It recently ended up on Netflix and I decided to watch it for the first time.
It was very much an early film in the “3D is back, baybee!” wave that has yet to subside.
That summer my friend’s argument for seeing it was literally “when will we get another chance to see a 3D movie in a theater?”
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complex opinion involving robert rodriguez incoming:
none of the Predator movies since the first one have been good enough to justify making a sequel, but both Predators and The Predator are still underrated (a little)
edit: Wait Rodriguez didn’t direct Predators, he only produced it? What the fuck
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how fucking dare you mistake the indelible work of Nimrod Antal for any other filmmaker
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also he didn’t write the final script, but it’s based on a script fox commissioned from Rodriguez in the early 90’s
maybe he gets a Story By credit?
no way it would be very easy to look this up on the internet
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There is some glorious Commando-style action-movie shlock in The Predator that I loved. Also felt like the tone was exactly right. Good goofy gore gags.
Like Predators, though, it does indeed suck overall. I think the problem with a lot of these is that they don’t know what they’re trying to accomplish - is it going to be a serious sci-fi horror movie, or is it going to be goofy action shlock? You gotta pick one.
the only good part in The Predator is when Traitor Predator kills all those guys in the back of a truck and then uses one of their disembodied arms to give a thumbs up to an idiot
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I’m not sure what happened when they were storyboarding and writing mission impossible fallout where everything after the title crawl and before the bathroom fight (like the second 15 minutes of the movie, with Alec Baldwin and the casual reference to waterboarding and the dumb halo jump) is the most obvious exposition and manufactured conflict and the rest of the movie is largely great
it’s like they felt compelled to deliver a bad intro on top of the good one
What
Are you telling me you don’t like Neufenstein
they simultaneously telegraph “actually the bad guy” and “brash and unprofessional” at the same time and it’s like… what? it’s jarring
the one part of bond movies they haven’t topped is the bit when he’d be talking to Judy Dench and Desmond Llewellyn
This was bugging me until I decided there should be a pulp exception. Within the tone of your world cackling evil might fit without teaching lessons about the real world (but that’s not right, Wolfenstein 2 is great at illustrating its diverse family and revealing the human venality under its super-generals). But the middlebrow and attempting highbrow world sends signals that this is supposed to be taken seriously, is supposed to be real, and villainy is still allowed to be spotlighted and different from us, and that’s a lot more dangerous. And the modern urge towards gritty and real in our fantasy has reduced the tone signifiers between pulp and highfalutin’ and really scrambled where the truths are inside the art.
Like a lot of culture we don’t have a clear transition point where we discard the childish notions of bad guys and these days we take up swearing and cursing and deep-shadowed color grading and call it good
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Sometimes Tom Cruise doing 9 billion actual HALO jumps to make a fucking movie is its own reward, felix.
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robert rodriguez did it, he created live action moe
Yeah like I wasn’t thinking about character nuances while that was happening. My jaw was on the floor.
It helps that I didn’t know about it going in. And it was in the theater
jencon is ethereal
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I did used to get annoyed with new wolfensteins because I didn’t want cartoon nazis with magic and robot zombies I wanted to kill real nazis as graphically as possible, in vr. what else is increasingly uncomfortable realism in murder simulators for if not that
Nuwolf is interested in the humanity of its heroes in a way most pulp isn’t and that’s about the only way it gets away with it.
The concentration camp in the first one not having bad enough conditions remains very close to being enough for me to write the series off
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I think my favorite part of the movie is the idea of Jencon and Christoph Walz having a kid together
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