— RANKING: 62 —
CALL ME “YAUTJA”: Kevin Peter Hall wears the costume that would lead to a franchise. Writers Jim and John Thomas conceived of the Predator while F/X expert Stan Winston, during the design process, added the perfect final-touch element of mandibles. Courtesy: Amercent Films/20th Century Fox.
CREDITS
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation/Amercent Films; John McTiernan, dir.; Jim Thomas, John Thomas, scr.; John Davis, Lawrence Gordon, Joel Silver, pro.; Alan Silvestri, mus.; Donald McAlpine, cin.; Mark Helfrich, John F. Link, ed.; John Vallone, prod. design; Frank Richwood, Jorge Sainz, art dir.; Stan Winston, Jim Boulden, James Camomile, Daniel Cordero, Laurencio Cordero, Manuel Cordero, James Balsam, Scott Beattie, Michael Bigelow, Jeff Burks, Paul D. Johnson, F/X; 107 min.; Color; 1.85:1.
CAST
Arnold Schwarzenegger (Dutch); Carl Weathers (Dillon); Elpidia Carrillo (Anna); Bill Duke (Mac); Jesse Ventura (Blain); Sonny Landham (Billy); Richard Chaves (Poncho); R. G. Armstrong (Gen. Phillips); Shane Black (Hawkins); Kevin Peter Hall (The Predator, body); Peter Cullen (The Predator, voice).
MOST MEMORABLE LINE
If it bleeds, we can kill it.
DUTCH TO HIS MEN
BACKGROUND
As aspiring screenwriters, the Thomas brothers came up with the idea of crossing the two popular genres of the era: one-man army films starring the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone and the brilliant and complex F/X monster films, such as Alien. Coming off action hits, including Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner, 1987), producer Joel Silver (1952–) hoped to find a different twist and sensed this was it. He hired John McTiernan (1951–), who had all the right stuff to make a top action director; the two would create Die Hard in 1988. McTiernan immediately threw out the script’s lumbering dog-headed monster, bringing aboard F/X genius Stan Winston from James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984). While designing an original creature as unique and iconic as the one from that film, Winston conferred with Cameron, who suggested they use mandibles for the jaw. That suggestion provided the necessary final touch that pulled the package together.
THE PLOT
An elite special forces unit, led by veteran Dutch and his CIA contact Dillon, descends via helicopter into a thick Central American jungle. There, they wipe out a guerilla camp, excepting a lone woman, but they cannot find the political captives that Dutch had been ordered to rescue. He realizes the command was only a ruse to manipulate him to commit a massacre. Before the bickering between him and Dillon explodes, a wild card appears: a translucent seven-foot alien that blends with the jungle and turns the tables on the warriors.
THE FILM
Though certainly an action film, Predator offered something out of the ordinary by making the combat cerebral as well as physical. Even as Dutch despairs of beating this seemingly super-human creature, he realizes that the mud now covering him keeps the Predator from “seeing” his precise position owing to the natural camouflage of human body heat.
Schwarzenegger had long since proven himself adept at playing brutal men of action, such as the title character in Conan the Barbarian (John Milius, 1982). One scene here allowed him to transcend superman typecasting: at his wit’s end, Dutch falls down, shivering and shaking, sobbing at his fate. This sense of vulnerability behind the stoic surface suggested for the first time that, perhaps like his idol, John Wayne, Schwarzenegger was capable of emotion, as well as action posturing, in his acting.
THEME
Though hardly intended as a message movie, Predator reached classic status in part due to implied themes. After realizing that his supposedly benign government sent him on what appeared to be an idealistic mission to save lives when, in fact, the objective was an all-too-realistic mass murder, Dutch, the true soldier in every sense, feels that his own personal code of honor has been violated. A certain cynicism, typical of the times, lifts the film out of jingoistic simplicity.
However unintentionally, Predator might be considered an anti-romantic predecessor to Cameron’s Avatar, the earlier film suggesting the opposite attitude toward nature. In that more romantic vision, anything that blends with the jungle is “good” and the American military-industrial complex people are all “bad”; in Predator, such an idealized vision of the green world is reversed via a vision that equates amoral evil with natural (i.e., uncivilized) land. The film can be thought of as a cinematic predecessor of the controversial book Iron John: A Book About Men (Robert Bly, 1990), often perceived as a reaction against the women’s movement of the 1970s with its insistence on “real” men recovering their basic instinct for blood combat and asserting their primitive maleness.
TRIVIA
Kevin Peter Hall, who portrays the Predator, also plays the helicopter pilot in the opening sequence.
Martial arts expert Jean-Claude Van Damme was originally slated to play the Predator.
The film was shot in Mexico, explaining why that country’s most beautiful and beloved actress, Elpidia Carrillo, was cast as the female lead.
Shane Black, a screenwriter, was cast so that the producer Joel Silver would have him around to work, in their off hours, on future scripts, including The Last Boy Scout (Tony Scott, 1991).
Despite a strong start, the Predator franchise did not offer the artistic rewards reaped by Alien. Predator 2 (Stephen Hopkins, 1990) is, at best, a routine sequel, lacking the creative imaginative rethinking of, say, Aliens. Worse is Alien vs. Predator (Paul W. S. Anderson, 2004), a botched attempt to revive the Frankenstein vs. Dracula monster duel classics from Universal during the 1940s.