The popularity of Predator is both the premise, and not assuming the audience are complete idiots, and providing them just enough information for the audience to figure it all out, without the movie explicitly spelling it out.
Going into the movie, audience isn’t sure if what was killing the commandos was some kind of ‘monster’, magical entity, etc.
The suspense and trying to piece together “Just wtf is it that’s hunting them an why” is the entire point of the movie.
As the information slowly trickles in, we find out that it is an alien species on a safari hunt. Because why not? It makes perfect sense that we drop into a different world ‘jungle’ and hunt big dangerous game. Why couldn’t an alien species want to do the same?
Why wouldn’t an alien species want ‘sport’ in that manner and only hunt the armed males.
And the movie explained all of this, without some random character just saying all of that information out loud to explain it to the audience. We piece that together ourselves.
This is why Predator movies as of late fall flat on their face.
We already know what it is, and why its there. So everything after that is pointless.
Predator 2 was ‘slightly’ interesting, as it filled in some gaps on the species itself.
is there more than 1
do they hunt other things?
what kind of other technology do they have?
But beyond that, any Predator movie afterwards is a complete waste of time, unless it’s an audience member going into something like “Prey” completely blind to what a Predator even is, and/or has never seen any previous movie.
Once you see the first movie and know the premise (or know the premise before ever going into it), the magic of it is already gone.
To add to that excellent summary, the first Predator movie started off as a testosterone fueled action movie that then flipped to a horror movie where the macho soldiers were afraid of the unknown and only one survived by being clever and resourceful instead of shooting his way out. It was the first popular movie to turn action movie protagonists into victims, and someone who saw it mote recently would have that idea spoiled by yhe many movies that Predator inspired even though I haven’t seen one that did it nearly as well.
Some sequels definitely work, such as Prey, even though they don’t have the same thrill of not knowing the monster. They succeed by having good characters who need to overcome the threat of the Predator(s). It isn’t like movies about real world predator animals can’t work even though we know their capabilities.
During CoVid some friends and I had a virtual movie club called CoVideo Club where we would meet up in VR each week to watch a movie in a virtual movie theater together.
Over the 200 movies we watched we screened all of the Predator movies. I picked the movies and sometimes I wouldn’t tell others beforehand what we were going to be watching during our next session. None of my friends follow upcoming movies so they had no idea about Prey, what it was or when it was coming out. It had been months since we had watched the last Predator movie so when I screened Prey they had no idea it was a Predator movie. It came out the day before we screened it so there wasn’t much talk about it in the media yet.
The slow realization they had that we weren’t watching a western but a sci-fi horror movie set in the Predator universe was fun to sit back and watch play out.
I haven’t seen Prey since but if I remember correctly the first time it dawned on them that this might be a Predator movie was the first time you see the fluorescent yellow glowing blood. They went wild.
I always loved the scene where the Yautja gives Danny Glover the flintlock pistol trophy as a sign of respect at the end of Predator 2. Prey had me like this:
The popularity of Predator is both the premise, and not assuming the audience are complete idiots, and providing them just enough information for the audience to figure it all out, without the movie explicitly spelling it out.
Going into the movie, audience isn’t sure if what was killing the commandos was some kind of ‘monster’, magical entity, etc.
The suspense and trying to piece together “Just wtf is it that’s hunting them an why” is the entire point of the movie.
As the information slowly trickles in, we find out that it is an alien species on a safari hunt. Because why not? It makes perfect sense that we drop into a different world ‘jungle’ and hunt big dangerous game. Why couldn’t an alien species want to do the same?
Why wouldn’t an alien species want ‘sport’ in that manner and only hunt the armed males.
And the movie explained all of this, without some random character just saying all of that information out loud to explain it to the audience. We piece that together ourselves.
This is why Predator movies as of late fall flat on their face.
We already know what it is, and why its there. So everything after that is pointless.
Predator 2 was ‘slightly’ interesting, as it filled in some gaps on the species itself.
But beyond that, any Predator movie afterwards is a complete waste of time, unless it’s an audience member going into something like “Prey” completely blind to what a Predator even is, and/or has never seen any previous movie.
Once you see the first movie and know the premise (or know the premise before ever going into it), the magic of it is already gone.
To add to that excellent summary, the first Predator movie started off as a testosterone fueled action movie that then flipped to a horror movie where the macho soldiers were afraid of the unknown and only one survived by being clever and resourceful instead of shooting his way out. It was the first popular movie to turn action movie protagonists into victims, and someone who saw it mote recently would have that idea spoiled by yhe many movies that Predator inspired even though I haven’t seen one that did it nearly as well.
Some sequels definitely work, such as Prey, even though they don’t have the same thrill of not knowing the monster. They succeed by having good characters who need to overcome the threat of the Predator(s). It isn’t like movies about real world predator animals can’t work even though we know their capabilities.
During CoVid some friends and I had a virtual movie club called CoVideo Club where we would meet up in VR each week to watch a movie in a virtual movie theater together.
Over the 200 movies we watched we screened all of the Predator movies. I picked the movies and sometimes I wouldn’t tell others beforehand what we were going to be watching during our next session. None of my friends follow upcoming movies so they had no idea about Prey, what it was or when it was coming out. It had been months since we had watched the last Predator movie so when I screened Prey they had no idea it was a Predator movie. It came out the day before we screened it so there wasn’t much talk about it in the media yet.
The slow realization they had that we weren’t watching a western but a sci-fi horror movie set in the Predator universe was fun to sit back and watch play out.
I haven’t seen Prey since but if I remember correctly the first time it dawned on them that this might be a Predator movie was the first time you see the fluorescent yellow glowing blood. They went wild.
I always loved the scene where the Yautja gives Danny Glover the flintlock pistol trophy as a sign of respect at the end of Predator 2. Prey had me like this: