Remember when Ah-nold was cool?

[trinityvixen]

I watched Predator again on Monday. I hadn't forgotten how much I loved that movie or anything, but it's been a while since I'd seen it. I've been heavily wrapped in the mythos of the universe and the Aliens crossover stuff (to the point that I was summarily told to "stop talking about this stuff as if it were real"), which is fine, but the movie stands as well on its own for all that it could be said to just be a knock-off of Aliens. Not Alien, mind. I doubt anyone involved with making Predator entertained any pretensions of artistry as were present in Alien. Aliens, on the other hand, shares so many similarities with Predator--the pitting of paramilitary groups against aliens with advanced/improved weaponry; the isolation of the humans due to complications of politics and politicians; the heroic military leader bad-ass and the (mostly) unarmed female bad-ass who gets the situation waaaaay ahead of anyone else, and so on and so on...

Not to say all things about Predator have held up even as well as Aliens has. While the makeup for the Predator is still amazing, the special effects are pretty ludicrously dated. I didn't even realize that the Predator's blood was CG'd to be greener until I'd watched it again. And its infrared vision isn't as good, with all the effort a special effects team was able to put into it, as the same effect used in the mid-90s Aliens vs Predator game.

Nonetheless, I found it still very watchable and enjoyed the set-up plot that threw Arnold's team into the jungle with the Predator. For one thing, I understood it better now--who the various groups were with the competing interests in eliminating some jungle baddies, etc. I also really loved that Arnold was the leader for the very good reason that he was both a good manager and fairly smart. A smart Arnold is almost unheard of--that's not what he's famous for, let's just say. But his character, Dutch, was incredibly savvy about building correct theories on very little evidence, i.e. deducing that anything technologically advanced for them would be laughably low-tech to the Predator and as easy to spot as a tank even though it was near invisible to the humans; working out that the Predator never attacked anyone who wasn't already armed for a fight ("No sport"); even recognizing immediately that this wasn't just another bad guy squad that was really good is impressive.

That last one I enjoyed a lot. I am so sick of the average horror movie where the group spends forever pretending weird shit can't happen. Granted, I'm not a fan of the self-knowing horror like Scream either, but there's a difference between literally knowing you're in a horror movie and just not being a dumbass about things happening that are truly out of the ordinary. It's entirely possible to not be all "Oh, man, only in the movies would this happen!" but keep an open mind about weird, impossible shit existing and causing trouble. Part of the sophistication of Predator (and further proof of Dutch's intelligence and experience) is that Dutch doesn't question the situation, he merely assesses it and moves on to working on a way out of it. Yes, the other dudes still demur and insist it's not possible, but they get over it pretty quick. The only one who doesn't is the stupid CIA guy because, hello, he's a jerk and a liar and he hasn't got the experience of this insertion team. The tracker (ugh, the Native American one, but let's not go there) is so good that he's onto the fact that things are majorly not okay almost from the start. That's pretty impressive--the ability to notice something being missing (footprints, tracks, signposts of any kind that someone has moved through a space) as a sign of something having been there? In a jungle? That's hardcore.

I back away from this fairly sophisticated analysis (for me) to make one other observation: I really like that the team seems almost human in addition to being impossibly bad ass. For starters, there are actually non-white dudes on the team as befits the modern military makeup. Of course, Arnold is in charge, but there's a black team member, a Latino one (who looks white-ish, but his name is Ramirez and the actor's name is Chavez; he also speaks Spanish fairly naturally), and the aforementioned Native American one. They're all individuals, too, with different strengths, different features that are bone deep, not just the simple descriptions like the new guy (Hawkins), the friends (Mac and Blayne), sarcastic guy (Poncho). They make sense as a unit, but they all show up on the helicopter arriving in civilian clothes with varying indications as to their out-of-duty status. Mac is in a rather natty gray, double-breasted suit; Poncho arrives in a polo and jeans, looking like someone's dad picking up their gear at soccer practice; I think one or two of the others is dressed down entirely in a t-shirt. They are all just people some place that isn't this particular place.

There's also palpable history between them, certain members work better together, all of them are specialized. Dutch says at the beginning, "My team are not expendable," and I believe it. A lot of their "history" is bloody and awful, but it also forms convenient short hand when they want to cut through to what they mean in as few words as possible and have the others understand immediately what they mean. They drop references to Cambodia and Afghanistan, talk about previous jobs like pros, use that history to inform upon the situation.

Mostly, it makes me wonder where that sort of individuality has disappeared to. Modern war movies, which make their film entirely about war and not just use it as a background to telling a sci-fi/horror stalking story, don't always get this as well. I think about something as iconic as Saving Private Ryan (one of the sacred cows of the modern war movie genre), and I can't remember individuals half so well. There's the heroic leader, the dweeby one, the gruff second-in-command who relates to both leader and men so that both can work well together, the young guy...on and on.

Perhaps it's a function of movie stardom? It's hard to forget that Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks, for all that he's a good actor, whereas even those names as you recognize in Predator, besides Arnold, aren't so distractingly famous. Jesse Ventura is the most famous one that people besides me know, but I'd wager he's not so distracting as you can't accept this former wrestler as a macho-guy military type. (Be surprised that his macho shit doesn't get him killed in five seconds, sure, but not that he's wielding a mini-gun.)

All in all, still a very satisfying movie, all things considered. I'm laughing at how macho-butch this movie was, but it was the 1980s. That stuff looked great when you had the great Red threat hanging out in Russia (starving and freezing, but we didn't know that) to worry about.

My family had HBO in the 80s, and they'd tape stuff off of it (TAPES! Remember those?). One of the tapes was a triple threat of Predator, Robocop, and The Running Man. (Speaking of butch 80s movies...) When I was a kid, I wasn't as comfortable with bloody, violent stuff (I know: WTF?). I worked my way backwards through that tape until I was brave enough to watch Predator. I mean, for all the blood and guts of Running Man, it couldn't compete with Robocop for gross-ness. (Guy splattered on windshield, a hand shot off with a shotgun, guy stabbed in the jugular, the Ed209...) Once I got a handle on Robocop, I tried watching Predator. It took a few tries just to get past the skinned corpses. I'm glad I did because it's an awesome movie but also because it's an awesome concept that I've enjoyed in other guises over the years.

Except for Aliens vs Predator: Requiem. That was just...ew.

Comments

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Predator 2 had a lot of decent set-up, but it had problems in execution. For starters, Danny Glover is not Arnold. He can be wily and clever in a different way, but he'd never been the same kind of butch action hero and the film didn't rework the concept hard enough to adapt to that. Compare Ellen Ripley's relative non-muscled body to the marines in Aliens; she compensated with tools what she couldn't do with military training and weaponry. They didn't quite manage the same with Danny Glover's character. Or Bill Paxton's for that matter. Otherwise, setting the Predator in an urban jungle in the midst of gang warfare was brilliant; it was a believable set-up where you could buy the people in it not looking for an alternative explanation for the body count. (One of the Jamaicans killed a dude in a pretty gruesome way to begin with, so it's not hard to imagine their brutality being a good cover for the Predator to operate.)

I don't think, now, that Predator is more violent than Robocop. I think it was a factor of catching a glimpse of the former at too young an age and being scared enough that I wouldn't revisit it until I could stomach equally (or more) scary/violent things. I agree with you: Robocop is way more graphically awful. Predator, however, is much more suspenseful--hiding the killer the way good horror should--and that's what scares you more when you're younger, the unknown, the suspenseful.

War movies can be quite boring, but I took a class on them and it was like a crash course in understanding our country because it really pokes at and illuminates our fears--both of the time the film was made and of the era it depicts. It's useful but not always enjoyable.

And yes, Shane Black was Hawkins, the new kid. Clearly, he found writing to be a better fit than acting, though I think he did well enough in the movie. That was something else I liked about Predator: even Ah-nold managed some subtlety. I wasn't the hugest fan of The Long Kiss Goodnight, but he seems to have written Monster Squad, which I love, so all is well.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

But the role in Predator 2 for Arnold wasn't Danny's, it was Gary Busey's. Danny was always Danny in Predator 2. I don't know if that character would still have died if Arnold wasn't busy, but any writing done for Danny was done before he arrived, and not after.

Even if you disliked LKG, I think The Last Boy Scout is probably one of my 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, were I ever to make one. Mostly, it's Bruce Willis at his finest. The little epilogue bit is really, really bad though.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

The hero role wasn't Busey's. Busey was playing Paul Reiser's role from Aliens only he was slightly less of a jackass. And the fact that they didn't adapt the story before casting doesn't make it better.

[droidguy1119.livejournal.com]

I don't think it was clear I was stating a movie trivia fact. The Gary Busey role was written as Dutch, and then when Schwarzenegger turned it down to do Total Recall instead, it was rewritten.

[trinityvixen.livejournal.com]

Ahh, yes, okay. Honestly, Arnold made the right choice. Total Recall wasn't brilliant, but it was definitely better than Predator 2.