Hunting Season

We start with a man falling from the skies, his chute narrowly opens before he hits the ground, then the title rolls in… PredatorS

Now if you expect any explanation how our main characters who were all dropped out of the air were abducted and brought here – don’t waste your time, there will be fewer answers than in the series finale of Lost. But in Predators’ case I don’t blame the creators.

In Predator 2 and the not to be spoken of AVP and AVP: Requiem we were hit over the head with information the audience didn’t need. We saw Predators activating their equipment, gearing up, running around, climbing walls – it took the tension out of everything and this movie that strives to ignore all the previous movies except the first wisely avoids this.
For a fact we spend a very long time with the human characters and the environment before we finally see the Predators, narratively this movie resembles the first Predator but also James Cameron’s Aliens. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure out why the movie was called PredatorS.

We get a little glimpse into Predator culture without losing the mystery of the race and we also get a certain group dynamic between the protagonists who have done more than a fair share of dark deeds in their past. Here I need to give credit to the writers for making the characters actually immoral. No good guys to be found between murderers, rapists, mercenaries and so forth.
Usually with this type of movies we have at least one protagonist who is thrown into the mix with a clean slate, so we don’t feel bad watching this movie. And when Adrien Brody’s character appeared I immediately thought that it would turn out that he is in fact a good guy (some kind of soldier or something) that somehow got screwed by a lawyer (or pick your card) and now has to survive with bad people – but far away from this. Brody is cold character with a past and an attitude that makes him a little interesting.

But hear me out – Predators doesn’t reinvent the wheel and of course it lives in the shadow of the first Predator (but let’s be honest, even that one while being a cult movie isn’t really a cinematic masterpiece). No, Predators is just a load of gory fun and guilty B-grade pleasure. Add to the mix some great sci fi sets that take us back in time wishing for more movies to look like this: tubes, smoke, dirt, apparent sets with little cgi and the constant feeling of being hunted by the baddest aliens around the milky way.

There is also the inevitable galore of movie clichés which turned into a little game while we were at the cinema. It is not very hard to piece together the order of how the guys get killed, a guy screaming around is probably a medic and so on. But in a summer that depressing (still waiting for Toy Story 3 and Inception) I can be very forgiving to a movie like Predators.
And it couldn’t have come out to a better time: when a sappy romance like Twilight draws in the crowds and there seems to be no hope for testosterone driven movie entertainment, Predators is the bromance movie of the summer.

Rating and Moviequation

Category: 1
Score: 62%

P.S.: Probably the best thing about the evening was finally seeing the trailer for Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Inception (starting July 16th in America, July 30th here in Austria). I have tried to avoid anything Inception related and have only seen one picture and the first teaser in order to be fully surprised when the movie finally hits the screen, that being said: wow to what Nolan is about to create, thankfully the trailer didn’t spoil any plotlines and I am now more anxious than ever to see inception (especially after initial reviews sound very positive)

P.P.S.: nine hours to live until the Twilight triple feature, hopefully I’ll survive it.