The Predator movie franchise is over thirty years old, and in that time can be best described as incredibly varied. Unlike sister series Alien, which has a clear set of throughlines - the Ripley originals, Alien vs. Predator, the David prequels - few of the six Predator movies so far has been quite like the others, and most tend to ignore much of what's happened before.
It kicked off in 1987 with Predator, followed up by bigger budget sequel Predator 2 in 1990, before various versions were stuck in development hell before 2004 and 2007's double-tap of Alien vs. Predator and AvP: Requiem. Their shared misstep led to a revising of an old 1990s script with space-set Predators, and now the series is going in a whole new direction with Shane Black's The Predator. As the confused nomenclature may hint, Predator a series with an unclear identity - narratively inconsistent and tonally varied - that tapers off much quicker than the likes of Alien or Terminator. That said, crossovers aside, its lows are certainly a little less abrasive.
Related: Read Our Review of The Predator
With The Predator hearkening back to some (not all) movies in the series and opening up many debates of what the Yautja means in modern-day cinema, we're going to look back over the series and rank all six Predator films from worst to best.
6. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem
Alien vs. Predator: Requiem is the worst entry in both involved franchises by quite a margin. The previous films all had flirtations with the slasher genre, but here's where all the usual sci-fi trappings, unique style and grander themes were tossed aside and it became homogenized, indistinct from a Platinum Dunes remake. Set on modern-day Earth in a small town, AVPR is just a slasher movie where the killers happen to be Aliens and Predators. In fact, involving these two is to a massive detriment: once you've seen a xenomorph in the fluorescent light of a diner kitchen, it's really lost all menace; and the Predator can't be both human hunter and protector without losing the inbuilt code of duty.
It's not even a good slasher film setup. The string of potential victims have broad backstories and weak relationships messily established before they're picked off in an oddly paced escalation in genre cliche locations - forest, school, hospital - with weak internal logic (being stabbed by an alien's tail is interchangeably instakill or flesh wound) and cheap sets (the military presence is one guy in a room), all presented in a high contrast, high saturation image. It's narratively dull and visually dark, with the only real moments of inspiration from directors the Strause brothers being some experimenting with the R-rating, and that's a very mixed bag; seeing xenomorph blood melt a douchbag's face is cool, having chestbursters come from a child and a ward-ful of pregnant women is not.
Obviously, what suffers most are the titular beasts. Whereas the first movie did add some fun aspects, this is a dud. The Predalien, the major antagonist after being teased in Alien vs. Predator, is a neat enough design and gives the xenomorphs, just hordes in the predecessor, a sense of autonomy. But it's for naught when their conflict is such a small, unrelated part of the movie; the creatures are separate for most of proceedings and franchise ephemera is cheap, winking at the most well-known iconography and ideas (when not breaking continuity entirely). Little wonder both series went back to ideas in development from before this whole sorry affair afterward.
5. Alien vs. Predator
Like its fellow early-2000s horror icon showdown Freddy vs. Jason, Alien vs. Predator feels like it came too late. Released in 2004, Paul W.S. Anderson's crossover came six years on from Alien: Resurrection and 14 after Predator 2, making it more a reboot of both franchises than a continuation team-up. And considering the promise of a showdown had already been heavily exhausted thanks to a slew of better-timed mid-1990s comics and video games that almost replaced interest in their core series and then tapered off, AvP emerged as an obscure throwback made at one of the low-points for big-budget filmmaking.
The contemporary eyerolls were predictable, and the resulting movie is lesser than the Nightmare/Friday take, not really satisfying either fandom with its story and a PG-13 rating meaning a high proportion of kills are just a Predator claw retraction and off screen slicing. Plainly, it's an Anderson movie first and has all his aesthetic hallmarks (mixed with copious plugging gaps with callbacks to The Thing). That said, the director clearly has an affection for the original movies, sneaking in sly references big and small (Lance Henriksen returns as the original Charles Weyland, while Ewan Bremner exploring the Antarctic town above the Predator pyramid creates a red-hued version of Aliens' scanner), and while the mythology is bluntly presented, it is nevertheless thought out. There's also a bevy of cool, fan-pleasing moments: an alien scarred in acid blood by a Predator net; a Predator slicing a xenos head from behind; a make-shift xenomorph skull shield; the Predalien tease (surely a reshoot).
Related: How AvP Saved Predator (But Possibly Killed Alien)
However, when you step out of the bait, Alien vs. Predator doesn't really have much to say that's not been done in the previous six movies - any inventive idea with plot relevance is lifted from another film - and is ultimately about the showdown. And that's the real issue: the first brawl is just that, with a Predator swinging a xenomorph into pillars, while a later final battle against the Alien Queen is still far off delivering on the promise.
4. The Predator
Warning: Spoilers for The Predator in this entry.
It's hard to measure The Predator, the latest entry in the franchise ostensibly from director Shane Black, against the rest of the movies in this ranking. After all, it's less a movie and more an object to be studied, joining Fantastic Four, Suicide Squad and Justice League as 2018's entry in the "tentpoles totally butchered by reshoots" category. Granted, it's a step up from all three of those - there's no Kate Mara wigs or Henry Cavill mustache embarrassments - but its ADHD editing reveals a movie lacking in proper coherence. As released, The Predator only makes sense because it barrels at such a pace the audience can't really question some crazy illogical decisions and the sheer amount of ideas it throws at you. Why does the Predator not kill a naked Olivia Munn? Don't worry, now ask why its spine was yanked out by a bigger Predator when it was just revealed that's a DNA gathering trick. It's dumb as is, but there's also the sense that what's underneath was already broken to some degree.
However, what this has that the other films don't have are glimmers of what does work. The character interplay, in particular, is often sharp. Boyd Holbrook and his team of mentally unstable outcasts are dependably funny once they're introduced (Thomas Jane's intermittent Tourettes sufferer aside), while Olivia Munn is so good as the bemused scientist-turned-action hero she should have led the whole thing. Even here, though, the film collapses into a "tell don't show" approach, so we never get deeper into these relationships before it tried to Rogue One it.
Related: Olivia Munn & The Predator: A Timeline Of The Cut Scene Controversy
And those are just glimmers. The Predator overall is a badly made action movie, and for the Predator franchise a perplexing entry. It aims to link into all the other movies (Predators aside) with subtle cuts like Jake Busey as the son of his father's Predator 2 character, then has fan-offending broad jokes like "get to the choppers" (that just happen to be in a military base). The creatures themselves are particularly bizarre, with a hybridization plot really just a cover for a scheme involving humanity's near extinction and a plot to steal our climate change heating planet from us. Yes, The Predator takes the space hunter premise and turns it into a same-old alien invasion narrative.
Page 2 of 2: The Top 3 Predator Movies
3. Predator 2
One of the biggest challenges for a Predator sequel is that the creature's powers were built around the narrative of the original movie, meaning a plot formula is baked into the monster. Predator 2 doesn't really do much to get away from that, with its central conceit being to move from the real jungle to the concrete jungle of Los Angeles. Set in a baking, near-future city torn apart by gang wars, it definitely feels different and the massively increased budget creates some striking shots in this vein, but the story is the same except instead of an Arnie actioner, the creature's hijacking a cop drama with Danny Glover.
And whereas Predator was good on a basic level as what it was riffing on, all of Predator 2's police department in-fighting and conspiracies are rather dull, trotting through the motions that everybody involved has done better before (Danny Glover is too old for this stuff, Bill Paxton is fun but even he's on auto-pilot). We know exactly what's going on because we've seen this play out before, and so it's a low-end rehash of genre tropes (with a light mixing of humans wanting to do bad things a la Alien mixed in). Things get hotter when the Predator becomes the hunted - a slaughterhouse scene is fresh and inventive - although this is paired with some misplaced humor involving birds and brooms.
However, it's just about worth it for one hell of a final scene: Glover ends up in the Predator ship below LA, discovering a museum of previous hunts (including the xenomorph skull). He engages in one final battle with the Predator, besting it with its own weapons only to be surrounded by six others. He braces, but they just silently take the fallen hunter's body away, gift his killer an old pistol, and blast away. With barely any dialogue outside of Glover's stunned quips, the mythology of the Predator is deepened and bettered.
2. Predators
It's still unclear if Predators is actually underrated or just underseen. It barely broke even at the box office, the debate about whether Adrian Brody can pass muster as an action hero is as strong now as it was pre-release, and nobody seems to have questioned that The Predator's Ultimate Predator is really a reconfiguring of the Super Predator here, so it may be the latter. Whatever the case, it's certainly better than its reputation suggests.
Part of the problem may be that despite a high concept premise - a collection of deadly human killers are kidnapped and taken to a Predator game reserve planet to be hunted by various creatures - Predators is the least ambitious in the franchise, happy being a solid B-movie. The attempt to reboot the franchise after the failures of AvP goes back to a Predator 3 script from the 1990s, and some of the hokey retrofitting writing is obvious. The bar could be read as lower than even with an Alien vs. Predator sequel, but in 2010 a movie simply being "a fun time" wasn't enough. However, this is a fun time and a little (not a lot) more; were it released today, the attention would likely be very different.
Related: Predators is the Only Worthy Predator Successor
Predators has the best cast of characters outside of the original - the setup allows for a bunch of archetypes who mostly work bar Walton Goggins' OTT death row inmate - and the fear of being so far from home and the question of what makes these Earth-based monster "human" gives the series some actual thematic heft. The action is where it's weakest, with no overriding style and most fights devolving into simple beatdowns shot with quick cuts (although a samurai fight is cooly atmospheric). It's also the film in the series where the proposed Arnie cameo feels like it would have been a detraction, rather than movie-saving asset
1. Predator
Unsurprisingly, the original Predator is still the best. It's neither Arnold Schwartzenegger nor John McTiernan's best film, sure, but in this franchise it stands head-and-shoulders above the rest. Indeed, while later movies greatly expanded the mythology, everything ultimately loops back here (in contrast to Alien, whose subsequent action bent owes as much to Aliens as it does Ridley Scott's original).
At first, it may seem like another Arnie actioner from the mid-1980s - and that's exactly the point. Predator may now be an action classic in its own right, but just as with McTiernan's next film Die Hard, it built that by upending what came before. The first masterstroke is having the movie start apart from the Predator: we see it land, but the mission Arnie and Carl Weathers head out on is ostensibly a simple rescue, and the dark secret is that it's politically motived, nothing fantastical. The subsequent assault is primo 1980s action, with quips galore ("stay put" after pinning someone to a door with a throwing knife). But lingering under this by-the-book premise is something darker. They find flayed bodies before the attack, and afterward, the delayed evacuation and stifling heat make clear Predator is something more grounded, an inversion of the well-worn genre tropes... And then the monster strikes.
Once the switch is made, the movie becomes something else: a tense hunt led by a fantastic villain. The Predator is such a wonderful creation, immediately striking (don't ask about the Jean Claude van Damme original costume), believably grotesque, and so ridiculously OP it requires a character flip similar to the movie's tonal one. The final showdown where a back-to-basics Dutch, slathered in mud, coaxes the hunter out and winds up in one-on-one combat is uniquely set up and tensely played. That Arnie must forsake his armament and muscle in favor of quick wits and brain power was the ultimate stamp on his career thus far, and delivers a sci-fi legend.
Next:
from ScreenRant - Feed https://ift.tt/2QrnOMw
0 comments:
Post a Comment