought a shape deep in itself. As if to fight them to the death it had to be itself and them all at once.”
THE MOVIE
Predator is the film Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in between Raw Deal and The Running Man; the film John McTiernan directed between Nomads and Die Hard; and the film Joel Silver produced between Lethal Weapon and Action Jackson. Silver and Schwarzenegger had first worked together two years earlier on Commando.
This one gloriously blends men-on-a-mission military jungle adventure with sci-fi slasher monster horror. A team of gigantic mercenaries (Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura, Sonny Landham, Bill Duke) is sent into Central America on a CIA black-ops mission to rescue a politician from guerrilla fighters. It all goes very wrong when an alien hunter on an intergalactic safari starts treating the unit as its quarry. As the team strike out for their extraction point, they’re gradually picked off. Despite all the immense hardware fired off throughout the film, it climaxes with last-man-standing Arnold versus the creature in a weaponless mano-a-preddo. Part of McTiernan’s sly anti-macho subtext is that the guns are impotent.
Adjusted for inflation, Predator is the sixth biggest hit of Arnold’s entire career, ranking beneath only the first three Terminators, Total Recall and True Lies. It led to five sequels (including two Alien Vs. Predator films), all of which Arnold sat out.
THE NOVELIZATION
In terms of plot, structure and event, Paul Monette’s Predator novelization hews extremely closely to the film, with only minor embellishments and extrapolations. All of the immediately recognisable, quotable lines are present : “I ain’t got time to bleed”; “Goddamn sexual tyrannosaurus”; “If it bleeds we can kill it”; “Get to the chopper!” Even the groanworthy moment where Major Dutch Schaeffer (Schwarzenegger) and Al Dillon’s (Weathers) handshake breaks into an arm-wrestle is there on the page, their “massive forearms bulging”. The CIA have had Dillon sharpening too many pencils rather than pushing them, but that exchange otherwise plays the same.
In the film, General Phillips (R.G. Armstrong) points to a map on which the Chapada Das Mangberias mountain range is clearly visible, which would place the action in central Brazil. Mark Verheiden’s comics for Dark Horse give the location as Colombia, and some fans like to believe that it’s Val Verde, the fictional South American banana republic invented by Commando screenwriter Stephen De Souza. But according to the novelization, Dutch and his squad start in Guatemala (at Panajachel) and then travel to Peru, somewhere in the vicinity of Contamana.
Dutch, we’re told, looks “like a football hero from the Midwest” with “a street kid’s surly underlip”, so he isn’t necessarily an Austrian bodybuilder. He and Dillon have worked together previously in Thailand, and all of the squad are ‘Nam veterans. They’ve been working together for seven years with no casualties to date. Blain (Ventura) has been chewing tobacco since he was 12 years old. Billy (Landham) is half Italian and half Sioux, and his apparent supernatural-psychic aspects, only hinted at in the film, are made plainer: as the Predator understands it, Billy is the wizard to Dutch’s king. Hawkins (Shane Black’s character) doesn’t get to tell his pussy jokes. The guerrilla Anna (Elpidia Carrillo) becomes less a prisoner and more a de facto squad member, put to use as a spotter.
There’s a mention of “Ol’ Painless”, the not-so-mini 7.62mm M134 helicopter Minigun hefted in the film by Blain and Mac (Duke). It has been “adapted for field combat” in an attempt to explain away its impossibility as a hand-held weapon. But it doesn’t end up being used anyway: in the scene where the squad blazes away at the empty jungle, they use a more conventional armoury.
MONETTE’S PREDATOR
Where the film and novelization diverge hugely is in the small matter of the alien itself. The problems around the design of the creature are well documented, with the eventual Stan Winston creation (inhabited by the 7ft Kevin Peter Hall) not arriving on set until well into production: an eleventh-hour replacement for a disastrous previous version. Monette’s Predator then, is absolutely nothing like the ultimate screen version, because the screen version didn’t exist at the time he was writing. The screenplay that’s easily accessible online — dated January, 1987 and still called The Hunter — barely describes the creature at all, sticking to its camouflage effect and, once each, brief descriptions of “bleached white eyes” and a “crimson” hue.
Monette’s personal vision of the creature is by turns intriguing and confusing: part shapeshifter, part free-roaming incorporeal consciousness, part warrior lizard. Like the screenwriters Jim and John Thomas, he never actually calls it “Predator” (there’s a running joke in Shane Black’s 2018 sequel The Predator about whether “Hunter” is a better, more accurate designation).
We first encounter the creature on its ship. The novel begins as the film does, with the Predator craft approaching Earth from space, but while the film gives us a quick exterior long-shot, in the book we’re aboard with a “cocoon chamber” and some vaguely sketched control panels and beams of blue light. There’s no description of the alien as such, but it has a physical body because it has a heartbeat (“intense as a hummingbird’s”) and hands with fingers to work the controls. It’s looking up Earth’s indigenous species on the pred-net, trying to identify the most fearsome. It settles on “a hairless, bipedal creature” wearing combat fatigues. The alien has travelled 16 million miles to get to Earth, and its egg-shaped ship is on autopilot because it’s been here before, a thousand years ago. There’s the suggestion that the Predators wiped out the Mayans. This Predator, as well as collecting skull trophies, likes to stretch out his flayed human skins on frames.
When we first see it in the jungle, it’s completely changed from its ship-bound form, “rippling from root to root… making its way through the molecules” along the ground. This is way beyond mere camouflage, and seems more like an ability to be the vegetation. “It needed no earthly form of its own beyond what it chose to assume.” It’s almost like Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing here: a consciousness existing independently in “the Green” (Moore’s concept) and able to assemble itself from whatever organic material it finds. “The eye was only a nexus of nerves… spun like an insect’s nest.” Slightly later again, it spies on Blain and Mac, having disguised itself as a banana palm tree. And it really is a tree: the local monkeys are eating its bananas and not noticing anything amiss.
A few pages further on, and now it’s a jackal, but it’s achieved this by taking over the body of a real jackal, rather than turning itself into a facsimile. It later does the same with a hawk, in which form it’s able to stalk the soldiers from the air. The bird is “possessed like a zombie”, and we learn that the alien can do this with any creature on Earth, apart from the humans, who are “impenetrable”.
In the aftermath of the battle at the guerrilla camp, “it was clear at last that the invader had found a form.” For reasons not entirely clear but apparently in homage to Dutch and his men, it’s now “humanoid and vast, seven feet tall with ice blue scales from head to foot,” swinging “from tree to tree with the brachiating ease of a golden gorilla.” It can also run across the surface of deep water “like a hydroplane”. There’s no explanation of how it’s achieved this form or where its mass comes from, but it lasts for a while, until the point where the soldiers unload on the jungle and manage to wing the alien (its blood here is amber, rather than green). After this it doubles down on the “absolute camouflage” and simply dissolves, “coasting on the jungle breezes, dispersed and invisible.”
It’s humanoid again (“like a terrible hellish gargoyle… lizard skin pulsating deep vermilion”) when it kills Dillon and Mac — although it first sneaks up on Mac as some vines. Its weapon of choice is not the energy beam with the three target dots, but a self-propelled spear-thing which neatly removes Blain’s heart on its journey through him and splats it against a tree. The alien and the spear seem to have a symbiotic relationship, but Dutch is still able to use it when he picks it up during the climactic showdown, seemingly because the spear understands him “warrior to warrior”.
As with all the other non-alien details, that climax plays out much the same in print as on film — but the big explosion happens for a different reason. Dutch still discovers that he’s invisible to the alien’s heat-vision when he’s covered in mud, and he still gets his Tarzan roar, “universally translatable wherever war had meaning”. The alien responds with a “snake like hiss”. Dutch doesn’t, however, set up the film’s series of Home Alone jungle traps, opting instead for an improvised bow and an assortment of nasty arrows, from the poisoned to the combustible (the latter made from cannibalised grenades). Once it’s injured, the weakened alien is unable to transform, presumably stuck as the gargoyle, although this isn’t quite explicit. It still manages to get away from Dutch and limp back to its ship, but Dutch throws the spear, and its “deadly energy” reacts with the ship’s plasma forcefield, causing both ship and alien to blow up. So the Predator here doesn’t get to trigger his weird self-destruct system.
We end on the helicopter flying Dutch and Anna (and General Phillips) into the Peruvian sunrise. Dutch privately resolves never to speak of what’s just occurred. Maybe that’s why Arnold never came back.
THE AUTHOR
Predator is an odd piece of work for a Yale-educated poet and LGBT activist, but Paul Monette’s novelization work coincided with a brief period pitching screenplays in Hollywood. He also wrote books based on Scarface, Midnight Run and Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu, and published seven original novels alongside collections of his poetry and memoirs. Becoming a Man: Half a Life Story won the 1992 National Book Award. The moving, angry Borrowed Time chronicled the death of his partner Roger Horwitz from AIDS. Monette established the Monette-Horwitz Trust shortly before his own death in 1995. Its committee gives annual awards to to individuals and organisations for literary, scholarly, archival, or activist work combating homophobia.
About the Novelization Station project…
I’ve always had a soft spot for novelizations. As a kid, growing up pre-VHS, they were a way to re-experience films I’d enjoyed. In my early adolescence they became a way to “see” films that I wasn’t old enough to access. And into adulthood I continued to find them weirdly fascinating as warped, parallel universe versions of the things they were supposedly adapting: sometimes based on much earlier screenplays than the ones that were ultimately filmed, and sometimes crazily extrapolated and embellished by the authors themselves. They were — and still are — both hack work and a definite craft. My first major published magazine feature, more than a decade ago now, was an investigation of why they still exist when you can buy the DVD. In the age of Netflix, I still think that’s an interesting question.
They’re a niche interest and they’re not much studied, so my intention here is to create a platform to talk about them. I’m planning to focus on one book a week. I’m using the American spelling of “novelization” for SEO reasons, and I will not be worrying about spoilers. Length and format of these pieces will vary, I think, depending on what there is to say. I’ve got my own list, but if there’s anything you’d like to see covered, give me a shout below the line or on Twitter.
Arriving next: Beneath the Planet of the Apes
