Inhalt

Copyright

Contents

Preface

Predator

Predator 2

Alien vs. Predator

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

Predators

The Predator

Prey

Predator Short Films

Predator Video Games

Predator Comics

Photo Credit

PREFACE

The Predator franchise is sometimes seen as a poor relation to the Alien series. 20th Century Fox certainly seemed to put more money into the Alien series than they did Predator but that was understandable because Alien and Aliens were both hugely popular and influential and remain pop culture touchstones. The Alien franchise, for two films at least, was always quite prestigious. Predator was always slightly more of a niche franchise than Alien and none of the Predator movies can be described as blockbusters or pop culture giants - though the first one was very profitable. The Predator franchise was always seen as somewhat more low-brow - presumably because these are essentially action films which then incorporate some horror and sci-fi elements. That's really the genius of the first Predator film though. It plays like an action war picture at first and then suddenly takes a sharp turn into horror and sci-fi.

Both of these famous Fox film franchises were eventually forced to suffer the indignity of the Alien vs Predator interlude - which thankfully had the plug rapidly pulled after the truly atrocious Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. The Predator franchise - happily - did return in more undiluted fashion after this and proved with Prey that it still has plenty of life and potential left in it yet.

There is often a common misconception with the Predator franchise that, up until Prey, all the sequels were terrible. I don't agree with this perception at all. I love Predator 2 and Predators is a film that has somewhat grown on me over the years. Neither of these films are bad sequels at all if you ask me and I'll have plenty to say about both movies in this book. For my money the only real out and out clunker among the 'undiluted' Predator sequels is 2018's The Predator - in which Shane Black, for reasons best known to himself, seemed to think he was making an action comedy rather than an action horror film.

We'll discuss all of these films in this book and we shall also - of course - discuss the two AvP movies too. We'll look at the background of each film, the development of them, and discuss worked and what didn't in the actual movie. The Predators themselves remain an intriguing and fearsome movie antagonist. Their physical attributes, advanced technology, and unique culture make them both frightening and mysterious. Yet, it is the Predators' culture that truly fascinates. These enigmatic aliens who come to Earth on safari. They view themselves as apex predators and seek worthy adversaries to engage in one-on-one combat.

Through elaborate rituals and tests of skill, they carefully choose targets that display exceptional strength, intelligence, or combat ability. Inspired by their intense dedication to the hunt, they have developed a vast array of weaponry. Energy-based plasma cannons, razor-sharp retractable blades, deadly nets, high-tech spears, and throwable explosive devices are just a few examples of their arsenal. What sets the Predators apart from mindless killers, however, is their strict code of honour. Instead of overwhelming their targets, they prefer to engage in fair one-on-one combat - even toying with their prey at times rather than kill them straight away.

This sense of honour and celebration of the hunt distinguishes them as complex beings, transcending the realm of mere villains. The Predators are fearsome and frightening but what makes them especially chilling is that they are smart and cunning. These creatures have mastered space travel so they are clearly way more intelligent than us. If you ever encounter a Predator you are most likely toast. They are not unbeatable though. A few brave souls have gone up against a Predator and lived to tell the tale. The book that follows will tell you all about them.

PREDATOR (1987)

Predator is said to have started life as a flippant joke about Rocky Balboa having to fight an alien in the next film because he'd beaten everyone else. Jim and John Thomas, brothers from California, wrote the first script treatment - which was originally called The Hunter and then simply Hunter. The first script for The Hunter was written in a single weekend. The main concept of Hunter was that a highly advanced and lethal alien comes to Earth to hunt humans - in the same way that humans (well, those who are cruel and heartless enough anyway) go on safari to hunt animals in Africa.

It struck the Thomas brothers that if a deadly alien did come to Earth to hunt humans the people it hunted would have to be heavily armed military types because otherwise the 'hunt' wouldn't be much of a challenge for the alien. The pulpy sci-fi script, which obviously owed something to Alien but actually predated Aliens (despite its similar military v aliens premise), would be revised many times before Predator hit the screen.

In the original Hunter script there was going to be a party of aliens hunting on Earth but later revisions later changed this so there was a single Predator. The formula of having a single Predator hunting humans seems to be the one that works best in Predator movies. When they try to introduce more Predators or mess around with the Predator too much it never quite seems to work as well. New Zealand filmmaker Geoff Murphy was the original director on Predator. Murphy was best known for the cult sci-fi film The Quiet Earth. He later directed Hollywood films like Young Guns II and Under Siege 2: Dark Territory and was a second unit director on Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films. Murphy developed the Hunter script for a time with Jim and John Thomas but some of his ideas clashed with the studio 20th Century Fox.

Murphy wanted the alien hunter to be patently female and also wanted a sequence where the military team destroy a rebel camp in the jungle and kill everyone but then find it was being defended by boys and old men - who they've now just slaughtered. The studio obviously chafed at this last suggestion in particular. They felt Murphy was being a bit too radical, political even, for a sci-fi actioner. They wanted Hunter to be a sci-fi action film - not a gritty anti-war drama or critique of American foreign policy!

Geoff Murphy had Harrison Ford in mind for the lead in Hunter and wanted James Woods to play the untrustworthy CIA man foisted on the military team. It seems rather doubtful that Harrison Ford, then at the peak of his career, would have actually agreed to be in the film but you never know. His fee alone would have taken a fair chunk out of the budget! The fact that Murphy wanted James Woods in the film too was an indication of how he viewed the movie differently from the producers. The roles in Predator would eventually be taken by larger than life action stars and James Woods, though a terrific actor, was definitely not an action star.

Joel Silver then came onboard as a producer and told Geoff Murphy that Arnold Schwarzenegger was going to be the lead in Hunter. In fact, there was already a deal in place where if Schwarzenegger's 1985 film Commando had a big opening he would get the part. Commando opened big and Arnold was cast in Hunter (as it was back then). Schwarzenegger hadn't actually made that many films at the time and wasn't taken very seriously as an actor. As far as action stars went, Sly Stallone was still the top dog and Arnie was some way behind. It was the double impact of Commando and Predator (and also the big box-office numbers of the 1988 comedy film Twins) which lifted Schwarzenegger up into Hollywood superstardom. By the early nineties, Arnold was headlining blockbuster films like Total Recall and Terminator 2 and had become a bigger star than Stallone.

Geoff Murphy really disliked the casting of Arnold Schwarzenegger as the lead in Hunter and complained to the studio. Murphy wanted the lead to be an all American GI type and said that Arnold Schwarzenegger could barely speak English! Geoff Murphy thought that Arnold was a terrible actor and would hobble any ambitions he had to make Hunter a credible film about plausible military men (plausible military men who just happen to find themselves up against an alien!). Nonetheless, despite his unhappiness, Murphy agreed to work with Arnold on the film and accept the casting. However, what Murphy didn't know was that, as part of his deal for signing on, Schwarzenegger had a say in the choice of director on Hunter.

Word got back to Arnie that Geoff Murphy had complained about him being cast in Hunter so Schwarzenegger asked for Murphy to be replaced by John McTiernan. In his memoir, Murphy said - "That is how I blew probably the biggest break I could have got in Hollywood. It was my big mouth!" There is actually another oft told story concerning why Arnold didn't want Geoff Murphy to direct Hunter. A few years before, Murphy was one of the directors interviewed about doing a proposed third Conan the Barbarian film with Schwarzenegger. During his interview Murphy had, as a joke, referred to the character as Conan the Librarian. Arnold apparently didn't think this was very funny.

Suffice to say then, Arnold didn't appear to be the biggest Geoff Murphy fan in the world. There is an alternate universe out there somewhere where Predator was directed by Geoff Murphy but we'll never know how that film might have turned out. The choice of John McTiernan to direct the film was amazingly shrewd in hindsight. At the time McTiernan had only directed one film. This was Nomads - a baffling supernatural thriller with Pierce Brosnan. Schwarzenegger said he was impressed though by the sense of atmosphere in Nomads that he knew McTiernan was the right choice to direct Hunter.

John McTiernan was more than happy to accept the job on Hunter. McTiernan took the art of direction very seriously and soon had plenty of his own ideas about what sort of film Hunter should be. Another change, besides hiring a new director, that Schwarzenegger instigated was that he didn't want the film to be him versus the alien for too much of its running time - as was proposed in the early drafts. He wanted more of a Wild Bunch/Dirty Dozen scenario. Schwarzenegger wanted to be part of an ensemble where the other actors were just as imposing and rugged as him. At some point the plan to call the film Hunter was changed and the title settled on Predator. Hunter always seemed a trifle generic as a title and Predator was much more inspired.

Carl Weathers, who was of course best known for the Rocky films, was always the first choice for Dillon. Weathers, for some reason, never became a film star in his own right - though he did make an attempt the following year when he was the lead in Action Jackson, a (as the title implies!) action film directed by Craig R. Baxley. Baxley was the second unit director on Predator. Action Jackson was not a hit and Weathers did a lot of television instead - appearing in shows like Tour of Duty and Street Justice.

Carl Weathers is brilliant in Predator and more than makes the most of the part of Dillon. Weathers is great casting because not only is he beefy enough to share the screen with Schwarzenegger he's also a terrific actor. In fact, when it comes to acting and plot, it is Weathers who does much of the heavy lifting in Predator.

The mean looking 6'4 Bill Duke, who was in Commando with Arnold, was cast as Mac. Duke was actually more of a director until Commando. He had directed on many TV shows like Dallas, Hill Street Blues, Matlock, and Cagney & Lacy. Bill Duke became good friends with Arnold on Commando and so was asked to be in Predator. Duke played a baddie in Commando and had a memorable fight with Arnie in that film. Sonny Landham, who usually played villains, was cast as the spiritual Native American soldier Billy. Landham was half Cherokee and one-eighth Seminole descent. Landham began his career in erotic films but had become a mainstream actor by now. He had supporting roles in films like The Warriors and 48 Hrs. Landham was also in the 1985 television movie The Dirty Dozen: Next Mission - which must have been good preparation to play in a military themed ensemble like Predator.

The insurance company insisted that Sonny Landham could only be hired if he was given a bodyguard. "Not to protect Sonny, but to protect other people from Sonny," said John McTiernan. Landham was a famed loose cannon away from the camera. "On the weekends when we weren't working," said Bill Duke, "we would sometimes go to these clubs. We're having a good time at this club. And then we didn't know where Sonny was, and it got us worried because sometimes you got a little drunk, whatever. And so, I forgot who it is, [someone] went, "Look over there, look over there!" Sonny is on the floor, crawling around the floor, and either he was touching or kissing women's legs. On the dance floor. I think that's when they called the security guy to be with him."

Shane Black plays Hawkins, the commando team's bespectacled radio operator. Black was a screenwriter and had recently written Lethal Weapon and The Monster Squad at the time. Black was given a supporting actor role in the film by 20th Century Fox so they would have someone at the heart of the production to keep an eye on the inexperienced director John McTiernan and the script. Black later directed the fourth film in the franchise - The Predator. Shane Black later said that he refused to do any writing on the set of Predator because he had been hired as an actor and wanted to focus on that. John Davis, the producer, said that because of Black refusing to do rewrites of the script they killed off the character of Hawkins first! Black did say though that he contributed the jokes which Hawkins tells Billy in the film.

Jesse Ventura, a former wrestler and Navy veteran, was cast as Blain. The firing speed of the M134 Minigun (Ol’ Painless) used by Jesse Ventura in Predator was reduced by the production crew because the director wanted the audience to see the barrels spin. Ol’ Painless was so heavy to pick up that the actors could only carry it for a few minutes at a time. The same year that Predator came out, Ventura was also in The Running Man with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arnold Schwarzenegger had gym equipment sent to the set of Predator in Mexico from the United States so that the actors could work out during the shoot. It became something of a competition between Arnie, Ventura, and Carl Weathers to see who could do the most gym work. Jesse Ventura said he was delighted when he learned he had bigger arms than Schwarzenegger! Ventura was still wrestling at the time and actually took a break from the Predator shoot at one point to take part in a wrestling match back in the United States.

Richard Chaves, who plays Poncho in Predator, was a real life Vietnam veteran. Chaves was often cast as police officers or military men. Shortly after Predator, Chaves was cast in the TV show The War of the Worlds - which serves as a sequel of sorts to the 1953 film. Richard Chaves plays the no nonsense military man Ironhorse in War of the Worlds. Sadly, Chaves was killed off at the start of season two and replaced by Adrian Paul. Richard Chaves was cast in Predator because the producers saw him in a play called Tracers. Chaves had just failed an audition for a small part in the John Landis comedy movie Three Amigos! when he got the part of Poncho.

The great R. G. Armstrong has a small part in Predator as as Major General Homer Philips. John McTiernan said Armstrong was a bit old for the part but he just wanted him in the film so didn't worry about this too much. The Mexican actress Elpidia Carrillo was cast as Anna, the insurgent the team reluctantly takes as a prisoner. Elpidia Carrillo had been in films like Under Fire and Salvador. Carrillo said it was quite an experience being the only woman in the cast of this macho action film!

Although they were never mentioned in the final film, the full names of the main characters in the original script Were Major Alan "Dutch" Schaefer, SSG George Dillon, Sergeant Mac Eliot, Sergeant Blain Cooper, Sergeant Billy Sole, Corporal Poncho Ramirez and Corporal Rick Hawkins. A slightly bizarre piece of Predator trivia is that two members of the cast (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jessie Ventura) went into politics and became Governors. Sonny Landham tried (and failed) to make it a hat trick when he ran in the Republican Party primary election for the post of Governor of Kentucky.

The song which plays as the team fly over the jungle in a helicopter at the start is Long Tall Sally. Long Tall Sally is a rock and roll song written by Robert "Bumps" Blackwell, Enotris Johnson, and Little Richard. It was originally performed by Little Richard and released as a single in 1956. The song has since become a classic and has been covered by various artists over the years. The song was later used in the closing credits for Predators.

Predator was shot in 1986 in Mexico. Palenque, Chiapas, and Mismaloya were used as locations. The Misol-Ha waterfall was used for the sequence where Dutch jumps in the water. Misol-Ha Waterfall lies in the Chiapas region of Mexico. The film had a $15 million budget. It was quite a troubled production - for one thing the script was still being rewritten as production began. Each morning there were new hastily written scenes. Arnold Schwarzenegger said that making the film was something of an endurance test. It was stiflingly hot during the day and then freezing cold at other times. They warmed Arnold up on the set by giving him Jagertee. Jagertee is a popular Austrian alcoholic beverage made with black tea, rum, red wine, and various spices such as cinnamon, cloves, and orange peel. Arnold said that he had to brave leech infested water on more than one occasion during the shoot.

Over the course of Predator, you can see Schwarzenegger's character Dutch start to look a bit gaunt. This is because Schwarzenegger got ill eating the local Mexican food and so stopped eating (as much as he could). He did one scene with an IV bottle in his arm. The cast and crew all lost a huge amount of weight when it dawned on them that the local food and water wasn't safe. John McTiernan lost 25 pounds shooting Predator because he refused to eat the local Mexican food. Bill Duke said that there were a lot of bugs and mosquitoes in the food - which obviously didn't do too much for anyone's appetite. After his experience on Predator, Schwarzenegger hired a personal chef for all his movies.

Predator also seemed to put Arnie off shooting movies abroad. He was supposed to make a Sgt. Rock movie (Sgt. Rock is the comic book Hawkins is reading in the Predator end credits) in the early 1990s but bailed out when he learned it was going to be shot in Southeast Europe. After his experience on Predator, Arnold decided he wanted to make his films in California so that he could go home and eat dinner with his family at night. Schwarzenegger actually took a break from shooting Predator to get married. On April 26, 1986, Schwarzenegger married Maria Shriver in Hyannis, Massachusetts. The honeymoon was only two days long because Arnold had to get back to the Predator set.

It was something of a miracle that such a memorable monster emerged in Predator in the end because the film started shooting with a completely different Predator design. Martial arts star Jean Claude Van Damme (then completely unknown) had been hired to play the Predator (the thinking was that his athleticism would make the alien appear quick and formidable) and the alien costume he was given looked like a cross between a fly, a prawn and a dog with big yellow eyes and spindly legs like stilts. Boss Film Studios, owned by Richard Edlund, designed the first alien costume. The original concept was that the alien would be fast and be able to move through trees like a monkey. The alien costume just didn't work though. The suit looked like a monster from Space 1999. It wasn't iconic or scary at all.

"We needed two different Predator suits," said assistant director Beau Marks. "One is the suit that when you can see him and one's the suit where you couldn't see him, which was a kind of a hold-out suit. It was all red so when we shot it in the jungle we could pull a matte off of it. Probably a couple weeks before we needed the Predator a box comes. And we open it up and it looks like a giant red rubber chicken. It's pretty hard to have the most deadly alien from outer space coming to hunt man and it looks like a f—ing chicken unless you're doing a comedy. The real suit came shortly thereafter and it wasn't any better. So we shot some tests with it and it became quite obvious that this was a disaster." The 'red rubber chicken' suit was later an Easter egg in Shane Black's 2018 film The Predator. You can see someone dressed in a silly red monster suit during the Halloween sequence in that film.

The first costumes were atrocious and, after shooting a couple of sequences, John McTiernan sent the costumes back to the studio and told them the film would be a laughing stock if he carried on like this. When production was shut down, Arnold Schwarzenegger stepped in and asked special effects expert Stan Winston (with whom he had become friends while making The Terminator) if he could come up with anything to save the picture. Winston was inspired by illustrations of Rasterfarian warriors he'd seen and came up with a new Predator that had dreadlocks and a steel mask and looked much more like a fearsome warrior hunter than the other design.

One of the special effects people said that Jean Claude Van Damme appeared to be labouring under the impression that he was going to have a kung fu fight with Schwarzenegger at the end of the film! John McTiernan said of Van Damme - "It was a complete screw up with his agent, trying to hustle him into a job and didn’t know what the movie was. It’s silly. It was really silly." The diminutive Van Damme (who had done nothing but complain about the heat anyway) was jettisoned and they hired the 7 foot plus Kevin Peter Hall to play the Predator instead. The helicopter pilot at the end of the film is also Kevin Peter Hall.

Hall played a Yeti in Harry and the Hendersons (a comedy with John Lithgow) around the same time as Predator. Hall suffered from the heat in the Predator suit and could also barely see in the costume. He remained friendly and patient throughout the shoot though and was a gentle giant away from the camera. Having the Predator be 7 foot tall was clearly the right approach because it meant that - just for once - even the mighty Schwarzenegger looked like he was out of his depth.

The explosive and bombastic sequence in Predator where Dutch and his commando team destroy a rebel camp in the jungle was shot by second unit director Craig Baxley. John McTiernan disliked this sequence and tried to have it removed. McTiernan felt that it didn't really fit in with the tone of the rest of the movie. McTiernan also felt it was too 'static' and didn't conform to the directorial style he had used in the rest of the film. Baxley had shot the sequence because he felt they needed some spectacular footage to placate worried studio executives (who were threatening to shut the film down because it was going over budget). It eventually stayed in the film.

The jungle base sequence, which is like something out of The A-Team (Baxley actually worked on The A-Team) but on a much bigger budget and with much more violence, didn't mesh with the stoic and serious early tone John McTiernan had established but it is an awful lot of fun all the same. Predator just wouldn't be Predator without this explosive sequence. What this sequence does too is establish the teamwork of these men and showcase their individual skills. In a weird way, though this sequence is a tonal clash with McTiernan, it works within the overall story because it makes Dutch and his team look invincible. This makes their sudden vulnerability against the Predator more effective.

The big jungle base attack sequence required 100 Mexican extras. They had to spend two weeks rigging the location with explosives. No actual jungle was destroyed shooting this sequence because it was filmed on a patch of land that had been cleared out by a fire a few years before. By the way, John McTiernan had wanted Dutch and his team to enter the jungle by performing a HALO jump out of a plane. He obviously didn't his way on this and in the film they rappel down ropes a helicopter. They had to fly in leaves to the location because the leaves on the trees started to turn orange during the shoot and the trees also began to look threadbare. John McTiernan broke his wrist falling out of a tree during the shoot so you can't say that he didn't suffer for his art!

John McTiernan said that the scene in Predators where the soldiers shoot into the jungle for a couple of minutes (in the hope of hitting the Predator) was a vague attempt at a subtext about the public fascination with guns. "What I was really doing was to quietly ridicule the desire to see pictures of guns firing. All of this is sort of a moral separate peace here, and in order to do it I set up the circumstance where there were no human beings in front of the guns. In fact the point of all the firing was, as the man says as soon as they stop shooting, ‘We hit nothing.’ The whole point was the impotence of all the guns." McTiernan said the studio were complaining to him that in his rushes there didn't seem to much footage of the guns in the film so he came up with this sequence.

There was a going to be a scene in Predator where we see the injured alien attending to its wounds on its spaceship. The construction of a spaceship interior for this scene was deemed too expensive though and replaced with a scene where the Predator patches up its wounds in a tree instead. The Predator's blood in Predator was originally supposed to be orange but they decided it was easier to make it green. Starburst magazine actually had an article during the production of Predator which predicted the film was a disaster in the making. Happily, this turned out to be completely wrong as far as crystal ball gazing went. In fact, Predator is considered to be a genuine action movie classic. Val Verde is a fictional country which was used in Joel Silver films. It also featured in Die Hard 2.

Trivia - the dead Green Beret that Dutch finds is called Jim Hopper. This was later used as the name of David Harbour's character in the popular Netflix show Stranger Things. The town in Stranger Things is called Hawkins - another Predator Easter egg. The Predator species is known as the "Yautja" in the expanded universe and other media. The iconic Predator heat vision effect was partly achieved by using an infrared camera - but digital effects and layers of camera footage also had to be used. The inspiration for the Predator vision was apparently based on how a snake sees its prey. You could say that the Predator is more or less cheating by using heat vision! It gives the alien a huge advantage because you can't hide from it - even in a jungle.

REVIEW

Predator is a fun science fiction action horror film and the picture that more or less established Arnold Schwarzenegger as a superstar. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Schwarzenegger was the biggest star in Hollywood. You think Dwayne Johnson is a big star today? Well, he is but Arnold was twice as famous as Dwayne Johnson in his day. The double whammy of Commando and Predator firmly established the Arnie screen persona and it is impossible to think of anyone else playing "Dutch" Schaefer. Stan Winston's memorable and fearsome Predator creatures are just as iconic as Arnie in the movie - which is no mean feat. Seven foot aliens with an ornate tribal appearance, dreadlocks and armoured masks who hunt humans for sport with an assortment of deadly weapons and some advanced technology at their disposal.

Predator is a product of the last great era of Hollywood action films - the eighties. A decade of bone crunching blood splattered foul mouthed blockbuster epics (Robocop, The Terminator, Die Hard, Commando) that wouldn't know what a PG-13 rating was if it skewered them with a spear and ripped their spinal column out to keep as a trophy (as the Predator is apt to do on occasion). The film begins with a canvas of stars before a spacecraft slowly appears (I always try and guess which star will turn into the spaceship and always get it wrong) and sends a small pod hurtling towards Earth to the enjoyably melodramatic strains of Alan Silvestri's stirring

Impressum

Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG

Tag der Veröffentlichung: 20.10.2023
ISBN: 978-3-7554-5791-6

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