Predators (2010)
Directed by Nimród Antal
Predators, the latest entry in the saga started by John McTiernan’s Predator in 1987 is clearly the result of the collaboration between its producer, Robert Rodriguez, and its director, Nimród Antal. Started as Rodriguez’s project 15 years ago, Predator owes him the main story and a great deal of the characters; but, for those who have seen Antal’s earlier films, Antal’s involvement is quite noticeable. Both Rodriguez and Antal made mostly genre films, and it’s easy to see why Rodriguez hired Antal in the first place: they both seem to share intuitively the craft of adapting B-movies to 21st century sensibilities. One can tell, though, that Nimród Antal has a more precise style, almost lacking spontaneity, in a manner that we could associate with some of Rodriguez’s earlier efforts. Take, for example, Antal’s horror flick Vacancy, his second feature film and the first made for English-speaking audiences, and compare it to Rodriguez’s The Faculty. Both these films aren’t that new in their respective genres, to be frank; they are more like an homage to the slasher film and the sci-fi horror film. Nevertheless, both these films are as close as you can get to being honest with the viewer, precisely because both these directors know how to balance the initial, improbable premise (in a certain motel, the guests are being brutally murdered on tape; the inhabitants of a quiet, small town are presumably possessed by strange creatures coming from outer space) with a handful of commonplace and banal facts, that make it all seem real and plausible. It’s little wonder, after all, that Predators has in its best parts such a credible atmosphere, despite its subject.
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Nevertheless, in spite of their resemblances, Antal’s and Rodriguez’s styles have evolved differently in time. Rodriguez has been making for the last past years pastiches of action films, when he hasn’t been making straight comedies. Antal, on the other hand, seems to belong to that imaginary club of directors who sincerely admire the techniques used by Hollywood filmmakers for the last decades. This is why it’s easy to imagine how the mordant auteur of Sin City, Planet Terrori or the still-to-be-released Machete needed a “serious” director, someone who would take cinema seriously even while making B-movies, to boost some energy into the Predator franchise. But we can imagine Rodriguez wanted more than credibility; by choosing Antal, Rodriguez was eventually pointing towards the very style of his first films, which shared an underlying sense of balance. Concerning Predators, Rodriguez made it quite clear that it’s not going to be a parody of the original film, but more like a sequel. Since critics in the past haven’t lost a chance to label the original Predator as campy, is sure sounded like a difficult mission for Antal. As if it wasn’t enough already, Rodriguez sketched the characters of his project as if they were characters of a video game: literally falling from the sky into an unknown jungle, they were brought misteriouly from all over the globe and were separately armed with different kind of weapons. Luckily, the first part of the film uses the fact that they don’t know each other, making them meet gradually as the story unfolds. What can be nevertheless considered as a weakness of the script (penned, alongside Rodriguez, by Michael Finch and Alex Litvak) is that the scriptwriters use initially a trick that we’ve seen a lot during the nineties and even more in the last decade: the characters imprisoned in an unknown facility by an unknown mastermind, having to figure out how they got there in order to escape (by the way, does anybody still remembers Pandorum, one of last summer blockbusters, failing to carry on attractively after the mystery was solved?). But it seems that Antal understood the risks of the concept, and this is why the first half of Predators is actually based on clues that the characters discover everywhere, in order to understand what’s going on with them. The director and the cinematographer do a great job in that aspect, following closely the consecutive discoveries and the growing panic that accompanies each of the findings. In more than one occasion, Antal chooses to show first the panicked looks, just a moment before pointing the camera at the thing the eight characters discovered. This is why Predators seems, at least in its first half, suspenseful and easy to follow. It might not matter, in these first 50 minutes, that the scriptwriters naively ignore the characters’ basic needs (none of them seem to need anything else but fight with the enemy), and you might ignore that Adrien Brody and Alice Braga aren’t exactly the match for a Predator film, since Predators seems interesting, thanks to Antal, even if we already know the answer to the characters’ most ardent question.
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The second half of Predators disappoints because you can feel that Antal wants to please the ticket buyers who want to see re-enacted the 1987 final scene. It’s only a matter of minutes until the script becomes an amalgam of brutality, gore and badass lines – as a matter of fact, the lesser the number of survivors, the more emphatic the lines become. From the moment the script begins to quote Hemingway in order to mirror the battle between the species, you can see how the film is going to become a total mess. True, Antal tries to organize the events of the last minutes; furthermore, he tries to impose a certain tempo, by slowing the rhythm of the film with a scene that seems stolen straight from Kill Bill and that you can watch separately from the whole, but generally there’s enough bloodshed and special effects to get you worried: is the director taking his job too seriously? Luckily, an open ending and the ultra-ironical „Long Tall Sally” used for the credits as a nod to the original Predator keep the film away from incongruousness; at least, until the sequel.
