Predator (1987, John McTiernan) (Patreon)

64/100

Second viewing, last seen sometime shortly after its original theatrical release. I was then 19 years old, reveling in my first flush of cinephilia and impatient with the mindless Hollywood schlock that I nonetheless kept running out to see, for some reason. (Movies!) Predator therefore did nothin’ much for me, and in the decades since I’d mentally filed it alongside Commando and Red Heat and The Running Man—just another of Schwarzenegger’s tongue-in-cheek ’80s action vehicles. So I was quite surprised to discover that there’s only one kill quip here (though it’s a particularly lame example of the form: “Stick around,” spoken to someone he’s pinned to the wall with a huge knife), with the film’s minimal comic relief coming primarily from Shane Black (whose name in the opening credits—wait, among the cast?!—was my first big surprise) and Jesse “also somehow gubernatorial” Ventura, both of whom are dispatched relatively early. Despite some macho campiness toward the beginning—surprise #2 was discovering the source of that musclebound interracial handshake meme (didn’t occur to me that it came from a movie, as it got turned into an illustration somewhere along the way)—Predator turns out to be much more restrained and grimly pessimistic than I’d remembered, even allowing for its two over-the-top displays of indiscriminate firepower. Bill Duke’s increasingly haunted performance, after Mac encounters the Predator, verges on genuinely unnerving, and I knew for sure that I’d gotten things mixed up in my head when Billy tells the rest of the unit “We’re all gonna die” in the flat, resigned tone of someone looking at the weather report and predicting that his flight’s gonna be canceled. Also could’ve sworn that I strongly disliked the Predator’s design, but it turns out that applies only to the rarely-seen (yet nonetheless most iconic) Rastafarian Boba Fett look; Stan Winston’s work on the creature’s actual face is memorably grotesque, and I was frankly kinda blown away this time by the mirrored camouflage effect, perhaps because I’m knowledgeable enough now to wonder how the hell they pulled it off in the analog era. (Look it up. Ingenious.) Still nowhere near enough wit and imagination to truly thrill me, and Alan Silvestri’s score sometimes gets way too busy for my taste—certain cues answer the unasked question “What if Back to the Future had taken place in the jungle?”—but overall, it’s a solidly gripping amalgam of slasher conventions and The Most Dangerous Game.

One thing bugs me way out of proportion to its deleterious effect, though. Predator rivals the original Halloween for tension-building patience: Over 40 minutes elapse before any of our “heroes” gets slaughtered (though we see the skinned corpses of earlier victims), and McTiernan repeatedly cuts to the Predator’s thermal-vision POV, making it clear that Dutch & co. are being stalked. At the same time, though, considerable effort goes into expert misdirection—if you came into the film cold, and missed the first 90 seconds, it might not dawn on you for a long while that you were watching sci-fi/horror, as every single beat securely fits the black-ops template. Even the thermal imagery looks manmade. It’s really a first-rate bait-and-switch, and I cannot fathom the decision to pre-emptively ruin it by opening the movie in outer space. Yes, the marketing campaign inevitably gave that away; very few people saw Predator, even in the summer of ’87, not knowing in advance that the title character’s an alien. I’m sure that I knew. Still, the principle of the thing gnaws at me. I couldn’t fully enjoy the long stretch that purports to be a conventional mercenaries-in-the-jungle potboiler—not because I knew that’s a fakeout*, but because the movie itself had already told me that it’s a fakeout. Which made me feel as if the movie were just wasting my time by going through the motions of Dutch getting all pissed off at Dillon for his lies regarding the nature of their mission. We know that’s irrelevant, thanks to your Final Frontier intro! Aargh. Anyway, I’m very much aware that this is a niche complaint (to put it politely) that bothers virtually nobody else, but we have here one of those hypocritical cases in which I might support a filmmaker re-editing his work long after its release. Snip that needless shot of the Predator’s pod heading Earthward and you improve the movie’s first act by an order of magnitude.

* Which of course I’d have known in any case, having seen the film previously. (My memory's bad, but it's not that bad.) This is a related but separate phenomenon that could fuel another long rant; précis is that revisits can’t “spoil” a film if one retains an emotional memory of the original, spoiler-free experience, which will inform all subsequent viewings. Just want to head off any comments along the lines of “Well, it can’t be a very good movie if you can only enjoy it once, in a state of complete ignorance.” That’s not how it works.