Predator (1987)
Directed by John McTiernan
A team of elite commandos on a secret mission in a Central American jungle come to find themselves hunted by an extraterrestrial warrior.
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The lead actor, of course, is the last man standing to face the dreadlocked and many-mandibled foe in this clich�d action film, which first-time writers John and Jim Thomas envisioned as a kind of "Rocky" meets "Alien."
Hindsight tells us that Predator was part of the still-vital cycle of Alien rip-offs, and you don't have to squint too much to see why that makes sense.
It's derivative of "Rambo II," "Alien," and the old short story "The Most Dangerous Game," yet it presents a few unique twists on all three tales.
How surprising then, to find myself absorbed in this mindless pulp adventure, so obviously derived from a combination of Rambo and Alien.
"Predator" begins like "Rambo" and ends like " Alien ," and in today's Hollywood, that's creativity.
Made in the same era as the first “Alien” movies, “Predator” follows a very similar storyline, which has been seen in plenty of other movies like both versions of “The Thing.”
"Predator," you may recall, is the alien version of "The Most Dangerous Game," where man ends up being hunted for sport.
As such, it's a variation of sorts on The Most Dangerous Game, with an extra dose of macho ball-busting from a team made up by Bill Duke, Richard Chaves, and Shane Black, the enfant terrible author of Lethal Weapon (reportedly, Black was positioned as a studio spy to keep an eye on as-yet-untested director McTiernan).
It's derivative of "Rambo II," "Alien," and the old short story "The Most Dangerous Game," yet it presents a few unique twists on all three tales.
The most obvious is Alan Silvestri's score, the best he ever composed - it doesn't seem nearly as nervy all these many years later, mostly because it has been copied hundreds of times (and even from the standpoint of 1987, he clearly borrowed more than a little from John Williams's work in the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises), but the unusual percussive elements, and the fluttering hints of atonality that accompany the predator's attacks set all kinds of rules for action movie music that are still followed even today.
Made in the same era as the first “Alien” movies, “Predator” follows a very similar storyline, which has been seen in plenty of other movies like both versions of “The Thing.”
An equatorial transposition of The Thing, though director John McTiernan's layered, shifting style seems as far from the crisp delineation of Carpenter/Hawks as you can get.
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Predator arrived smack dab in the prime of Arnold Schwarzenegger's movie career - after The Terminator and Commando, before Total Recall and The Running Man - so it's more than a little disappointing that the film comes off as by-the-numbers as it does.
I rather expect that the final form of Predator, if not the original concept which was mangled in all sorts of ways by the time the shoot began, is better thought of as a knock-off of The Terminator : a terrifically straightforward action film with some science-fiction trappings scattered about.