Predator - Poll Win & Thoughts

Predator won the poll, so I'm drawing up a nice print which will, as always, ship out to everyone in the Elite tier! I'm thinking of a very stylised Masami Obari-style image this time, with lots of black shadow. Something along the lines of how he drew Transformers:

 I first saw Predator when I was browsing my local video rental store in my hometown of Lincoln around 1988. I spent hours in there just looking at the covers of the horror and sci-fi titles. The cover for Predator didn't give anything away and I knew absolutely nothing about it, but obviously it was an 80s Arnold film, so it was bound to be good!

 Anyway, SPOILERS:

 It turned out to be about an alien hunter absolutely kicking the living shit out of Arnie and his crew. As a kid I was completely enthralled by it. First it's one of the best action movies ever made (the attack on the rebel village near the start of the movie is one of the greatest action sequences I've ever seen, matched only by some stuff in Robocop and Hong Kong cinema), then it's a supernatural suspense as they're picked off one by one by an invisible entity, and then it's a one-on-one fight with a technologically superior alien creature. Director John McTiernan (also the director of Die Hard, The Hunt for Red October and one of the most underrated action films - Last Action Hero) somehow managed to blend several genres into one cohesive masterpiece of pyrotechnics and practical effects.

It helps that the cast of characters are all really well designed and distinct visually. They're a mercenary team in the jungle, so you'd expect them all to kind of look similar, but it has that Capcom approach to character design where everyone has their own distinct look and accessories despite basically wearing green camouflage. One guy has a big cowboy hat, one has sunglasses, one has no sleeves, etc. It's like Robocop in that everyone is so memorable that I can remember the names of the characters (except for Hawkins. I always forget that guy). When did you last see a movie where you actually remembered the names of more that one or two characters?

The jungle setting is fantastic and a perfect location for the story, being beautiful to look at as well as giving tons of tactical possibilities and vertical movement for the Predator. Every shot is a painting. If you watch the making of documentary, it's amazing how they went into this jungle in Puerto Vallarta and really sculpted it and chopped things down and added just the right amount of mist, etc, to make the perfect backdrop for each and every shot. The later sequel Predators (2010) tried to go back to the jungle setting, but it's pretty dull and lifeless in comparison to the original. It feels like they just went to Hawaii and started filming, rather than setting up every shot with such meticulous detail. Some of these are so well filmed they could be manga panels.

Obviously, it helps that the film has one of the absolute best creature designs of all time, courtesy of Stan Winston (Terminator, Aliens, The thing). The way the creature is built up and the sense of creeping dread that the film evokes is really great. We don't see him properly until the last quarter of the film, and the reveal is great.

 This is especially amazing when you learn that the original creature design (which they actually filmed for most of the movie, right there with the actors, until replacing it with the now iconic design last minute) was a kind of a weird prawn thing (with Jean Claude Van Damme in the costume)! If they hadn't improved the creature and fixed all its original appearances in editing, it could have been a very different movie.

 Arnold said it looked like a duck. Here it is in red, for the cloaking/invisibility VFX to go over. As you can see, he originally shot some kind of spinning weapon from his hand instead of using the shoulder-mounted plasma cannon.

Thankfully, Stan Winston and his studio gave us the now iconic design.

Three years later, Predator 2 was released and tried an interesting spin by having things set in the big city during a massive heatwave and comedically enormous gang war. They kept to the original 1987 design of the Predator, but gave him a lot more screentime, new weapons and lots more gadgets. It's not a bad film at all, but nowhere near the sheer quality of the first movie. As with the Cenobites in the Hellraiser sequels, just showing more of the creature doesn't make it better. It's the way that you shoot it, frame it, light the scene, etc. And sometimes, seeing less of something until the final reveal is the right move.

Later sequels and reboots have tried to "improve" the predator design, but they all just end up either lackluster or not even looking like the Predator at all.

I dunno, man. He needs his string vest or it just doesn't look right.

And , of course, we ended up getting one of the best arcade beat 'em ups of all time out of all this! Alien vs Predator (1994) by Capcom, of all people! I never thought I'd see one of my favourite western creature designs drawn by the guy who designed all of the Street Fighters (Bengus), but here we are!

 Anyway! Those are some of my thoughts on Predator from the great year of 1987. I shall get to actually drawing the print now.
See you all later!

-Paul