When I was a child I watched a ton of 80s action films with my dad. I saw all the heavy hitters of the time, from Arnold to Sly. I thought I was meant to like them as a way of holding onto my masculinity card. Same thing with sports. I’ve watched hundreds of hours of sports to uphold my manhood among friends, peers, and family. Not anymore. Now I’m more considerate of me. Hell, I’ll watch Pretty in Pink over the next Transformers film and let it be known. Action films today don’t get much better. They have the same amount of cheese, but more CGI. So why is Predator different?
Most people have seen the original Predator by now. Simply put an alien comes to Earth and hunts a group of special ops soldiers after they blow up a guerrilla outpost. Predator is seventy percent of every action film, full of bad one-liners, excessive muscles, and lots of guns. The other thirty percent sprinkled in there are horror and science fiction. Watching it today, I think it’s a bit of a satire of the action film. If you take out the predator you still have the typical action film. A special ops team come against any number of men and wipe them out while smoking a cigar. Good prevails. With the addition of the predator, he takes out every one of the experienced team until it’s one man left. Even though Arnold will ultimately win, the predator still has the last laugh as he self-destructs and I think that is satire icing on the cake. For all things I hate in action films, I’m happy to say they don’t bother me in this one.
My girlfriend is one of those in the minority who hadn’t seen it. So I took her to see it on the big screen and she liked it. It still holds up well, 80s cheese included. The infrared predator vision also holds up because the voices we hear are digitalized making it turn up the frightening factor.
I’m excited to see what Shane Black has planned for us in his Predator film coming out in a few months. I would recommend checking out the original prior to it.
Robert Ring
KissTheMovies 