Predators
July 9, 2010
Rated: R Runtime: 106 min Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
Better than Predator 2, far better than the Alien Vs. Predator movies, and almost as good as the original 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Predator.
If an action-adventure TV series (particularly science fiction) goes on long enough, they usually do “The Most Dangerous Game” episode. This was a 1924 short story by Richard Connell, where an eccentric millionaire kidnaps people to hunt them on his private island.
Here’s a Predator movie that goes along these lines.
Predators
The movie starts out in a literally breathtaking way. Soon, a motley crew of bad-ass killers find themselves in a strange jungle with no idea how they got there. Adrien Brody, Danny Trajo (Also in the end-of-summer Machete, which started out as a joke fake trailer in Grindhouse, now it’s a real movie!), Lawrence Fishburne, and Topher Grace are in the cast. Alice Braga plays the only woman in the bunch. Soon they figure out that the jungle they’re in may be rather further away from any jungle any of them has ever been in before. Light-years away. And Most Dangerous Game-style, they’re being hunted by alien warrior-critters.
The Predator aliens are sort of uglier Klingons. They’re a race of hunters (Well, at least the ones we see are: somewhere I guess there has to be a PredaTailor, making all their clothes, and PredaEngineers making all their nifty hunting gadgets and spaceships). They’ve made hunting a ritual, almost a fetish. They seem to have some sort of noble warrior code; they generally don’t kill non-combatants. Though it must be said, they aren’t too much into fair play; they really stack the deck in their favor.
They like hunting those feisty humans, but every once in while, a human turns out to be better at hunting than they are.
A lot of descriptions of this movie claim it takes place on the Predator homeworld, but that doesn’t seem to be the case; it’s more like a terraformed planet (literally terraformed, since the plants on it are from Earth) just for hunting (and apparently mining).
Produced by Robert Rodriguez, and directed by Nimród Antal (Vacancy, Armored).
This movie does a pretty good job of packing the visceral punch of the original movie, while still bringing a new angle to it.
Popularity: 50% [?]
Seen it? How many stars do you give it?
(5 votes, average: 3.2 out of 5)
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Here’s the official trailer for PREDATORS on YouTube.
I note for the record there is a scene in the trailer that doesn’t play out the way it does in the actual movie. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the viewer to figure out which scene that is.
Many of the cast of the original PREDATOR later went into politics; Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Venture became state governers, and Sonny Landham ran for state governor, though he didn’t win. I wonder if Adrien Brody and Topher Grace will one day run for governor?
As mentioned, the basic plot here is sort of like the 1924 short story by Richard Connell, “The Most Dangerous Game”, which is a rather good short story, and you can read online here: http://www.classicshorts.com/stories/danger.html
It was first filmed as a movie simultaneously on the KING KONG sets in 1932 (which is why it has Fay Wray in it; KING KONG would film in the day, then THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME at night). You can actually watch it online here: http://www.archive.org/details/TheMostDangerousGame
But the basic idea (eccentric millionaire hunts people on his private island) has been used in numerous TV show episodes. There’s the STAR TREK episode with Trelane. A GILLIGAN’S ISLAND episode. A LOST IN SPACE episode. And I remember an INCREDIBLE HULK episode where David Banner gets invited to some weirdo’s private island for the weekend. You’d think he’d be wary of a different kind of predator. “Oh, you want to hunt me, kill me, stuff me, and put me on your wall? Oh, thank God! I thought…”)
And now that it’s been out two weeks, here’s a SPOILER discussion on Predators. If you haven’t seen it, avert your eyes! SPOILERific Thoughts On PREDATORS.
From collegehumor.com: Predator’s Teenage Son!