Review of Predators (2010) by Chads. — 08 Jul 2010

"The horror, the horror" had Arnold Schwartzenegger attempted to deliver a literary quote in John McTiernan's "Predator", the 1987 film which spawned three sequels "Predators" would probably have you forget, especially the shameless marketing-oriented ones that matched the nameless predator with the nameless alien.

"AVP: Alien vs. Predator" and "AVPR: Alien vs. Predator- Requiem" were more like spinoffs for gamers who loved MTV's "Celebrity Death Match" than an organic organic continuation of the Reagan/Bush-era franchise.

They were live-action video games. "Predators" fairs only slightly better. Appropriately enough, the film opens with a man hurtling to the ground(the screenwriter must've had a Sprite) as the achromatic atmosphere, symbolic of the white light from a computer, is the preamble to the game: the planet where Royce(Adrien Brody) must play "The Most Dangerous [Video] Game" with his multi-cultural survivalists.

(The predators are like CBS executives.) To lend "Predators" some much-needed gravitas, Adrien Brody quotes Ernest Hemingway, and acts like a Hemingway character(perhaps Wilson in "The Short Happy Life of Francis MacComber"), as Brody's Royce deduces that they're being hunted on a game preserve after he and his colleagues are attacked by spiky-looking quadrupeds.

In order to escape from the "Lost" planet, the spirit of Schwartzenegger finds itself abounded in the "classic" predator, who like the android in James Cameron's "Terminator 2: Judgement Day", protects his former prey from an updated model: in this case, a higher evolved predator(the "black" predator) who keeps his ancestor in shackles.

So Royce makes an alliance: Royce has guts, or as Hemingway put it, his course of action exemplifies "grace under pressure", when he perceives that the "classic" predator(who as it turns out, was probably only following orders in the South American jungle) isn't his real enemy, and frees the predator so he can fight his oppressor.

Not only is Royce a man of action(he comes back for GRACE), but a man of great intellectual powers, as well: a man who reads. "Predators" can be read as a liberal film.