Chad Taylor

Old bones

Predators is a time travel movie that takes you back to an age when action movies were bloody, the monsters were some guy in a suit and the digital effects were a bit askew. The original moved the action genre forward a step by being two movies in one. Ahnuld's Predator started off like Ahnuld's Commando, giving the neck-and-pec fans all they wanted from the star in the first quarter hour (one liners, exploding ethnic stereotypes, the star lifting a truck with his bare hands). Once the special ops team had done their stuff and it was revealed they themselves were being stalked, only then did the ten little Indians countdown begin. Predator was an Alien rip off that has aged better than its source, partly because sci fi has diversified but largely because of that stylistic shift. No matter how many times you watch it, Predator is a great bait and switch.

Tasked with a sequel in the shadow of the truly awful Alien vs Predator mash ups, Nimrod Antal / Robert Rodriguez have made a faithful and loving remake in the plural, Predators, that is less daring than Predator and less tense-making than Predators II. Sticking to a single story line and tone, writers Alex Litvak and Michael Finch move the same pieces around the board to much the same effect. Instead of noble Native American soldier who faces off, knife in hand, with the invisible beastie, Predators has a noble Japanese yakuza with a samurai sword (in a fateful field of long grasses, conjured up by the alien world as surely as a Chaucerian knight's longing for a castle will make same appear around the next corner). Instead of a square-jawed tobacco chewing southern state gatling gunner it has a square jawed Russian gatling gunner. Instead of Elpidia Carrillo's "men of my village" speech it has Alice Braga giving a "men of my village" speech. Stumbling on a bad thing the humans escape the same way as Ahnuld did in 1987, falling through the bushes and into a body of water. (It's a stunt worth repeating: Jake Sulley does the same in Avatar. The sequence matches Predator almost shot-for-shot.)

Instead of Ahnuld Predators has Adrian Brody who does a pretty good job balancing knowingness and 'roid rage. It also has similar continuity problems: the troops break cover long before anyone thinks to look up and notice the alien sky, and the aliens have varying degrees of mortality, but with these lies come the satisfying "gotcha" moments, and a bullet count, and a fun cast and some parts when it's almost scary, thus balancing the filmmakers' goal of getting back to action movie basics while meeting the needs of a modern audience whose idea of mystery is a Tumblr link. Recent movies such as The Hangover change gears five times to keep people watching; if modern cinema is any indication then audiences have not been this restless since the Monkees' Head.

Predators is way more fun than Avatar. The movie has been shot on what looks to be a live set, and looks great: the digital effects are often tacky, and the old soundtrack and sound effects have been retained, to its benefit. I stopped counting the references to the previous Predator movies and Alien because it made me feel old, and because I was having fun watching it. There's a lot wrong with it and a couple of things brilliantly right with it. The irony is that this is how movies used to be before the movie that inspired it came along.

The premise of a human hunter who is himself hunted by an alien was the subject of a 1953 short story 'The Ruum' by American SF writer Arthur Porges. When a game hunter in the Canadian Rockies stumbles on the alien's eerie gallery of life specimens, the ruum pursues him to add to its collection. I read the story when I was 11 in R. Chetwynd Hayes' 1975 anthology Tales of Terror From Outer Space; years later when I first saw Predator I immediately wondered if it had been the movie's inspiration. Porges' alien is also liquid, like a rolling bubble of mercury, and morphs into different tool shapes to pursue its prey, just like James Cameron's T-1000 in Terminator II. Someone owes that writer lunch.