Predators

As Adrien Brody’s Royce abruptly and unwillingly parachutes into an unknown jungle in the opening moments of Predators, the team at Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios thrusts the viewer into a bold and successful re-imagining of a classic survival story. Predators is largely faithful to John McTiernan’s 1987 Predator, both in premise and in execution. Like the original film, the sequel is a modern, albeit simple re-telling of The Most Dangerous Game, both following a group of skilled human killers as they are hunted through an unfamiliar landscape. Royce and his companions slowly learn that they are hunted by methodical, intelligent, and technologically advanced alien creatures who live and die for the hunt. An explicit goal of Antal and Rodriguez was to bring the franchise back to its basics. After a series of increasingly overwrought and incomprehensible sequels, the Predator franchise was due for a serious update. Rodriguez and team have thrown away the urban warfare of the inferior Predator 2, and the absurd ancient Mayan backstory of the vacuous Alien vs. Predator films. The filmmakers successfully bring the franchise back to its roots by telling a story that is first and foremost about  survival and perseverance, with a healthy dose of aliens, gore, and explosives.

Predators follows a group of dangerous killers who have been mysteriously airdropped into an unknown jungle. As our crew pieces together the situation, their backstories are gradually sketched out. Adrien Brody’s Royce, an ex-U.S. Black Ops mercenary, assumes de facto leadership of the crew, determining their course and how best to deal with their alien opponents. Brody maintains a Christian Bale via Clint Eastwood personage throughout the film, and while somewhat one-dimensional, he convincingly portrays a cynical man who is concerned solely with personal survival. Alice Braga’s Isabelle is an Israeli sniper with her own share of emotional, combat-related baggage, and it is quickly and somewhat transparently indicated that a romance will develop between her and Royce. The crew is rounded out by a menagerie of generic, archetypal warriors, the Russian Spetsnatz agent, an African warlord, a Mexican cartel enforcer (dutifully portrayed by Danny Trejo), a Yakuza, a serial killer, and a seemingly benign, yet curiously intelligent doctor. The film has been criticized for its one-dimensional portrayal of these human predators, but when it comes down to it, these generic archetypes, stereotypes to some, are used strategically and to great effect. Each fulfills a role, the Russian with his enormous mini-gun, the Yakuza with his precise samurai sword, and the predictable portrayal of each killer allows the narrative to develop without getting bogged down in exposition or unnecessary characterization. Given their generic nature, audience members expect these characters to behave in a certain way and we quickly come to understand these killers for what they are, but as the film progresses and the severity of the alien attacks increases, we do learn about the lives of these warriors, and we learn that some of them are not so one-sided after all. This is crucial with regards to the core aspect of this film that differentiates it from its predecessors: the viewer’s attachment and identification with these soldiers, criminals, and murderers.

Antal and Rodriguez were faced with two immense problems in their attempt to bring Predators back to its basics. First, Arnold Schwarzenegger is too busy (and too old) to return to the jungle and fight aliens. The success of the 1987 film is predicated in large part on Schwarzenegger’s charisma and bravado; the soldiers that surround him are largely expendable and exist solely to develop the dangerous game that Schwarzenegger’s character is playing. Second, twenty years later, the vast majority of the audience knows what the alien predators are, what they look like, how they fight, how their technology operates, etc. Most sequels tackle this second problem in a fairly straightforward manner. In Transformers 2, for example, rather than devising a more inventive situation to place the Transformers in, Michael Bay just makes them bigger, badder, and unfortunately, more boring. Antal and Rodriguez tackle these problems with a deceptively simple mechanism; they make the characters more interesting. Rather than forcing the viewer to latch onto a single Schwarzenegger-type, Predators introduces an interesting variety of characters with whom the viewer is gradually encouraged to understand and identify with. Of course, the story is updated from the original film by placing the soldiers on an alien planet and by upgrading the alien weaponry, but ultimately, these soldiers are in the same jungle and facing the same opponents as in the original 1987 film.

What differentiates the 2010 film from the original is this diverse cast of characters, who are successfully used in lieu of CGI explosions to breath fresh air into a mythology that has been made stale by increasingly trite and unimaginative sequels. If anything, Predators reveals Antal
and Rodriguez to be immense fans of the original Predator, with its simple and taut hunter-hunted story, reliance on conventional movie magic, and an appeal to an incredibly basic human desire, survival. In this respect they are quite faithful to the original film. For the most part, the explosions are real, the alien predators are convincingly portrayed by large men in rubber suits, and the sweat and grime on the actors’ faces is the product of trekking through a real jungle that could only be recreated haphazardly on a studio backlot. Predators is a worthy sequel to McTiernan and Schwarzenegger’s 1987 film because Antal and Rodriguez have dared NOT to deviate too far from the source material. And in an era when Hollywood blockbusters are often empty vehicles for bigger and louder computer-generated spectacle, Predators is a refreshing reminder that some filmmakers are still thinking about the traditions from which contemporary blockbusters have strayed so far.

                                           Josh Gordon