"You are one ugly mother fu-"

When I was younger, like elementary school aged, one of my favorite movies was Predator. My friend who lived down the street and I loved this damn movie so much in fact that we would watch it at least once a week. I'd ride my bike over to his place and we'd pop in a crappy VHS home recording of the movie that he had taped from TNT. Naturally, being a cable network, it wasn't quite the same film that I now own on dvd. Carl Weather's death in particular is quite a bit less graphic in the version for daytime television. And I have to give props to whoever had to sit through and censor out or change every single "fuck" (believe me, there's a lot). Despite the changes, this movie was still completely and totally awesome for a couple of pre-pubescent boys. Hell, I still think it's pretty damn awesome. I'm not going to waste everyone's time by telling you things you already know (Arnold is kick-ass, Jesse "The Body" Ventura made me want to chew red man so damn bad, etc.) No. Instead I'm going to take a look at the deeper themes behind this king of 80's action/sci-fi. Prepare yourselves because this blew my mind when I first read these ideas and I fully expect it to do the same to you.

Predator as commentary on 80's action films

Schwarzenegger and Stallone were at the top of their game in the 80s with films such as Commando and First Blood: Part 2. In both of these films, the All-American hero mows down scores of nameless brown enemies all for truth, justice, and the American way. The charm of Predator, besides having an almost unheard of level of kick-assery, is that it takes these archetypal invincible American bad-asses and puts them into the role of nameless cannon-fodder.

At the beginning of the movie it is established that Dutch(Arnold) and his squad of ultimate bad-asses, have come to the jungle to royally wreck some shit. And they most certainly do, in the most violent way possible. Within minutes of encountering the enemy encampment all semblance of stealth goes out the door. Dutch lifts a truck and sends it careening into the center of camp signalling the rest of his squad to massacre everyone within in true Rambo/Commando fashion. A job well done.

This group of the toughest dudes that the 80's had to offer seem invincible. Earth's finest. Which is why an intergalactic hunter has set its sights on them.

One by one this squad of seemingly unstoppable American heroes are cut down like their South American victims before them. They have become unidentifiable blobs of heat on the Predator's vision much like how the South Americans had been nothing but indistinguishable brown men, each one practically identical to the last.


In the end, Dutch literally becomes an unnoticeable brown human. Covered in mud, it is ironic that in order to defeat the Predator, Dutch must become what he has slaughtered mercilessly in so many iterations of the same film.

After the final showdown in the jungle we see Dutch emerge from the crater a broken man. Who has defeated who? Dutch, once war's ultimate champion, finally sees the futility of it all. No one wins.

Honestly, Predator would probably have been successful if the whole movie had just been a rehash of Commando in a different setting. By switching the roles of hunter and hunted, however, it was able to reach cult status. Which leads me to the second theme of Predator.

Predator as a Feminine Threat.

As discussed in the previous section, Predator could be considered something of a bookend to the action genre of the 80s and in that regard it also serves as a backlash against the rampant masculinity inherent in such films. And what is more masculine than a squad of muscle-headed special forces operatives with huge guns blasting their way through the jungle? These men show no restraint, they tackle their enemies straight on and emerge victorious.

Look at these men and their huge... guns!

The only threat to their masculinity is a mysterious alien force which is the antithesis of such "manly" tactics. The Predator is deceptive. Using it's cloaking device and voice imitation to get the drop on our heroes. Deception, I will note, is a stereotypically female trait

The one scene I keep coming back to when I consider this interpretation is the scene immediately following Jesse "The Body" Ventura's death. In a fit of rage, the entire squad unleashes the full extent of their fire power into the brush. What effect does this have? Absolutely none. All they manage to do is graze the Predator. A commentary on their impotency? The idea that they were practically 'firing blanks" in more ways than one is appropriate.

Following this impressive, and totally worthless, display of male impotence, Dutch finds some of the Predator's blood on a leaf. I'm reminded of an earlier scene where "The Body" exclaims that he "ain't got time to bleed". Of course he doesn't have time to bleed. He's a man. Noone in the squad has time to bleed. But the Predator does. Menstruation imagery perhaps?

The Predator has established itself as the superior force and in the end, the only way that Arnold can even come close to matching it in combat is to himself adopt deceptive "female" tactics. Eventually, the epic struggle devolves into a physical, masculine exercise in fisticuffs between Arnold and the beast. Uh oh! What's so feminine about this you may ask? Nothing. But in order to stop us from becoming confused and to drive the point home, the filmmakers reveal that the Predator literally has a vagina for a face! Vagina dentata in the literal sense. If you think I'm stretching here, I'll go ahead and refer you to Predator 2, in which Danny Glover goes so far as to spell it out explicitly when he calls the Predator "pussy face".

Yep.

This feminization of the Predator really blows your mind when you think about it in context of the incredibly popular cross-over franchise: Aliens vs Predator. A race of space penises vs a rival race of space vaginas with humanity stuck in the middle. Yea, I know, it's crazy.

All in all I don't take this all that seriously. I just think it's fun/funny to think about. Thanks to the Something Awful forum goons for coming up with the majority of this. I just wanted to put it into a coherent post.