Alright now, this news is just about a zillion years old at this point, but it somehow slipped through my “action net” and I didn’t get around to posting about it till today. I hope my fan can forgive me.
Anyway, it seems that a director has been chosen to helm PREDATORS, which is the next installment of the Predator franchise. The director is Nimrod Antal and no, I haven’t heard of him either. Well according to his IMDB page, he made that horror movie VACANCY with the less talented by equally as silly looking Wilson and an upcoming movie called ARMORED about an armored truck heist that goes wrong. I guess they could do worse. The scoop is courtesy of Aint It Cool News.
I’ve heard Robert Rodriguez talk about what this movie is going to be about and I have a really bad feeling about it. First of all, it’s my understanding that the movie is going to be about a bunch of normal people who get transported to the Predator home world and are then (spoiler) hunted by Predators for sport. There will also be tension within the group and betrayals because everyone knows that the real villain can’t be the 10 foot tall alien with dreadlocks but MAN, the most evil of creatures! That just sounds like lame garbage to me. The thing that made the Predator intimidating in the original movie was the fact that he was stalking and killing trained bad-asses. Anyone can kill some chump off the street with a shoulder mounted laser cannon, but I wouldn’t mess with a creature that could take out a platoon of trained soldiers that included the likes of Arnold and Jesse “the Body.” What I’m basically saying is that normal people wouldn’t stand a chance against a predator and to watch them get killed in the alien woods sounds boring.
They’re also planning on filming this movie at Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios, so I’m expecting it to look like SIN CITY with aliens. And that’s not an entirely bad thing, I’m sure there are some five year olds that absolutely hate to see real sets and love watching actors wander around wildernesses that look like an oil painting by a meth addict, but that’s just not what I’m in too. And I’m going to say it right now, Troublemaker Studios is a terrible CG effects house, they’re stuff looks like it was made in the 90′s.
I wander around the internet enough to know what people are saying about this movie, that it will be what ALIENS was to ALIEN, and that’s just stupid. First of all, you can’t compare the original ALIEN and the first PREDATOR. They’re completely different movies in totally separate genres. The only thing they have in common is that they have space-aliens in them. ALIEN is a claustrophobic horror movie with a sci-fi backdrop; whereas PREDATOR is a classic action movie with an alien as the villain. I don’t care if they’ve been shoehorned together in shitty movies; they started in completely different places. And then ALIENS came along and took the horror concept of the original and turned it into an action movie because James Cameron realized that the aliens wouldn’t really be scary anymore because we all know what they look like and what they do…the fear of the unknown was gone. So there can’t be an ALIENSesque sequel to PREDATOR because that is what PREDATOR is. It’s like they skipped the Ridley Scott step. And you can’t go the other way and make a straight claustrophobic horror movie with the Predator either, because we all know what he looks like so there is no unknown element to him, no scares to be had. You could turn him into a slasher like villain like Jason or Mike Myers, but that wouldn’t be scary, it would just be a stupid gore fest. Just because both movies have aliens, doesn’t mean the two franchises are anything alike and they should be treated as completely different animals.
