When Hollywood Did It Right: PREDATOR

Because I am an American exceptionalist, there is no doubt in my mind that the world was a better place when Hollywood stood atop it as planet Earth’s greatest soft power weapon, boldly broadcasting a powerful American culture to the World and daring them to beat us at our own game.

America has weakened considerably in the years since Hollywood’s heyday, as our once unstoppable movie business has slowly allowed itself to be replaced by other more insidious and socially destructive diversions. Creepy diversions… like Chinese-owned Tik Tok, a corrosive brain worm weapon which transmits a curated sampling of the worst of humanity directly into the cerebral cortexes of American children in small highly-addictive doses.

Well, I believe it’s high time Hollywood reasserted itself as a positive cultural force and got back into the fight on the side of Western Culture, before it’s too late… if it isn’t already.

It’s a big job, there’s no doubt about that. But there’s an old saying that the ocean is made up of a lot of drops. In that spirit, here at the Continental Congress, I am launching a new series of essays to remind Hollywood of when and how and why they did it right, in hopes that we may be able to lead executives, producers and creatives along a trail of breadcrumbs back to a time when Hollywood understood in its bones how to consistently make movies that Americans were excited to see, and where it did so forcefully, relentlessly and without apology.

First up…

EPISODE ONE: PREDATOR

PREDATOR was released in theaters on June 12, 1987 and was very much a movie of its time. In 1987 the WWF (as we used to call the World Wrestling Federation back in the days before the World Wildlife Fund started getting uppity) was near the end of a golden era of professional wrestling that featured legendary names like Hulk Hogan, Rowdy Roddy Piper and Andre the Giant, and which brought us cathartic Cold War battles between Hacksaw Jim Duggan and his weaponized 2x4 against the likes of the Iron Sheik and Nikolai Volkov.

Back in those days, America itself felt a little bit like the World Wrestling Federation writ large… it was big and it was loud and it involved a lot of questionable outfits, oiled muscles and crazy hair. More importantly, it felt like the America of the 1980’s could do just about anything it put its collective mind to… and in PREDATOR, Arnold and his special forces unit reflect that same invincible American glow right back at us.

The opening sequence of PREDATOR plays very much like the wind-up to one of those classic WWF matches. As Dutch and his team climb out of their helicopter and onto the beach of some nameless central American beach, we are gifted with one of the most iconic character introductions in action movie history… Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his team doing their own version of a classic “walk-in” right out of Monday Night Raw.

Dutch has his signature cigar, aviators and cowboy boots… Billy sports a Eurotrash track suit and a Native American swagger… Blain’s cowboy hat, thick pack of chaw and raw male energy… Mac, stoic in his ill-fitting business suit… Pancho with his custom-built grenade launcher of a species that never actually existed… Hawkins’ coke bottle glasses, comic books and ubiquitous gross out sex jokes.

Like they’re setting you up for the world’s most insane “King of the Ring” cage match.

Later we’ll learn that they even have a walk-in song… Little Richards’ “Long Tall Sally.”

One thing is immediately clear as they climb off that helicopter onto that anonymous beach… these are the baddest motherfuckers in the valley.

It’s a great introduction from a pure character development perspective, but that’s not all it is… it’s also a hell of a lot of fun. This WWF style introduction lets the audience know right up front, that they’re about to have a rip-roaring good time. Fun was the hallmark of the great 80’s blockbusters… which of course, was much easier to do back when Hollywood’s first instinct was never to apologize for American excess. One of the many, many lessons Hollywood could stand to learn from this current box office downturn is that audiences miss the fun they used to have when they went out to the movies on a Friday night.

Look… I like the JOHN WICK movies, I really do. The action sequences are exquisite, reminiscent of John Woo’s best work from his Hong Kong days… but are the Wick movies fun?

John Wick’s missions always feel a little bit like work to me… work done in a highly satisfying way to be sure, but still, it sometimes feels a little grim… like watching someone do a distasteful job that must nevertheless be done… scouring the toilet maybe. And I’m not sure I’d want to grab a beer with John Wick after one of his revenge missions, I’d rather he take some time for himself and maybe spend it doing self-care with his therapist. Seems like he really needs it.

Dutch and his crew, on the other hand… well, they seem like the kind of guys you’d want to spend a weekend in Vegas with.

***

Let’s talk a little about PREDATOR’s structure, because that too is pure 80’s.

In a world where Streaming services are taking tight two hour movies like FATAL ATTRACTION and turning them into bloated eight hour affairs designed to keep you planted in front of your “device” for as long as possible, PREDATOR remains a marvel of efficient story telling.

By the time Dutch’s unit goes boots dry in the war zone and the helicopter buzzes away leaving them alone to begin their mission, a mere eleven minutes of screentime has elasped. That seems incredible here in the era of the unecessary eight hour mini-series where audiences understand going in that several of the episodes are going to feel like pointless padding.

PREDATOR, on the other hand, wastes no time getting right into the action.

The core mission of the movie happens very fast, as such things did back in the 80’s. Dutch and his men are sent deep into enemy territory on a Search and Rescue mission to bring back a squad of Americans being held captive by rebels in a jungle prison camp. Despite being seriously outmanned and outgunned they take out the entire heavily armed camp in just under 4 minutes (yes, I timed it)… and the only injury suffered by the team is a scratch for which Blain has no time to bleed.

Movie snobs will tell you that PREDATOR is nothing but mindless entertainment, but the destruction of the rebel encampment is evidence that they’re wrong. There is much more going on here than meets the eye. The destruction of the enemy base is great 80’s action filmmaking, for sure, but it’s also a clever bit of storytelling on the part of director John McTiernan, and it serves a secondary purpose beyond simple entertainment.

The art of great filmmaking has been distilled down over the years into innumerable bits of advice, all of which fall into a loose set of rules that must, generally speaking, be followed if your movie is to be successful. One of the most important rules is “show don’t tell”, and that is one of the things McTiernan is doing with this first action sequence. He’s showing you how good Dutch and his team are, rather than simply telling you.

By the end of that four minute sequence, we know that these guys are hyper competent and extremely lethal… the best at what they do. For McTiernan’s purposes, and for that of the story, they have to be. Their expertise is critical to the success of the movie. If Dutch’s team were not ruthless and expertly dangerous, damned near unstoppable, then the Predator’s ability to kill them quickly and efficiently would not be startling to the audience.

And indeed, when the Predator begins to pick off Dutch’s men one-by-one, often as if he’s doing nothing more strenuous than flicking an ant off his boot, we immediately think to ourselves “holy crap, this must be the most lethal creature in the galaxy. There’s no way Arnold is going to survive this.”

And that turns out to be almost true…

Almost.

McTiernan understood that he needed to isolate his lead character, place him beyond assistance, and then put that character in mortal jeopardy in order for us to engage with the story… in order for us to feel something. He’s building the movie’s stakes here, and he’s drawing the audience out to the edge of their seats. If you are a fan of John McClane’s outgunned barefoot adventures in Nakatomi Plaza, then you know how good McTiernan was at doing this sort of thing.

***

One of the other things that really sets PREDATOR apart from most modern action movies is that it knew exactly who its audience was, and it never apologized for it.

Years ago an executive at a Box Office tracking firm, meaning a company that surveys moviegoers about their preferences in order to predict the box office results for specific movies, told me something that has stuck with me. He said “If you don’t know who you’re making your movie for, you’re making it for no one.”

PREDATOR is a movie made for men, specifically young men… and you know what? That’s OK.

This is not to say that women can’t or don’t enjoy PREDATOR. But it does mean that PREDATOR was made to appeal primarily to men of a certain age. If you’d asked the marketing execs who worked on PREDATOR at the time they would have told you that if women wound up enjoying the movie too, well then great, but that from a marketing perspective they understood clearly who their primary audience was. Furthermore, they knew that in order for the movie to be a box office success, they had to make sure that this primary audience of young men showed up to the theater in force. And the legendary filmmaking combination of director McTiernan, producer Joel Silver and Arnold gave their audience plenty of red meat to ensure that they did.

There is no doubt that it has become much more difficult to make relatively inexpensive “one quadrant” movies like PREDATOR in an era where the corporatized major studios only seem interested in movies that can generate a billion dollars in box office (and eight or ten sequels). But the problem is that those billion dollar franchises aren’t working the way they used to. Box office is down across the board, and the big titles like Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Pixar and those from Marvel and DC are suffering badly. There are all kinds of reasons why, but I believe that one of the biggest reasons is that Hollywood has spent the last two decades trying to reinvent not just the wheel, but human nature altogether. Somewhere along the way, Hollywood decided that rough male talk is bad, that masculinity is toxic and that part of making ours a better world includes taking those things that appeal primarily to aggressive young men out of the movies they like and replacing them with “better”, woker things.

For instance…

I love how the men of Dutch’s platoon ruthlessly dunk on each other in that way only very close friends can do. Watch the scene on the helicopter as they’re being inserted into the LZ. I hate to break this to all of you non-men, but this is how young men, particularly agressive Alpha Males, behave around one another when they are alone in an exclusively male “safe space”… in the parlance of our times. If you were in the target audience for PREDATOR, which is to say a young man who grew up in the years before the turn of the millenium, then it’s likely that you found this scene endearing because it’s exactly what you did with your guy friends when you hung out together.

But this kind of male behavior has been branded toxic by the broader culture and it has mostly disappeared from the action genre. Men, it has been decided, cannot be allowed to see other men behaving this way because if they do, well then they might want to emmulate it, and we have determined as a culture that this kind of aggressive male behavior must be stamped out.

Of course, this behavioral morality sensor only ever seems to point in one direction. A scene where guys ruthlessly dunk on each other and which includes salty officially unapproved language like “faggot” and “pussy” would be branded toxic and unacceptable today… but women engaging in what is clearly unhealthy or even self-destructive social behavior in shows like SEX AND THE CITY, GIRLS, THE IDOL or EUPHORIA are more likely to be labeled “empowering” or described by critics as “a gritty depiction of the realities of modern dating.”

…Anything but “toxic”… that label, it seems, is one our culture has reserved exclusively for describing male behavior.

Girls are allowed to be girls in any way that they want… but boys are allowed to be boys only within tightly scripted cultural parameters. It seems to me that if Hollywood is serious about getting audiences back into theaters, one way to do that might be to let boys be boys again.

***

Oh and by the way… speaking of the culture… PREDATOR is also a wildly diverse movie.

Almost 30 years before the #OscarsSoWhite movement made the utterly preposterous insinuation that the world’s most progressive industry was actively blocking artists of color from Oscar nominations because of the color of their skin, John McTiernan gave us a Special Ops unit that included two black men, a native American, and a latino, all under the command of the most famous (legal) immigrant in the Universe… though it must be noted for the record, that Arnold was an immigrant who always seemed to love his adopted country more than most of us who were actually born here.

And of the two white male actors who are in the cast, one of them, Jesse Ventura, is in a BFF relationship with Bill Duke that is so frank in its intensity that… well let’s just say I won’t ask and they don’t have to tell.

In the spirit of MLK’s “content of their character” aspiration, neither man seems to give a rip what color skin the other man has, as long as they get the job done, cover each other’s six and always come out of the mission together and alive… which is the way it ought to be.

Whatever else Blain and Mac may be, they are definitely not racists.

***

No discussion of PREDATOR can ever be complete without talking about its tone.

Action movies of the 80’s, movies like PREDATOR, DIE HARD, and LETHAL WEAPON were brilliant at mixing fun and spectacle with deadly serious stakes. Audiences love to watch heroes whom they admire and who make them smile, but Hollywood has forgotten that audiences want to worry about their heroes, too.

That’s why we call them “thrillers.”

Modern action movies either take themselves way too seriously and slip into grim dreariness, like JOHN WICK or EXTRACTION, or they condescend to their audiences by getting so silly that they descend into full-on camp. Movies like the FAST AND FURIOUS series, BULLET TRAIN, and (judging solely by the trailer) THE FALL GUY, are less thrilling than they should be because the filmmakers spend so much time winking at the audience, and filling their characters’ mouths with snark that it begins to seem like they’re embarrassed and want to make sure you understand that they’re not taking any of this seriously.

I have never once worried about Vin Diesel in any of the most recent FAST AND FURIOUS movies… ditto Brad Pitt in BULLET TRAIN… why would I? The filmmakers didn’t bother to make me feel like I should. Certainly they never made me feel like either man was ever in any real existential danger.

PREDATOR, on the other hand, is an entirely different animal from the mostly meaningless, cotton candy, forget about it five minutes after it’s over, action movies of the 21st century. Once Dutch’s soldiers start dying, the movie drops any pretense of humor and gets deadly serious. The campy one-liners like “stick around” are jetiisoned for something more like gritty 70’s genre filmmaking.

Some of the later sequences, like Anna telling the story of the “demon who makes trophies out of men”, or Billy telling his compadres that he’s scared… that “there’s something out there and it ain’t no man”, or Mac recalling how “those eyes disappeared” and how he capped off two hundred rounds and “nothing on this earth coulda lived… not at that range”… these scenes almost play like horror movie sequences. They are genuinely, quietly unnerving.

We believe these guys are in mortal peril. And that’s critical to the success of the movie. Without it, how could we expect an audience to care about what happens to them?

I think this is one of the reasons why Tom Cruise’s movies (from MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE to MAVERICK to EDGE OF TOMORROW) continue to have enormous success here in the 21st century… just like PREDATOR, Tom Cruise still has the courage to take himself seriously.

***

Finally… lazy movie critics will tell you with a dismissive wave of the hand that 80’s action movies are all the same. But they’re wrong about that, too. There was a reason the movie star lineups of the 80’s needed Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Mel Gibson AND Bruce Willis… and that reason wasn’t just movie star scheduling.

All four men became known for playing distinctive 80’s action hero archetypes.

Stallone’s John Rambo was a reluctant hero, the stoic lone wolf. He was a man of few words and superhuman endurance who took on America’s most dangerous real world geopolitical foes across the World in grounded, if ridiculous, action extravaganzas.

Bruce Willis’ most famous character, John McClane, was the American Everyman. He wasn’t superhuman and he wasn’t invincible. Always the right man in the wrong place at the right time, he was a better talker than a fighter, and his muscles weren’t even really that big. McClane got hurt a lot, he bled, his personal life was a Jerry Springer mess and often he had to fail over and over again before he could finally win.

Mel Gibson’s "Martin Riggs”, much like Max Max before him and William Wallace after, was the sensitive broken man with a history of personal tragedy. He was a little crazy, a taker of unnecessary risks and a man seemingly always on the knife’s edge of suicide. Men wanted to approach everything in their lives with Rigg’s same level of passionate intensity, and women wanted to fix him.

Arnold’s Dutch, on the other hand, is neither John McClane, Martin Riggs, nor Rambo… he’s not the reluctant hero who does what he must because no one else can. Nor is he the fallible every man. And the last thing in the world Dutch needs is to be “fixed.”

Dutch is the best at what he does and he knows it. Unlike the comparatively dour John Wick, there is no room in Dutch’s psyche for doubt or self-reflection.

Like many of the characters Arnold played, Dutch is a man who wants to test his skills against the best the universe’s bad guys have to offer. Arnold spent his entire career playing men like Dutch… Men who didn’t shrink from action… but sought it out.

Men who luxuriated in it.

Dutch never sneaks into the building where the terrorists are holding their hostages…rather, he blows everything up, walks right in through the shattered front door and then says something cool right before he shoots everyone in the face.

And he never, ever, apologizes.

At the end of the movie, Arnold… DUTCH… stands alone, the Predator has been soundly whipped thanks, in the end, to good old-fashioned American ingenuity. Dutch’s hands are on his hips, he’s covered in mud and blood and sweat, oblivious to the noxious cloud of post-nuclear smoke and ash and dust swirling around him.

He is, to put it bluntly, the most iconic image ever to come out of the 80’s action movie genre.

This is DUTCH

This is PREDATOR

And this used to be America.

It can be again.

READER NOTE: I’d like for “When Hollywood Did It Right” to become a regular feature here at The Continetial Congress… and I already have some ideas for future episodes on deck, including THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER and BACK TO THE FUTURE. What are some other films you’d like to see analyzed this way? Let me know in the comments, and maybe your favorite movie will appear in a future essay.