Streaming Availability: Hulu
The thing about these Eighties action movies is that they knew how dumb they were. Commando, two years before Predator, features a character complaining "I can't believe this macho bullshit". Arnold Schwarzenegger's filmography is full of these self-conscious attempts to write memes, basically. He starts out with "I'll be back" in The Terminator and then afterwards everybody wants to write him some goofy one-liner, no matter how forced. Commando has "Let off some steam, Bennett!" after impaling a guy on a pipe. In Predator he throws a machete through a guy, nailing the corpse to a wall, and then we get "stick around!". I'd say nobody has ever worn a T-shirt to reference these puns, but sadly I'm 100% sure somebody has. Check Etsy right now, you can probably get a whole bedroom set with "stick around!" on every surface. The point is: these were live-action cartoons even in their own time. Only a few years after this, John McTiernan and Schwarzenegger go on to make a metafiction parody of his their own genre in Last Action Hero, and other than the metafiction plot line, you can barely tell the difference.
Predator does one of my favorite story gags: shifting genres into horror. And since Eighties action shlock has such a thin reality already, why not deconstruct it this way? It is the same move that From Dusk Till Dawn makes, going from a quippy cool Tarantino crime thriller into vampire cheese. In the first act, there is little about Predator to make you think this would be anything less than another musclebound infinite magazine Eighties action movie. The only tell is that there's a suspicious large body counte. Dutch (Schwarzenegger) alone could fight off whole Latin American armies, why do we need Jesse "The Body" Ventura and Carl Weathers and Bill Duke? Well, because they're cannon fodder. This is not just in the jungles of Latin America and stereotypical Banana Republic tropes, they're at Camp Crystal Lake. The gym rats are the teenagers.
Considering how much hugneness is going around in this cast, you probably need something a bit better-armed than Jason. Well, how about a seven-foot-tall space man (Kevin Michael Hall) with a cloaking device and a laser cannon on his shoulder? There we go.
The politics of Predator are interesting, even if this is far far away from being anti-war or anti-Cold War. This is again, a Post-Vietnam movie, the characters are all veterans with experience in Southeast Asia. There's so many gags in the script (a lot of them written by cast member and future The Predator director, Shane Black) that you would imagine no depth to any of these experiences. When you say you're a "goddamned sexual tyrannosaurus", that seems to exclude you having a deep inner life with lingering trauma or injuries. These guys go off to war with all the seriousness of marching across the convention hall to play a Smash Bros tournament. The jungle is never a threat here, these men own it.
That is until halfway through the film, when Jesse Ventura's Cooper has been hollowed out, and his friend Mac (Duke) starts to break down. Bill Duke gives this incredible monologue at night to the Moon. It's a tone shift, more melodrama than really the rest of the movie deserves. He recounts some massacre in the war. Suddenly Mac's trigger discipline breaks down, he's jumping at shadows. All that PTSD we've buried under bravado has snuck back out, which he tries - and fails - to redirect towards killing the invisible hunter after them. And he becomes easy prey for the titular alien.
This is the Eighties, we're deep in the muck of the Reagan Administration's support for - and I'm not exaggerating this term - terrorism in Latin America. The Contras in Nicaragua got a lot of the press thanks to their reckless violence. We remember all the illegal shit our sainted Republican president did to continue to support them against explicit Congressional ban. But Iran-Contra is the least of America's sins. Let us not forget the civil wars in El Salvador or the straight-up genocide in Guatemala. Pinochet down in Chile was already sitting on mass graves by 1980 and got plenty of support from up north. In Columbia there's police death squads on American payrolls. These same Cold Warrior Neo-Cons worked for Nixon and would go on to work for W. Bush. It is all one continuum of disaster. The battles in the jungles of Vietnam in the imaginary of these people got to be replayed in the jungles of Latin America, only this time, nobody stopped them. "Nicaragua' Spanish for 'Vietnam'" was a meme back in the Eighties. In the blood of tens of thousands of socialists, clerics, and totally innocent indigenous villagers, American got a W and beat Communism. We got over our "Vietnam Syndrome" just long enough to glorious... oh yeah, do another two Vietnams at the same time in the deserts of the Middle East and the mountains of Central Asia.
Similarly, Dutch's team gets to have this fantasy of only fighting "good wars". They rescue people, they're not assassins. It is still the full might of masculine American (and Austrian) power slaughtering brown people, but any crookedness gets to be absorbed by Dillon (Weathers). This character is like a Sin Eater for the cast, so you can root for the other gun-toting badasses without worry. He's the CIA rep, the liar that's misleading our heroes into massacring an enemy base without cause. Yet even Dillon ends up unable to resist the call of true martial valor to fight the Predator. He dies for the sins of the Central Intelligence Agency and the good heroes can stay pure.
Interestingly the Predator is not part of this politics. It exists outside all this "nation building" and Cold War shit. Instead it this abstraction of violence, a more primal form of combat. Maybe it is here to colonize Dutch's team the way they colonize the jungle, but I don't think so. We do not know where it came from, what its world is like, just that it is here to Hunt the most dangerous game in the Universe: Eighties action heroes. Dutch and his crew lose the technology advantage to this alien, and are withered down one by one. That leaves only the biggest and baddest of the action stars to stand alone, coming to a realization of the true nature of this battle. Dutch gives up his guns and tools and even his shirt, becoming part of the animalistic reality of this jungle. The alien cannot descend into the elements as successfully, and gets crushed by a tree.
Predator is a beloved movie, honestly I'm cooler on this than most. Production-wise, Predator is clean and efficient. I think the score is too much, too loud, and it never stops. The final fight scene seems to last forever and Predator loses a lot of energy once Schwarzenegger has nobody left to banter with. But Stan Winston's design on the Predator's face is as iconic as any movie alien out there besides their future foe, the xenomorph. McTiernan shot this out in the jungles of Mexico, and the shoot never became an Apocalypse Now or Aguirre-level war against the elements. Still, the environment looks good, you can feel the humidity as several actors melt away in sweat. All those big dudes shooting like Hell into the jungle like idiots is fun, I'm not above it.
Next time! With the War on Communism won, we go to hunt the War on Crime in Predator 2.
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