As Predator: Badlands emerges, a look back at the 1987 original – and how it skewers the decade’s muscle-bound action archetype. NB: The following contains spoilers for Predator. Fans are a tricky bunch to please, as director Dan Trachtenberg found out in 2022. His film, Prey, successfully righted a Predator franchise that had floundered for ... Predator is a timeless takedown of 1980s machismo
As Predator: Badlands emerges, a look back at the 1987 original – and how it skewers the decade’s muscle-bound action archetype.
NB: The following contains spoilers for Predator.
Fans are a tricky bunch to please, as director Dan Trachtenberg found out in 2022. His film, Prey, successfully righted a Predator franchise that had floundered for over a decade, following the ramshackle spin-off AVP: Requiem (2009) and then Shane Black’s mystifyingly calamitous The Predator (2018).
Prey, on the other hand, confidently took the film back to basics: a 19th century setting, and the story of a Comanche tribe who encounter the universe’s deadliest hunter – this time with a rather different set of weapons. It was lean, exciting, and even beautiful in places – like The Revenant with sci-fi horror overtones.
Despite the evident care and technical ingenuity that went into it, though, Prey inevitably couldn’t satisfy everyone. Before it was even released, a subset of YouTubers and other online dwellers began to complain about the film’s protagonist, Naru, played by Amber Midthunder – that she was too small and inexperienced to take on a hulking Predator. If the monster could take out an entire platoon of muscle-bound mercenaries in the original 1987 film, what chance would she have?
Setting aside the undertones of racism and sexism that accompanied some of these complaints, the suggestion that Naru is too diminutive and weak to fight a Predator rather misses the point of the original movie.
It’s no coincidence that Predator emerged near the end of the 1980s – a decade dominated by muscle-bound heroes. The melancholic thriller First Blood (1981) was followed up by the triumphant Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985), which turned Sylvester Stallone’s protagonist from a lonely, psychologically shattered war veteran into a demi-god capable of taking on an entire army by himself.
Conan The Barbarian (1982), The Terminator (1984) and Commando (1986) gave Arnold Schwarzenegger a similarly mythic status.
Towards the end of the 1980s, however, there may have been a sense in the air that these olympian heroes needed taking down a peg or two. In 1988, Stallone made Rambo III, which despite its vast body count and expanded budget, was markedly less successful than its predecessor.
That same year, Predator director John McTiernan made his third movie, Die Hard, in which Bruce Willis played a more vulnerable, human kind of protagonist. Although still tough and handy with a gun, he didn’t constantly have the upper hand, made bleak jokes about his predicament, and felt actual pain when he trod on broken glass. The resulting hit was, relative to its budget, a huge hit.
In Predator, McTiernan takes great pleasure in putting seven outsized egos through the physical and mental wringer. The film’s premise originated as a concept for a Commando sequel, with writers Jim and John Thomas writing a spec script initially called Hunter, about an alien stalking a soldier. The concept was later taken and reworked to have the creature picking off a whole band of mercenaries, one by one, making it a kind of sci-fi slasher movie set in a Central American jungle.
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McTiernan leaned into the concept, with he and his casting director surrounding Schwarzenegger some of the buffest actors the decade had to offer: Carl Weathers, previously best known as Apollo Creed in the Rocky movies; Sonny Landham, Richard Chavez, Bill Duke (fresh off Commando), and ex-soldier turned wrestler Jesse Ventura. (The obvious contrast is Shane Black, whom McTiernan hired for the part of Hawkins so he could have a screenwriter on set. Black came up with many of his character’s lines we hear in the finished film.)
Note that McTiernan could have cast more ordinary-looking actors to play the soldiers surrounding Dutch, the mercenary played by Schwarzenegger; army types, especially back then, tended to look wiry rather than conspicuously jacked – something Adrien Brody noted himself years later when he starred in the 2010 sequel, Predators.
Instead, McTiernan – quite deliberately, I’d argue – packed his movie with comic book physiques. During the tough Mexico production, the air of competition among these alpha males was such that several of them would get up in the early hours of the morning to pump iron.
Read more: What went wrong with The Predator?
The bulging pectorals and biceps, far from an incidental detail, form part of the film’s central theme. Predator’s opening act establishes this squad of well-trained, well-fed and supremely confident soldiers; with their gigantic guns and years of experience, they manage to kill an entire camp of guerrilla fighters with relative ease (Ventura’s Blain gets a bullet to the arm which he brushes off with the now famous line, “I ain’t got time to bleed.”)
Enter the seven-foot-tall Predator (Kevin Peter Hall): an alien hunter that appears to kill its prey for sport. Capable of making itself almost invisible, its array of weapons are quieter and more lethal than the cumbersome ordnance Dutch and his team are equipped with. One by one, these tough guys are outwitted, outflanked and outclassed by this new alpha from another planet.
McTiernan is also at pains to make guns seem uncool – an attitude which ran counter to the 1980s trend of heroes brandishing ever larger assault rifles. At one point during the production, Fox executives looked at what the director had filmed so far and complained that there weren’t enough guns in it. In response, McTiernan staged the scene in which the soldiers fire round after round of bullets into the jungle, felling trees but failing to kill the Predator.
It was a moment, McTiernan later said on the film’s DVD commentary track, designed to thwart the “pornographic desire to market images of gunfire.”
“The whole point is the impotence of all the guns,” he added. “I didn’t want to advertise to little kids how wonderful guns were.”
The film is also at pains to point out the impotence of hulking muscles, too. One of the film’s most memorable images – so much so that it’s now a meme – is that of Dutch and Dillon (Carl Weathers’ character) shaking hands and performing a little mid-air arm wrestle. It’s a cool shot – one that underlines their testosterone-fuelled competitiveness.
That shot also has a contrasting moment later: the Predator fires a laser at Dillon and blows his arm clean off – right at that bicep he showed off so proudly a few scenes earlier. Even the biggest muscles can’t help you in the face of this kind of opponent.
It’s commonly said that Predator is a metaphor for the Vietnam war, and that like Aliens, it’s about a group of cocksure, well-equipped Americans (Colonial Marines in the case of Aliens) getting their backsides kicked in a bout of asymmetrical warfare: the enemy is stealthier, more cunning, and knows the terrain better than the gun-toting soldiers.
In a thought-provoking 2017 essay, No One in the Jungle, writer Noah Berlatsky takes this further, arguing that Predator is really a metaphor for America’s incursions into Central America in the mid-1980s, such as its invasion of Grenada in 1983. Unlike the Vietnam war, these campaigns were largely kept off US television screens, and so America’s presence in Central America was, in a cultural sense, essentially invisible. Viewed this way, the camouflaged Predator itself is a stand-in for US military power – a “presence that can’t acknowledge its own existence even when looking directly at itself.”
Whether you buy into that argument or not, the film is unambiguous in its attitude to military superiority. Dutch may have been tricked into doing the CIA’s dirty work – their mission was one of assassination, not rescue, he was initially told. But the fact remains that Dutch and his squad successfully wiped out an entire camp of poorly armed – and generally just poor – guerilla fighters. It’s not exactly your typical 1980s hero narrative.
The Predator’s appearance could therefore be seen as a kind of karmic justice; a bunch of bullies are taught a lesson by an even bigger, scarier bully. Tellingly, the Predator ignores Anna (Elpidia Carrillo), the sole survivor of the guerilla camp, because she’s the only one who doesn’t carry a gun. (In the story’s logic, it’s because the Predator only hunts opponents that are armed and therefore worthy; in the karmic justice reading, it could be said that Anna is innocent and doesn’t deserve to be slaughtered like the rest.)
Dutch is ultimately victorious, but only after the weapons he’s previously relied on are stripped away, and he’s forced to rely on his own cunning, trap-making skills, and maybe a bit of luck, to defeat the Predator.
Looked at this way, Prey is perfectly in keeping with the Predator tradition: the alien hunter makes short work of the (relatively) technologically-advanced French trappers roaming the land, and also the overly-confident Comanche warriors who think they’re the expert hunters. Instead, it’s Naru, whom the Predator foolishly underestimates, who defeats her enemy through cunning and skill rather than outright brawn.
The original Predator ends with Dutch and Anna in the back of a helicopter, airlifted to safety just as the mortally-wounded hunter sets off a self-destruct device. As the craft shudders from the huge blast, Alan Silvestri’s spine-tingling score kicks up one final time, and Dutch, bloodied, face ashen, stares off into the distance. It’s a rare moment of vulnerability from Schwarzenegger at this point in his career.
Here again, McTiernan uses contrasting images to tell the story. The first time we see Dutch in the film, he’s in a helicopter: clean-cut, wearing a red polo shirt, and smoking a huge cigar – the latter a possible symbol of how much money he’s made as a respected gun-for-hire.
The last time we see Dutch, he’s in a helicopter again – though this time, there’s no cigar, no confident pose, just that strange haunted expression. We could read all sorts of things into it – shock, exhaustion, but little of the triumphalism we tended to get in 80s action movies. Perhaps we could even imagine that Dutch might have learned something from this mission.
The moral of McTiernan’s film, if we were to treat it like a children’s fairytale, is that might isn’t always right. Violence is futile, and if you insist on moving through life as a bully, sooner or later a bigger bully will come and take you down.
Predator: Badlands is in cinemas now.
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