Predator (R)
20th Century Studios; AFI Catalog; IMDb; Rotten Tomatoes; TV Tropes; Wikipedia; Xenopedia
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This came out in 1987, and I feel like I might have seen just a bit of it at some point in the late 80s or early 90s, but I doubt I saw the whole thing. Or it could be that I never saw any of it until I watched it in 2024. I never really had much interest in it, but I finally decided I might as well give it a chance. (This was a couple of years after Prey came out, and I liked that more than I did this. But liking that probably contributed to my wanting to check out the original movie.) This is mostly an action movie, but it also barely qualifies as science fiction. I didn't care especially much for the latter aspect of the story, but the action was pretty good. Not really my kind of movie, and overall I thought it was just kind of okay. But I will probably check out the second movie at some point, and then decide whether I want to continue with the whole franchise.

So, this CIA guy named Dillon (Carl Weathers) recommends his old war buddy Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and his rescue team to enter a South American jungle to extract a couple of hostages held by a group of guerrillas. Along the way they find a group of dead, skinned Green Berets hanging from some trees. (I think there were a few others on that team that were never accounted for, unless I missed something.) Eventually Dutch's team, along with Dillon, reach the guerrillas' camp and attack, but they're unable to rescue the hostages. And Dutch learns that Dillon had a different reason for the mission, which I didn't completely follow, but Dutch was upset about it, anyway. Dillon takes the last surviving guerrilla, a woman named Anna, as a hostage, and they all begin making their way to an extraction point.

Meanwhile, they're being tracked by an alien hunter, and we see them from its point of view, in infrared. They don't know they're being hunted, because the alien has a cloaking device of some sort. It also has laser guns, or whatever. Eventually they do figure out that they're being tracked by this thing, and do their best to fight back, setting traps and shooting up the jungle and whatnot. But they're no match for the alien (which is even bigger and stronger than Dutch, and that's saying something). And... I don't know what else to say. I don't want to spoil how it ends.

The movie has some iconic lines, I guess, and an iconic image of a handshake/arm wrestling between Dutch and Dillon (which later became the basis for any number of memes). I can't say I cared all that much about any of the characters, so really the only thing the movie has going for it is the action scenes, which are pretty intense. And I guess the predator itself is a fairly cool concept, even if it doesn't really qualify as a character, per se. (It has practically zero personality beyond being an alien hunter.) So, I dunno... I guess I'm glad I finally watched the movie. I can't really say I was disappointed by it. In fact, it was probably better than I expected it to be. But again, it's not really my kind of movie. I can definitely understand other people liking it a lot more than I did.