Film review - Predators

Predators (Twentieth Century Fox, 2010) is the latest in the film franchise featuring an eponymous heat-seeking alien race which hunts other alien life forms, including humans, for sport. The hunt has moved from a Guatemalan rain forest in Predator (1987) to decaying urban jungles in Predator 2 (1990), to a monster face-off with creatures from the Alien films under polar ice in Alien vs Predator (2004), and small town America in Alien vs Predator: Requiem.

Nimrod Antal's 2010 Predators emphatically cuts ties with the Alien v Predator films, comics, and (banned in Australia) video games, in a white knuckle opening sequence with Royce (Adrian Brody) falling helplessly from the sky into an alien rain forest. Royce is joined by a posse of six other men and a woman, all plucked in a white light from battlefields, condemned cells and other charnel houses around the Earth. We are dead, one remarks, and this is hell.

The characters are reborn but remain all too human. Betrayal stalks them as relentlessly as the expanded gallery of predatory aliens the film introduces. The humans must make uneasy alliances amongst themselves to survive, with unexpected consequences. They look for allies also amongst their alien foes. Help me, one human begs a Predator, I'm one of you.

I guess we are not the only things being hunted, another observes of distant inhuman cries.

The 1987 John McTiernan film Predator asked who are the real predators? Adrian Brody's Royce provides a ferociously physical answer as he outwits both human and alien to save the day, or at least the girl. Alice Braga's Isobel provides the film a wavering moral compass, a character ultimately paralysed by good works and unable to save herself. An amoral Royce, eventually stripped of all civilization, saves her instead, defeating the last surviving high tech alien with rat cunning and fire.

The Predator films resonate with themes developed by the ecology, deep ecology and survivalist movements looking to reconfigure the place of humanity in the universe. Human and not human compete for survival, and outcomes are far from certain for any. Humans must learn from an unfamiliar ecosystem the rules of an inhuman game. Survival depends upon abandoning civilisation, and its mores, to become a component part of an unremittingly hostile ecosystem. The only issue of importance is survival, at any cost. Civilisation, and socialisation beyond survival, are superfluous, excess, waste. As one character remarks, during a moment where civilisation is temporarily restored, what a shit hole!

Predators constantly offers its characters moral dilemmas. In one scene a member of the party yells for help.

Wound one man make him suffer make him bleed make him call out for help and set a trap. And kill those who come. I have done this, another character offers.

The green blooded alien predators seem to have a red-blooded moral code also, offering mercy to a human in one scene, and enacting some elaborately stylized Katana swordplay in another. Humanitarian gestures of all kinds are constantly challenged as inappropriate, often leading to disaster and death for those inclined to be helpful to others. Civilisation, modernity, and its technologies, are portrayed as ultimately toxic to humans and alien predators alike. An alien that assists the humans earns a grisly end. Another human becomes more alien than the Predators. As American Marxist ecologist Murray Bookchin observed the same year that the original Predator was released, the green viewpoint had become a singularly dismal prism.

Survivalisms and green philosophies notwithstanding, Predators is a good action film, with an outstanding cast, and a script that more than expands upon the original, introducing new aliens with new technologies that are eventually utterly defeated in an old fashioned knock down fight with humans.

I watched Predators on Foxtel satellite television in wide screen standard definition.