Schwarzenegger Season: Predator (Dir John McTiernan, 1h47m, 1987)

 

The year is 1987, and Arnold Schwarzenegger is working out in the middle of the Mexican jungle; in the intervening years between Conan and this sojourn out to central America, Arnold had starred in a sequel to Conan, before starring as the titular Terminator, a nigh-unstoppable human-skinned machine from the future that not only cemented his fame as more than just a muscular power fantasy, but proved he could take risks with appearing in a film by an unknown first-time director. Next, the one-two punch of revenge-thriller Raw Deal, where Arnold infiltrates the mob to destroy it, and the enjoyably overwrought Commando in which Arnold, as John Matrix, demolishes an entire army on the road to rescuing his daughter. Now, he's here in the jungles of Central America, in the film that will arguably cement him as the master of action cinema, create one of cinema's most enjoyably bizarre franchises, and launch the career of the director that will eventually shatter the very concept of the macho action hero.

We begin, though, with Arnold's great rival, in a roundabout kind of way; whilst the duo's first meeting at the Golden Globes in 1977 led to Sly lobbing a bowl of flowers at Arnold (allegedly for laughing at him for losing out to the late Peter Finch for Best Actor). the duo feuded back and forth across the late 1970s and early 80s. Fast-forward to the mid 1980s, and, following the release of Rocky IV , the joke begins to go round Hollywood-what next? Having beaten an avatar for basically the other dominant superpower in the world, it's almost as though there's nothing left on earth for the man to fight; he's going to have to fight an alien! The idea, of course, goes nowhere for Sly himself, but two brothers, the Thomas's (Jim and John, who would later gift us the solid Behind Enemy Lines, and the enjoyably overblown Wild Wild West), begin to work on a script that eventually evolves into an alien hunting a soldier, or, as Jim and John put it, a film centring around "what it is to be hunted".

Following a number of rejections, the duo resort to sliding it under the door of Fox's Michael Levy, who instantly takes a shine to the script, as does its star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, who enjoys the taut script, but also recommends that, rather than the single soldier, the alien should face off against a squad, the film pivoting from straight-up action-adventure to science fiction inflected with science-fiction, whilst Levy and Arnold bring on director, John McTiernan, previously the writer/director of low-budget thriller Nomads, (the first lead role for Pierce Brosnan), impressed by the low budget and impressive tension of the film. Around them, a variety of Hollywood toughs (including Carl Weathers and Jesse Ventura), form the squad. Against them, after an abortive Jean Claude Van Damme appearance in the suit (he does indeed appear in the suit for a few scenes, but remains uncredited), colossal actor, Kevin Peter Hall, plays the titular Predator, under layers of foam latex and body-armour.

These intrepid muscle men, their nearly-seven-foot adversary, together with Shane Black (whose character is basically kept in the film longer than expected to cover the fact that much of the dialogue was being spruced up by an uncredited Black), and Elpidia Carrillo, playing, Anna a female guerilla and innocent amongst warriors, are promptly dumped into Central America, together with a vast armada of exercise equipment. What follows is a gruelling shoot where the alpha-male macho posing (some of the cast getting up at three in the morning to exercise in secret), the difficult terrain, (Arnold bemoaning that practically every sequence in the film is on some sort of slope), and the dehydration and illness of Central American locations and hotels, left much of the cast regarding the film's filming as much a battle for survival as its narrative.

Predator is a film of almost brutal economy; the titular Predator arrives via barely-seen spaceship (the creature, green-screen-shield, or physical actor, is barely on screen for eight minutes, crashing, unseen, into the forest. Arnold and his foil, and former friend, Dillon, are summarily introduced, the mission is given, and the rest of the squad are introduced in the helicopter ride, from the almost comedically over-the-top masculinity of Blain (Ventura), to the deadpan Billy (Sonny Landham), to Mac (Bill Duke), the practically inseparable friend of Blain. Whilst the film doesn't evolve a couple of its thumbnail sketch characters much beyond this (Rick, Shane Black's character basically doesn't get much of a character, other than terminally unfunny), but the sequence ties them together neatly as a squad, and by the time the squad are dropped off on their one-way mission, you do, undeniably, have a sense of each, together with some of the film's most memorable lines, sexual Tyrannosaurs et al.

It's here that McTiernan pulls two of the strands together of what makes Predator so damn good. Firstly, he sets up the mystery; the squad are soon confronted by the flayed bodies of three men that Dillon previously sent into the jungle together with the crashed remains of a helicopter-their focus, and their revenge are quickly meted out on the hapless local militia and their Russian aides, with one survivor being captured, whilst utter chaos, and scenes of run-and-gun battles that wouldn't be out of place as the finale to a Schwarzenegger film explode around us. Small wonder that less that two years later, McTiernan would be directing Bruce Willis in the film that would put pay to much of the unstoppable male machismo that Predator practically represents; the action scenes of Predator are at once impressively claustrophobic and often brutal interchanges of gunfire and weaponry-whilst it would be honed into a fine art in Die Hard, here, there's still an impressive tautness to it, as the squad, with Anna in tow, begin to realise they're not alone.

And it is here that the most impressive bit of, for lack of a better word, cinematic economy comes into play. There's many ways to call what Predator, Alien, and, of course, that Ur-example, Jaws do with their titular creatures, but where the Predator itself differs from the rest is that it makes regular appearances throughout all three acts of the film (rather than the needfully sparse appearances of Jaws), in camouflage. Thus, for great chunks of the film, we are forced to, like our heroes, keep our eyes open for the imminent threat; like Jaws, though, we often get scenes from the creature's perspective; an ominous, distorted world of thermo-imaging, crackling audio, and unseen menace. There is, for lack of a better word, a paranoia, a sense of the unknown in the film's titular hunter, and this paranoia begins to overtake the gung-ho sentiment as, brutally and often with great bloody gusto, the team are winnowed down.

Whilst Predator's politics do occasionally take a back seat, there's something of the shadow of Vietnam, of entrenched forces wreaking revenge on American forces, until only the strongest and most capable survives for his ultra-macho battle against it. It's a rematch of 'Nam, but with a cold, and clinical and vicious alien replacing the Vietcong, and with a single man replacing the vagueness and collateral damage of one of America's bloodiest periods. Even his death is heroic, a final stand against the creature to save his fellow man, whilst the film's lone civilian is rescued, rather than killed, by beneficent American forces, gun-toting whilst they may be. It's the only part of the film that hasn't dated well, and the scenes of indiscriminate murder practically belong to a different film with none of the tension of what surrounds it.

As the Predator offs the squad, one by one, so the survivors begin to realise what they're facing, both conceptually, and, after it is wounded, physically. Whilst Arnold declaims "if it bleeds, we can kill it, so the film turns into a race against time to see if anyone's alive to do so. There is, of course, an unsung hero in this monster-Stan Winston's animatronics are astonishingly impressive once the creature goes mano-e-mano with Arnold, mask off, and the special effects work of R/GA help the creature stay illusive, it is how the creature sounds, from its crackling, spitting sound, to its disturbingly uncanny ability to mimic voices, especially Billy's laugh, that make it a formidable foe; as Arnold escapes its self-destruct sequence that leaves an ominous mushroom cloud over the forest, so we're left, despite the ferocity of the battle between them,

The booming, creeping horror of its laugh, when finally bested, is perhaps the single most iconic sound effect of 80s science-fiction, a nearly-human, but horrifyingly alien sound coming from a creature finally bested by the alpha-male of Arnold, That these come from the same man that voiced, a year before, beloved childhood figure Optimus Prime, Peter Cullen, is, if nothing else, a testament to the ability of voice actors to transform a film from simply good to superb. Between them, Cullen and Hall don't just create an enjoyably nasty adversary, but a nigh-legendary creature in cinema, and a worthy lineage that carries on through a number of enjoyable, (and some even actually good) sequels, faces off against the Xenomorph, and continues to be a stalwart of sci-fi/action cinema.

Predator, though, is a watershed moment for Arnold. Whilst Commando may be the apex of Arnold as one-man-army wading through battalions, guns aloft, Predator is the high-point of what he represents as an 80s action hero-a macho, nigh-unstoppable figure of power and alpha-male control over seemingly everything, even enemy combatants from outer space. It is, together with Commando, the latter half of the Rocky series, and the remnants of the genre that carried on in Japan and Hong Kong under the auspices of Kitano and Woo, the apex of macho cinema. It wouldn't last. Perhaps it never could, buoyed along by a certain indestructibility that was all-too-fleeting in second-term Reagan America.

Less than two years later, an everyman cop would do battle with armed terrorist and nigh-impossible odds on a snowy Christmas Eve and change action cinema, and Arnold, Sly, and the rest would have to evolve to keep up. But for now, Predator stands at the summit of Arnold's 80s adventures in action cinema, a slickly made, perfectly based battle of wits between man and alien for survival:

Rating: Highly Recommended.

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