- Predator is a guilty pleasure. If you're looking for a modicum of realism, subtlety, or intelligence, look elsewhere. If, on the other hand, you're wondering who would win in a fight between GI Joe and an alien, this film's for you. In lesser hands, Predator would have been a quickly-forgotten, cheesy B-movie. In the hands of action maestro John McTiernan, it is a cheesy B-movie worth remembering.
- The movie starts off like any other overblown military action picture from the 80's. A team of specialists arrives by helicopter to blindly accept a dangerous mission because (dramatic pause) "some damn fool accused (them) of being the best," according to CIA operative Dillon (Carl Weathers). Unsurprisingly, the team itself consists of guys named Mac (Bill Duke), Blain (Jesse "The Body" Ventura), Billy (Sonny Landham), and Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger), any one of whom probably possesses the testosterone equivalent of an entire football team. They land in an unspecified jungle, biceps are flexed, and they get to work. Almost immediately, however, they're surprised to find the ghastly skinned remains of a green beret unit that apparently preceded them. Could this have been the work of guerrillas? Anybody who glimpsed the spaceship at the beginning of the film knows better.
- The film wastes no time dropping the pretense of a plot as Dutch and his team find and kill the guerrillas in a fantastically exaggerated action scene. Vehicles are exploded, miniguns are unloaded, and the heroes walk out completely unscathed (well, except for Blain, who memorably "ain't got time to bleed"). They also take captive a young woman named Anna (Elpidia Carrillo), who initially puts up quite a struggle...until they encounter the creature. At first, the creature is a blur in the jungle that quietly stalks them with infrared vision. Then, it starts taking them out, one by one. Suddenly, this badass fighting force finds itself the object of a camouflaged alien hunter's sport. Their situation is summarized by Billy, who blithely points out that they're "all going to die."
- This prediction is nearly fulfilled as each of the team members takes a turn standing up to the monster, only to get mowed down in the most gruesome way imaginable. Finally, Dutch and the increasingly bilingual Anna are the only two people left. We already know that Anna won't die because no movie this hyper-masculine would kill off the token woman, but Dutch has to fight to survive. In the most ridiculously savage part of an already bestial film, Dutch builds some weapons, slathers on the mud, starts a fire, and hunts himself some alien. Interestingly, it's only this late in the film that we finally get a good look at the Predator, whose design is actually quite impressive. His pincered face vaguely recalls the dead scorpion from earlier in the film, and Dutch poetically elaborates on the creature's ugliness. It's tough not to laugh at the ending, when even the Predator gets off a pretty good one-liner, but then Predator is always willing to sacrifice believability for fun. In fact, I think that's what I like most about the film.
- Although this fact has already been widely noted, the film features two future state governors. In my opinion, Ventura is a better actor than a governor, but I'm not sure the same can be said for Arnold.
- Billy is both a Native American and a magically intuitive tracker. Do you think the writers meant to imply that these facts were related?
- Dillon's death was memorably spliced into Arrested Development in reference to Carl Weathers.
