I’m a big fan of the 1987 Predator so I was hoping to like this movie. I knew it could never live up to the pure awesomeness of the original, but I figured maybe they could make an entertaining movie out of it.
There was almost no plot to speak of, the cast was mostly uninteresting (Adrian Brody played a credible badass, but no one else in the cast was particularly interesting). That could probably be forgiven if there were a lot of memorable action scenes but… not so much.
It didn’t have the same sense of being stalked and hunted like the original - the suspense wasn’t there. And you didn’t get the sense that there was one, singular badass entity that was toying with the most badassed men on Earth. The characters in predators were disoriented and thrown together rather than a crack team of commandos. And they were being hunted by multiple predators and other weird alien life. For some reason that ended up ruining the suspense and the whole feel that the original movie had.
It wasn’t horrible I guess but I can’t really think of one thing I liked about it.
I liked it, purely as an enjoyable enough action film for a friday night. Of course, I had just had a long, tiring week and really didnt want anything that I had to think too much about.
We had a group of superficially hard-ass characters, predators hunting them, and a minigun. That’ll do me.
The only thing that bugged me, that the original didnt have, was the sense that the predators could have just wiped out this group any time they wanted. They are supposed to be hunters right? Well isnt hunting supposed to be a challenge? I picture hunting as tracking a lion through a jungle. This was more like following a rat through a maze, prodding it from time to time to make it turn around. These Predators werent hunting, they were just dicking about.
Things I did like: That the captured Predator didnt become best buddies with Brody, ending with them side by side in the cockpit of the spaceship flying to earth :rolleyes:.
Also, I liked his method of evening the odds against the Predator with the silly jawline. They see body heat? Lets trap him in a ring of fire, blind him for a few seconds.
All in all, not a film I will bitch about, and if it ever comes on Tv I would watch it again.
In the first movie (the 1987 movie of course, and this is kind of a sequel, I guess) the predator was alone on an alien planet. No backup, just what he brought with him. And he hunted the most badassed men planet earth had to offer. He was fucked if he screwed up and he really had to be careful about how he stalked his prey because they were a coordinated team, well trained, well armed, and could take him down.
The new movie is the exact opposite - the predators are the ones dropping the humans randomly onto a new planet where they’re disoriented and haven’t learned to work together. There are multiple predators with hunting dog assistance. There’s no sense that this is a battle between a great hunter and powerful prey, but it’s more like some jocks fucking around with some nerds or something.
You could take any random line from Predator and it would be better than any other movie line ever.
Edit: I was just thinking - the most pleasant parts of the movie for me were when it basically just tried to replicate Predator, like how close the music resembled it, the scene where the Yakuzi guy went all Billy, the traps set by the previous set of prey, etc.
These Predators may just be the equivalents of rich guy wannabe hunters, but thats not what we want to see from a Predator film. Thats why it bugged me.
I was reading Ebert’s two-star review and hit the brakes when I read this: “If you recall the first “Predator” (1987), Arnold Schwarzenegger and other killers found themselves in the Amazon fighting an unseen predatory alien.”
The Amazon? I saw only small parts of the film and even I know it was set in Guatemala. And they’re not exactly “killers.” They’re a hostage rescue team. A whole different connotation. The guy’s a professional film critic and he’s been making these mistakes for decades. So much for fact checking.
Overall, not bad. Not as good as the first two movies, but it was sure as hell better than the LAST two.
But I think what really made it as a movie were the little things—not big themes or battle scenes, but the little touches here and there, with characters or setting. Kinda hard to explain.
Rambling thoughts/::SPOILERS::
'Had what was probably the best intro to a movie I’ve seen in months.
Hey, and I just did a little digging…the alien that chases the doctor that Fishburne kills? I think that might have been based on the ORIGINAL Predator design. The one Jean-Claude van Damme wore before they retooled it.
An honest-to-goodness audience “oh shit” moment: seeing the Predator for the first time…stripped and unconscious, and tied to a pillar in a gore-filled camp. Uh oh.
I think I could actually taste where the deleted and alternate scenes went in.
Maybe a bit too talky and unemotional. I think I would have played up the “crazy” element of some of the humans more.
I felt like they really didn’t use the scenery as much as they could have. In the first one, the jungle sometimes felt like it was as much a character as the actors, while in Predators it was just sort of a backdrop. An often unusually temperate-looking backdrop for a sweltering alien jungle hell, at that. At least they could have added one of those gas giants in the sky in the background occasionally (like during the Yakuza’s swordfight, for instance) or added some mist or an orange filter or somerthing.
I thought it was a fun, empty movie. Probably won’t see it again but don’t regret seeing it at all. Of course, I think Predator 2 is much much better than the first one (which I would give a resounding “meh”) so my opinions for this franchise are a little off to begin with.
As an ex-Austinite, I found some of the scenery fairly amusing. Jungle scene, jungle scene, McKinney Falls, jungle scene, jungle scene, Hamilton Pool. The funny thing is that when our anti-heroes fell into the water, I found myself wondering why they didn’t use Hamilton Pool for the scene- and then when they crawled to shore, that was exactly where they were.
Put me in the “Kinda liked it, nothing special crowd.” I liked the characters, what we saw of them, but they needed to be fleshed out a little more to gain a little more empathy. I had the same problem with Alien 3 when I first saw it – it was just a bunch of random people getting slaughtered by a beloved space monster. The director’s/assembly/special edition cut of A3 did a lot to make me appreciate that movie, maybe Predators will have something similar.
One thing Predators DID get right was putting soldiers in the laser sight of the preds again. In Predator 2 we had drug lords and cops. In AVP, it was a bunch of corporate lackeys and scientists who accidentally released the aliens. AVP2, we had a bunch of Colorado townspeople who again got accidentally caught in the crossfire. With Predators, we have (mostly) professional, lifelong killers who were brought in because of the challenge they represented instead of the amount of red goo they could provide when they went splat. That upped the coolness factor a hundredfold for me compared to the other sequels.
I liked it. It was an adventure movie with action all the way through. I did not quite understand the doctor though. I knew he had to be a bag guy ,but his reveal was a bit strange.
I really dug the first part of the movie. Then I don’t know what happened, but I got taken out of the movie around the time Fishburn was in it. Also, when Brody got all muddy, that just didn’t fly with me.
It’s like they tried to duplicate some of the original predator things (such as Brody being muddy and the yakuza fighting the predator with a samurai sword, which was like Billy in the original) and I didn’t think they pulled it off.
I also didn’t like the whole ‘serial killer’ angle. What challenge would he have been to the predators?
Yeah, I thought it was a decent popcorn movie, not worth paying theater prices for, but okay on demand. The prisoner and the Yakuza dude were superfluous, though. At least the black guy didn’t die first.
