Why Predator is awesome
Misc musings on one of my favorite properties
A lot of my substack feed right now is talking about the original Predator movie. As a really big fan of the franchise (I’m at least an A or A-), I just had to weigh in with some thoughts.
I do still need to watch Prey, though. (it at least has to be better than Pred 4)
The movie itself is a perfect example of how powerful minimalist storytelling can be. Save the act 1 sequence in the helicopter establishing the characters of the movie, you could mute the dialog in this film and still follow 90% of the story. The best stories in the franchise have always kept the stories streamlined with only the essentials. Some of the greatest comics in the franchise had no dialog at all.
I define a perfect film as a movie which cannot have anything added or removed from it and be improved. Predator is a perfect film.
Signs of how refined and honed the script is arise from the great rhythm of the story beats. The characters start out generalized and broad in order to ground us and help us get our footing. One they have been established and the audiences’ feet firmly planted in the world building, that’s when the movie shifts. After that shift is when we start getting more nuance to our characters.
What makes Predator a terror is its usurpation of mankind. Humanity conquered Earth by using our brains to build tools and traps to overcome beasts. Now here comes the yautja who’s mind and tools surpass ours, shoving us down into the position of animals. Ironically it is even physically superior to us, meaning it cannot be beaten by us going animalistic, but simpler. Dutch doesn’t defeat the hunter by trying to surpass its tech, but by embracing the Earth itself and using tools formed from its life and elements. One could probably write whole essays on the imagery of Dutch being saved from the alien by the Earth “embracing” him and covering him with mud.
This is what makes the pairing of Predator with the Alien franchise sublime. The xenomorph’s terror comes as a pure realization of unleashed animal instincts. Yautja come at man from above while xenomorphs come at man from below. The war between the yautja and the xenomorph is a war between the brain and the stomach. In other words, a hyperbolic metaphor for the human condition and how letting either of our natures get out of control spells doom for us.
It’s quite criminal how underrated the Predator: Concrete Jungle video game was. Not perfect, but a lot of good ideas and it’s a shame it hasn’t be remade and refined for newer generations.
Favorite on screen yaujta? Jungle Hunter (Pred 1) and Wolf (AvP:R). Favorite comic yautja? Ahab. (The one hunting an Engineer from Prometheus.)
Arnold really was a perfect choice for Dutch in this film (really all the casting was spot on). I still have mixed feelings about Danny Glover in the sequel (especially if Mel Gibson isn’t there to help him out), but that isn’t to say it was a bad idea. It was definitely a good choice to change protagonists for the sequels, but who should it have been? Think we could ever get Dwayne Johnson to do a film?
I still wish I could get permission to do a Robocop vs Terminator vs Alien vs Predator comic.