5 REASONS why PREDATOR is the MANLIEST movie of all time
A masterpiece of action cinema starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, the manliest movie of all time, this is one of the big three famous films of John McTiernan, who, in addition to Predator (1987), was responsible for such classics as Die Hard (1988) (see 8 reasons why EVERYONE loves DIE HARD) and Hunt for Red October (1990). In the 1990s, his career caught a downward spiral (Last Action Hero, The Thirteenth Warrior), the director finally painfully took a pratfall on Rollerball, and in 2013 he ended up behind bars for making false statements to an FBI agent. So much for the director, who, despite his plunging career, deserves great respect and remembrance from cinema goers for his mega hat-trick from 1987-1990.
REASON 4: Iconic quotes
What would an iconic film be without coarse lyrics? And since Arnold is a master of one-liners, so also in Predator we can hear a few gems (not only from his mouth). In the first place of the one-liner podium is, without question, Arnold’s own favorite line, Get to the chopper! (with a strong accent on the chopper), further places are occupied by the blain golden thought, namely I don’t have time to bleed, and again Arnold’s: If it bleeds, we can kill it.
It is impossible to forget, although throughout my childhood I tried, Hawkins’ bawdy jokes (Shane Black scored perhaps the rudest film debut in the history of cinema), which it is all too inappropriate to quote here. All I will say is that when I watched the film for the first time at the age of about eleven, I didn’t understand Hawkins’ joke, because at that time I didn’t yet know what an echo was…. Nevermind. Predator slaughtered Hawkins first, by ripping open his carotid artery, which he symbolically did in front of a woman. As you can see, even the space hunter, who has eaten bread from more than one planet and heard more than one thing, was fed up with the embarrassing excursions of the later director of Iron Man 3 towards the opposite sex. It’s also hard to forget the existential nature of Arnold’s question diplomatically addressed to a visitor from an alien planet: What the hell are you? to which the alien inelegantly answered with a question for a question. And finally, an amusing (though not for the door opener) Knock knock, and Stick around directed to a certain nailed down (and I don’t mean sad) partisan. And really, at the end, the absolute highlight of the number, an unforgettable interplanetary compliment: You’re one ugly motherfucker.
REASON 5: The Monster
And last but not least, that is, created by Stan Winston’s team, a superhumanly strong and fit alien, weighing a bagatelle 150 to 180 kg with full armament – at least that’s what the internet claims. A representative of the Yautja race, supposedly inhabiting the eastern part of the Milky Way, he can see enemies in infrared (though to his detriment, not in the mud), and has camouflage to ensure his invisibility. When he does speak, he speaks in the voice of Peter Cullen (of Optimus Prime fame), turns hunted people into trophies, hangs their dead bodies up evenly like laundry, and mounts their skulls on a wall in his living room. Well, maybe not exactly like that, but skinning animals hunted in the woods, and the humans in his thermal vision do as such, is nothing more than a cruel paraphrase of human, or rather hunting habits found on our planet. The Predator, whom we can see in his full glory on the screen for only eight minutes, is a versatile, strong and perfectly armed killer. His only weakness, as Arnold has already mentioned, seems to be only that he is as ugly as night, although it’s not his fault after all.
Such an alien, supposedly considered a perfect organism, was good only in close quarters, possibly at half distance, while a predator in the snout could give and from close range, and from a distance the head could be blown off with one shot from his cannon. And he wasn’t in the habit of missing, after all, three dots of a laser sight is a lot to ask, and if he missed with such a triple sight, he would have made quite a fuss about the neighborhood. And imagine if the Predator had a cat, what fun he would have chasing three dots…. The Predator, unlike the Alien, who flails his paws and snaps his jaws blindly, is guided by a code of honor, including not shooting at the unarmed, and when it is necessary to fight in bare fists with an opponent who has earned it with heroism, the Predator gives up his arsenal and fights hand-to-hand. However, while the bleeding green bastard is capable of fair play during a duel, when he gets a solid beating from Dutch, instead of simply dying, he blows himself up in a not very honorable way. In the cloud of dust after the big explosion, the unanswered question still floats – Who the hell are you…. to which the subsequent films will, quite unnecessarily, attempt to answer.
Rafał Donica