#2 — Predator
This is a countdown of my 49 1/2 Most Essential Action Movies, a list that has already been rendered outdated since its inception, yet still remains a valuable checklist. Last week I talked about the beautiful story of a boy and his single mom, who adopt a killer robot to help them fight a future war against Big Tech by blowing things up. It’s called Terminator 2: Judgement Day, and it’s one of my favorite and most essential action movies.
In Commando, John Matrix says “I eat Green Berets for breakfast” right before he’s about to fight (and eat) Bill Duke. A couple years later, they’d join forces, once again as the elite commandos that decorate the top of the military food pyramid. The problem for Dutch and his men is that they think they’re still in Commando. They don’t know they’re in a Predator movie, they don’t understand they’re breakfast, they haven’t seen the commercial where “studies show that a healthy bowl of Sergeant Rocks is proven to lower cholesterol for any Yautja” (that’s what a Predator is called in the science books).
That’s one of the many things that’s fun about this one, maybe the most fun. All these one-man-army action movies awakened a new challenger, to restore balance to the Force and allow nature to heal again. It wouldn’t be a stretch at all to watch the opening act as a Commando sequel or prequel. I could easily enjoy a whole movie of that, but it gets way better when worlds and genres begin to collide. Everybody already knows this stuff, it’s been talked about to death. McTiernan blending genres, horror as action deconstruction, blah blah, [insert Youtube video essay here]. I think it’s just the magic of how seamlessly executed it is, and the context for it that really carries this. This is one of the world’s biggest movie stars just about to reach his peak popularity, headlining a macho action film that will end with him barely surviving a Camp Crystal Lake massacre of GI Joes.
The storytelling in the last act is stylistically perfect, and it makes me think of some of the more cutting edge cartoons like Samurai Jack, where strange opponents are battled in unknown worlds without any explanation needed for what’s happening or why. There’s a brilliant sequence of editing during Arnold’s primordial battle cry where, instead of a slow zoom-out to show his smallness in the face of his final challenge, he holds his barbaric yawp indefinitely while the camera keeps cutting to a broader picture of the forest — his torch getting smaller and smaller, until eventually we cut to a shot of the moonlit sky. It feels mythic, like Theseus about to fight the Minotaur.
Alan Silvestri’s score is timeless, and it functions very similarly to John Williams’ work on Jaws. It’s often brooding and tension-building, with a sudden swell of strings or horns to punctuate the moment. It conveys the sense of mystery that is center to the genre-blending experience, shifting between horrific discoveries, heroic last stands, and constant role reversals of who’s hunting who.
At the center of it all is one of the great movie monsters, created in part by industry giants like Stan Winston and Greg Nicotero (among many others), but ultimately given life by the late Kevin Peter Hall. His performance as the creature is fantastic, and when Dutch finally sees the creature unmasked, I still feel like I’m witnessing a living, breathing thing as opposed to a man in a suit. They way he turns his head to investigate his surroundings, the way he delicately grasps his helmet with each individual finger, the way he holds out his arms to roar.
To think that I got my favorite creature feature smuggled inside one of my favorite action movies is truly a gift. On paper, this movie is kinda silly if you really think long and hard about it. I mean, do CIA operatives really have the chance to pump that much iron when they’re pushing pencils? Is bleeding simply a matter of time and convenience? Is carrying a minigun by hand through the jungle that practical? All doubtful, but you have to buy into the fantasy of it if you want to watch one of the greatest action stars to ever live fight an alien at the peak of his powers. This is the kinda stuff they joke about on the internet when they say “yeah, the Fast & Furious are gonna go to space next, haha wouldn’t that be funny”, except they kinda already did that by bringing the space to earth. Arnold fought an alien. They actually took the most braindead, little lizard-brain boy script, and elevated it to something artful by having practically every creative department involved provide some of their career best work. Even the musclebound cast is delivering pitch perfect performances that nail the tone and go big in a way that matches the outlandish concept. Astounding.
In his final moments, the creature lets out a maniacal, modulated variation of Billy’s laugh that gets louder and spookier as the countdown to his detonation winds down. We’ve come full circle now, from it’s parrot-like mimicry to flat out taunting, in yet another example of storytelling that comes without any unneeded explanations or exposition. That’s most of the film — efficient, thrilling, visual storytelling that ends with a laugh and a bang, and then an end-credits reel akin to theater performers lining up in front of their audience to bow and wave and say “thank you for enjoying Commano’s Most Dangerous Game: The Stage Play”.
Perhaps there is a small comfort in the fact that no matter how divided we become as a nation, the one thing we will always understand is that Arnold Schwarzenegger fighting an alien is one of the best things America could have invented, and they damn did it. Predator is our core values. Predator is our life, liberty, and happiness secured. Predator may be all we have left. Put Predator on the hundred dollar bill, or whatever the new currency is going to be after it all collapses, and what’s left of humanity rises from the ashes to build a new world, THE PREDATOR WAY.
