THE PREDATOR
Technical quality for this UHD Blu-ray is good, but the latest Predator reboot falls through its many plot-holes, reckons Stephen Dawson.
The Predator is another attempt to reinvigorate a semi-defunct movie franchise. The first Predator movie was a strange beast. It started as a military mission in the jungle and turned into an encounter with a poorly explained alien creature. Said creature liked to hang people upside down, typically stripped of their skin. It provided a chance for Arnold Schwarzenegger to flex his muscles and deliver one-liners and was very much a movie of its time (1987). There were two sequels, and two franchise expansions into Alien vs Predator.
And now, another attempt. Attaching Shane Black to the project as writer/director seemed like a surefire winner. The Lethal Weapon/ Last Action Hero/Long Kiss Goodnight/ Kiss Kiss Bang Bang/Iron Man 3 writer (and director of a couple of them) had also acted in the original. Fun fact: according to a featurette on ‘The Predator’, Black had been enough of a pain during production of the first movie that they made sure he was first to be killed by the Predator.
So what we have with this new version, which is entitled The Predator, is a high concept action movie that does not come off in that way at all.
If I’m reading it right, Shane Black seems to have tried to bring the style of 1980s’ sci-fi actioners into the modern era while retaining their essence. This movie is a sequel to the first three, and the plot acknowledges that Predators had been visiting our planet for some decades. This time a Predator is found, and accidentally defeated, by soldier Boyd Holbrook. For his troubles, the US Government attempts to put him out of circulation by committing him to a unit with military psych patients. Meanwhile evolutionary biologist Olivia Munn is picked up by the government and whisked to a secret facility where the sedated Predator is being examined. Of course, the Predator wakes up, kills a bunch of people and escapes.
The secret facility, which is deep underground next to a giant dam, happens to be very close to the town where the wife of the abducted soldier and his autistic son live. Oh, his group of interesting new friends are also nearby, coincidentally. And he had mailed some important alien artefacts to his family, as you do. Artefacts that the Predator wants to retrieve.
Getting the idea that plotting isn’t the strong point in this movie? Well there’s more... it turns out that there’s another Predator coming who wants to catch the first one, because it’s a traitor, and is really trying to help humanity. Which you can tell, somehow, despite it spending most of the movie killing almost everyone it comes across.
The Predator makes use of modern CGI for some visually convincing scenes, but retains the 1980s sensibility in (lack of) plot, off-colour jokes about women and the mentally ill, and some plainly ludicrous character work. It’s a weird mix of smart’n’clever and astonishingly dumb. The dumb bits are plainly irritating. To demonstrate how smart the main female
protagonist is, Jake Busey’s character greets her with, “Wow, I heard that you basically wrote the book on evolutionary biology”. Actually, it was Charles Darwin that wrote that particular book. The discipline became established under that name in the couple of decades before World War II, led by the likes of J.S. Haldane and Ronald Fisher.
Busey is only there as fan service (assuming there are fans). His father Gary played a similar role in Predator 2.
And then, before Munn gets to use any of her amazing learning in the field, the action section of the movie takes over, and she turns into an action hero, wielding a gun as well as any of the soldiers, chasing the Predator with intent to kill.
But there are some very smart and clever lines, and Holbrook does a creditable job of re-creating the wisecracking 1980s hero.
Sound and image
Parts of this movie constitute an aural treat. The Ultra-HD version comes with a Dolby Atmos soundtrack. The regular Blu-ray comes with DTS-HD Master Audio. I confess, these days I have whatever AV receiver I’m using convert regular 5.1 or 7.1 sound to either Dolby Surround or DTS Neural:X so as to make use of the ceiling speakers. In both cases, may I commend to viewer’s attention the early scenes. These are set in the jungle, and fully encompass the listener with its sounds in a delightful way.
The action stuff is effective, but unremarkable. It’s like a hundred other action scenes. The sound does the job.
There was a strange bit of behaviour from the Ultra-HD disc. I usually examine the audio and subtitle options by checking out the main disc menu and cycling through the options using the Audio and Subtitle keys on my remote control. Every Ultra-HD disc I’ve checked so far lets you navigate through audio and subtitle using your remote’s keys. But not this one. It seems that this disc is re-introducing those irritating User Operation Prohibitions that were so often the bane of efficient DVD use.
The picture is presented in BT.2020 colour space with standard HDR encoding. It’s smooth, rich and generally unimpeachable.
There are no extras on the Ultra-HD version apart from the inclusion of a bookmarking facility.The bookmarks persist, assuming your player has persistent storage.
There are deleted scenes on the Blu-ray disc, along with some self-congratulatory featurettes. More useful is a nine-minute precis of the previous three Predator movies, so you can get up to speed if you haven’t seen them, or otherwise need reminding.