Predator: Badlands

In Predator: Badlands find a kind of sangam for a great many of the former 20th Century Fox's science fiction and fantasy properties. Of course there's everybody's favourite invisible hunters with an added army of disposable synthetics, on loan from the corporate wing of the Alien franchise, not far behind. Such intermingling isn't new but the cross-pollination doesn't end there. Hanging on a trophy room wall in a derelict space craft there's a skull from one of Independence Day's locust-like Harvesters and, in creating a extraterrestrial environment seemingly dedicated to stripping outsiders to the bone in record time, there's more than a little of Avatar's Pandora in the mix for these bad lands. The film's approach to storytelling differs from previous Predator installments as well, harkening to the armoured, near-mute leads seen in Star Wars television spin-offs. The Volume VFX of The Mandalorian is obvious but, as well, there's something of Genndy Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars at play, certainly in terms of the deft touch for character-based action that director Dan Trachtenberg demonstrates here. The centering of an uncommunicative, vengeful berserker as he traverses an unmapped environment isn't a million miles away from Conan the Barbarian either. Sadly, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi's Dek, the outcast Predator of Badlands, never quite gets enough space to voice the bitter introspection afforded to Schwarzenegger's orphaned reaver. Really, all that's missing is a good, hard nod towards the Planet of the Apes. Although, having said that, there's something a little stark in play with Weyland Yutani's busy little mechanoids. Several layers of artificial hierarchy plot and probe without any clear input from a flesh and bone master. For all we know, Elle Fanning's crumbling androids toil in a far future were the post-human dreams of David (from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant) have been fully realised. 

Predator #1 by Chris Warner

Prey

Director Dan Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison have worked a minor miracle with Prey. The duo have managed to propose a concept so strong that it works against the received (but failing) wisdom of how to conceptualise and plot a sequel, especially one with such obvious brand recognition. To wit: go bigger and bigger, at the expense of reason. The Predator series has always stumbled and bumbled around when attempting to expand its scope beyond John McTiernan's masterful but deliberately self-contained first instalment. Although Predator 2 seethes with an agitated, even radioactive energy, subsequent episodes have strayed further and further away from the central idea of a single invisible monster stalking a shrinking team of maniacs. In one sense the first Predator is an ultra-masculine variation on Alien - a muscular appropriation of the same tick 'em off formula that trades oily decks for a green inferno; grumbling refinery workers for a well-equipped CIA death squad. 

In Prey, the extra-terrestrial chasseur is stalking The Great Plains, its presence in the 18th century reported to the viewer in brief asides that recall the passively observed methodology of Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg in The Terminator. While McTiernan's creature was a ghostly presence, prodding at the soldiers it was tailing before going as far as actually attacking them, Trachtenberg's is locked into its own little sub-adventure. Although occasionally glimpsed by Amber Midthunder's Naru, a young Comanche woman who'd rather hunt than gather, this Predator is often alone, collecting trinkets and slowly working its way up the area's food chain. Suit actor Dane DiLiegro's invader uses it's reflective camouflage to flaunt a proximity to other animals while they feast upon their physical inferiors. Trachtenberg's film, both in terms of incident and the dialogue screamed by dying men, plays up the villainous qualities of this Predator. It is a cheat. A massive firepower advantage isn't enough for this monster, instead it delights in striking at its victims while completely concealed, only decloaking when confident that it's on the stacked end of an enormous power discrepancy. 

Trachtenberg and Aison formulate their conclusion around this mix of arrogance and cowardice. Their hero, Naru, has enjoyed a certain closeness to this creature that has allowed her to decode its technology and techniques. In these situations Naru has, more often than not, played the role of quarry to the bigger game that this Predator is actually poaching. She isn't viewed as a threat and is therefore irrelevant to the heat vision hunter. An early scene in which the Predator inadvertently gives a cottontail rabbit a reprieve by killing the wolf that was stalking it establishes that this alien has a blind spot, one that the physically smaller Naru can comfortably occupy. This advantage is compounded by Naru's intellectual acumen - just as she isn't constrained by the gender role that has been assigned to her by her family and society, she isn't limited by the position she hopes to grow into either. The Comanche men she brushes shoulders with have tried and trusted weapons that they rely upon - not unlike the Predator. Naru, when sensing the limitations inherent to her equipment, customises hers and transforms their utility. Naru then practices until she is fluent with these contraptions. Threaded throughout Prey is this idea that overwhelming physical strength limits those who possess it. The reliance on this power reveals an unwillingness to adapt; a desire to respond to every question with the same, mocking answer. 

Surprise Attack by Hary Istiyoso

Alien vs Predator by Mike Mignola

HUNTER

Steve Johnson describes the miserable few days Van Damme spent cooped up in a bug-eyed, red insect suit on the set of Predator.

Aliens Versus Predator by Mike Mignola

Sketch Sunday: Predator

1987 Predator, scratched out from memory.

Predators

Umpteen psychopaths fall out of the sky and onto a rainforest planet. As they traipse deeper and deeper into the jungle they encounter lethal, prehistoric pack animals, the booby trapped remains of another kidnappee, and a trio of chameleonic hunters. The set-up for Predators initially plays like an agreeably schlocky repurposing of John McTiernan's 1987 breakthrough. Whereas Predator gradually revealed itself to be a near hopeless struggle for survival, Predators could be the funhouse re-jig, riffing off unexplored gore cues for wink-wink kicks. That's the idea anyway. In practice, director Nimrod Antal's Predators plods on without aim, rapidly junking anything with the potential to be enjoyable to concentrate on delivering the most artless knuckle-header in recent memory instead. The action is flat and dreary, most encounters boiling down to two muscular clods repeatedly charging at each other, thwacking together in an unreadable mumble. Predators is a lump, lacking Predator's sense of psychological desperation, and barely even trying to compete with Predator 2's Day-Glo vandalism. It doesn't even have the common decency to be exceptionally violent. Predators simply exists to be another franchise installment. There is no love, or even interest in this film. It's the cynical result of disinterested businessmen feigning passion to gain access to the contents of your wallet. It's product.

ACTION FIGURE APOCALYPSE

Red band shill for Predators. Apart from selling like a vulgar articulated figure remix of the 1987 original, this ad seems to suggest the film will be explicitly moving on slasher movie mechanics. Expect a variety of straight-to-video action archetypes being fed through the mangler by everyone's favourite intergalactic big-game hunter. I wonder if the film will go to any lengths to make the GI Joe chattel engaging? Each seems to have an accessory rather than a personality, with Adrien Brody's merc polling high for packing the absolutely ludicrous AA-12 super shotgun. Considering this bunch are made up of war criminals and gangsters, perhaps an air of punishment will hang over the spectacle, not unlike Fox's other extraterrestrial threequel Alien 3?

AVPR: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem

Researching this atrocity, I was struck by one fact: it isn't the special effects creators of each creature that gets continued credit, it's the writers who worked on the original films. Whilst I have no problem with writers getting their due - neither series would exist if those people hadn't got their think on - it just seems an ethical dereliction to not name HR Giger as the creator of the Alien, nor Stan Winston as the Predator's.

Both species are broad ideas on the page, given fantastical, expressive life by their respective designs. Giger crafted an exoskeleton penis that wandered and loomed in its space-nest; Winston was given a brief that asked for a dog-man, instead he turned in an enormous Masai with dreadlocks and mandibles. The blueprints for both monsters were so strong that immediate sequels only sought to embellish them. In Aliens James Cameron and Stan Winston crossed the Giger form with a Black Widow spider, and gave us the Alien Queen. For Predator 2, Winston simply worked up some gee-whizz gadgets and gave the intergalactic hunter a steeper forehead.

AVPR: Aliens vs Predator 2 - Requiem doesn't turn in any radical reworkings of either creature: the Alien looks to be a mish-mash of the warrior suit from Cameron's film, and Alien Resurrection's lanky clones. Meanwhile, the Predator seems to be directly inherited from LA 1997. The directors, who choose to be credited as The Brothers Strause, don't appear to have any real interest in either monster, or their visual aesthetic.

Apart from a few mime sequences framed from a Predator viewpoint, the majority of this film is made up of scenes that establish the boring slasher prey; cut-out nobodies who hate their jobs and are bullied by stock jocks. These phantoms burn screen-time. When it does remember to return to the beasts, the film is slick with an almost impenetrable darkness. Both monsters are shot in tight, geography denying close-up. There's a presumption that they're clashing, but you can't be quite sure.

Experimentation is reserved for this instalment's big idea - a cross-pollination. The dreadfully named Predalien skulks about the place abusing barely established women and leading its pack of lobotomised insects. The Predator DNA splice has created a life-cycle defying super stud who can vomit up embryonic offspring. All the better to cram in as many targets as possible. It's worth noting that said children do not retain any of the Predalien's features, mediocre human alignment wins out there.

AVPR is a depressingly minor addition to either saga. The alien comes off worse, an Old God bio-weapon reduced to a sewer skulking bottom feeder. The Predator is at least allowed a baffling, bureaucratic mindset - dispatched to Earth on a clean-up mission, the hunter liberally applies a blue gunk to any shred of xenomorph evidence, instantly dissolving it. When a community cop stumbles across this cosmic clean-up operation does the Predator attempt to conceal his presence? Nope. He skins and maims the bystander, hanging up what's left for others to find. You get where he's coming from though. You've got to find joy in your work.