PREDATOR
A film review by Steve Fritzinger
Copyright 1987 Steve Fritzinger
Arnold Schwarzenegger leads a team of elite mercenaries through a Central American jungle to rescue a captured "Cabinet Minister" from communist-backed rebels. Along the way he deals with a treacherous CIA agent, about a hundred insurgents, and an alien sportsman doing a little trophy hunting.
The "plot" of PREDATOR is only a set-up for the long hunt scene that takes up 3/4 of the movie. Any reason to drop 5 or 6 heavily armed men miles from civilization would have worked just as well, so little time is spent here, only long enough to let us know who the good guys and the bad guys are, and then one obligatory battle scene so Arnie can use his patented groan-inducing corny combat banter. Characters that started out as one-dimensional Rambos are barely developed to the point of being two-dimensional Rambos, and most of the dialogue is so stiff and unnatural that the characters seem to be announcing important information for the sake of the audience, rather then talking to one another. Lines like "You were my friend; now you are a treacherous CIA agent. What happened?", and "He was my friend. Now I want revenge." are typical.
But that doesn't really matter, because PREDATOR is not trying to present a soldier's experience. These guys are not ALIENS' grunts in space, nor are they the regular guys in a horrible situation from PLATOON. PREDATOR is about the local bare-knuckles champ going up against an out-of-towner who's won his last 725 fights. And on that level PREDATOR works well!
The alien's actions are believable, and consistent with the idea it is a sportsman. It treats the human characters like game animals, stalking them down, taking them one by one, and taking care of each kill before going out again. The alien is a competent, though sometimes over-confident, hunter after dangerous big game, and it behaves accordingly.
The thing that impresses me most is that throughout PREDATOR, the humans have a chance. Too often in movies like this, the monster is unstoppable. It is indestructible and omniscient until the last five minutes of the last reel, when the hero finds some laughably easy way to destroy it. In PREDATOR the alien is very very good, but fallible. The movie carefully portrays the alien as a real threat, without making it seeming invincible.
The effects used to create the alien are another strong point. While watching the movie, you know that the alien's camouflage suit and blaster would work just as well as shown on the screen. There is plenty here for the people who complain about Tie-fighters banking and spacecrafts making noise to pick apart, but it LOOKS real, and that is the important part!
There are still some holes in PREDATOR. The last scene of the alien mars the rest of the performance, and I feel some of the characters are killed off a little to easily so they could get on with the final fight of Arnie vs. The Thing. But it works more often than it fails.
It's hard to rate PREDATOR since if you don't like this sort of movie, this isn't the one that is going to change your mind, so as a movie I only give it +1 on the -4 to +4 scale. Die-hard fans of action movies, in the TERMINATOR style, can take a +3.
Steve Fritzinger CCI-OSD Reston VA.
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