Escape to the Movies: Predators

Sep 14, 2009
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dex-dex said:
For some reason this movie did seem really dumb looking at the trailers but you may have persuaded me MovieBob. bravo.

And thanks now i have a rebuttal to an argument with twilight fans saying that he is so diffrent and not from this time and what not.
basically this sums up what i thought of the video.

good job bob, im definitly going to give this a look now, i was about to pass on it thinking it was going to be a bad rehash but you made it sound like my kind of movie.

and the eclipse thing i will use for sure eventually..i never actually read teh damn books but now i can actually have a logical fact comeback to the annoying ass eclipse fangirls..
 

AvsJoe

Elite Member
May 28, 2009
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So Bob here gave this movie a big old thumb up? Alright, good, that what I wanted to hear. I was verrry worried about this film. Thank you Rodriguez-san and thanks to the pet Nimrod as well. I will now give you money and enjoy your film.
 

maninahat

New member
Nov 8, 2007
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Jai Deliete said:
This movie just kicked the shit out of every Predator movie since Predator.

I think my one gripe is that there is an extra-shitty explosion effect about 2/3s of the way through the film. Seriously, it was awful. It was also an "outrun the explosion" sequence, which are always stupid. Ugh. There are some things that don't make sense (
How long is a "season", if they drop in new game every season... and we see a second drop happening roughly one or two days after the initial drop? And what the fuck was the "trap" supposed to be, where Danny Trejo is bait -- apparently a turret gun that fires knives, I guess, but only within a fifteen-foot radius of the bait? And thinking about Predators spotting, stalking, and abducting all of these guys, especially the doctor, on Earth makes me giggle -- THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T FRIEND THE WEIRD-LOOKING DREADLOCKED GUYS ON FACEBOOK
), sure, but I found this movie very satisfying nonetheless. I don't give a shit that there are "dogs", I can't imagine how they would have reasonably worked more gore in, and I really like Adrien Brody in this role (Which surprised me!).

I would have liked to have seen more of
the alien they killed that was, presumably, also prey. What I mean is, I would have preferred the dynamic of them working together with an alien like that -- as opposed to the plot point of the prisoner Predator. And even THAT would have been a little cooler if the guy had lived more than two minutes, such as if he'd been freed before the final ten minutes of the movie.

The thing I may have liked the most is that there is no nonsensical scene where Brody is being painted up with fifty Predator lasers in this movie, despite it being in every trailer.
I was annoyed by the tacky explosion too. They should have just made it a weird colour and said it was something to do with the atmosphere.

Things I didn't like was
a) the Yakuza guy, who automatically gets stuck with the katana and has a cheesy homage to the old samurai movies (you know...he's Japanese, so he must know martial arts).
b) Plenty of stupid, lousy lines. At least they could have delivered them in the same, campy stupid way like the original movie's "GET TO DEE CHOPPAAA!!"
c) They should have had a great white hunter character as the lead. Wouldn't it have made more sense if it were some safari big game hunter? It certainly would have been a lot more ironic.
 

maninahat

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Nov 8, 2007
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cjalw1 said:
I went to the movies today, loved it....

was not expecting tf2 the movie 4 of my friends all came to the same conclusion.

main hero:scout
IDF sniper: sniper
soldier: the guy who's shoot did not deploy. He tried to rocket jump to stop his fall. that
is what happened to his legs.
The doctor:That Medic is a Spy!
Yakuza: Spy
Convict: face stabbing Spy
African Deathsquad:Demo
Russian spetsnaz: Heavy
Drug cartel enforcer: pryo
I think everyone noticed it. Huge Russian guy + minigun + medic + "Sasha" = TF2.
 

JWAN

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Dec 27, 2008
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MovieBob said:
Predators

This week MovieBob hunts down Predators.

Watch Video
People still hunt for food Bob. Some people just dont want to eat stuff from the store. I keep the trophies as a sign of respect, its apart of my culture, not because I'm trying to prove anything other than I was lucky enough to have the chance to earn sustenance for my family and myself. If you dont agree with hunting that's fine, but dont be deceitful and turn it into something it isn't. That would be like somebody calling Islam a religion of war and basing it on what other people have told them. Its just as ignorant.
---
I thought it was a great B movie, but that's all it was meant to be and that's why its awesome. Not everything great needs to be main stream.
 

DustyDrB

Made of ticky tacky
Jan 19, 2010
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God, I was loving the first 45 minutes or so of this movie. It was so suspenseful, you kept expecting something to pop out or someone to backstab one of the others. There was so much mystery and they were doing well to slowly reveal piece by piece. Then it devolved into a runny, shooty, explody-with-random-ass-ninja-fights sludgefest. Attention movie-makers: your villain works best when you don't show it in every scene.
 

Zing

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Oct 22, 2009
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Z(ombie)fan said:
Fuck, this was a disturbing movie.

the doctor dude at the end was worst of all. sadistic freak.
That's what honestly pulled it ahead of most run-of-the-mill action flicks, even though the doctor did do some weird things (left the Russian guy to die and took his photo and pretended they were his kids), you still don't expect him to be a full on serial killer.

It actually made me think about the movie.

Also I'm pretty sure Brody could have knocked out the Predator's by turning his head.
 

Paradoxrifts

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Jan 17, 2010
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In retrospect the movie was always going to be ruined for me by the titular monsters eventually showing up and proving that you've already seen this all been played out at least three times before. Despite holding hopes right up to the end that the movie would pull an unexpected twist or turn, it pretty much played out exactly how I expected and that always manages to disappoint me somewhat.

The real wall banger for me was the fact that the Predators that routinely shrug off the deployment of anti-personnel explosive devices point-blank without dropping dead due to the fact that their organs have been reduced to the consistency of soup then proceed to die from bullets, katanas and clubs. CLUBS!!
 

Therumancer

Citation Needed
Nov 28, 2007
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A bit late to the party but I'd point out that there have already been several things covering the society of the Predators, albiet not in the form of a movie. Simply put rambling on about a hypothetical society in enough detail to matter is likely to cause some serious problems for a movie people would be going to watch for the action appeal. At least if you wanted to give enough information for it to matter.

At any rate, the original "Aliens Vs. Predator" comics... which is the storyline that people were hoping they would use, but never did, kind of went into this a bit and managed to get the points accross without a lot of exposition. Albiet the nature of this storyline kind of invalidated the direction a lot of people apparently wanted to go in.

Simply put the gist of the matter is that Predators are more or less forbidden from going after "people", in this case races beyond a certain level of technological sophistication. This means all of this junk you see in video games with Predators going after Marines and colonists basically doesn't happen, or isn't supposed to. By the time a species has space travel, it's more or less off limits.

The original comic premise featured the idea of the Predators dropping some aliens on a planet to hunt them, where there was a human colony they were not supposed to mess with. An accident with a colonist destroys their drop ship, and the predators more or less freak out since a lot of them (most of the survivors) want to go kill the humans along with the aliens, but a few of them hold to the law and refuse to do this. This leads to the last surviving "good" predator teaming up with a rather kick arse female corperate to fight both Aliens and other Predators, and eventually they wind up leaving together for the Predator homeworld.

Books (not comic books) were written on the subject later, which further expanded this storyline, and covered a lot of what happened when she went to their homeworld. In simple terms given that humans were one of the species that were preyed on, the idea of humans being advanced enough to be off limits is something of an issue, and she winds up doing a lot of fighting there and winds up becoming something of a liason.

It's also noteworthy that what the Predators use for technology depends on the hunt they are going on. Part of the point is a challenge, and this is why you don't always see the 'best' weapons in differant storylines for any given situation. What's more, all arguements about predators proving themselves are fairly accurate, and if I remember there is a degree of scorn for someone say showing up with visual camoflauge, a force field, and 200 weapons to hunt some primitive with a spear. This is why presumably Predators have been killed by humans with black powder weapons, and you've seen comics with say tribal natives having predator skulls attached to their shields. It's about the principle of the thing, the prey is supposed to have a chance or else it's pointless.

A point also made (and something that makes a joke out of some of the various crossovers) is that while advanced compared to the 20th century, the Predators don't exactly have limitless technology. This is one of the reasons why they try not to provoke other advanced species beyond a point. While very good warriors, actually dealing with the trained warriors (Marines) of the "Alien" timeline with their weapons is a bit more even than you might think. I vaguely remember one of the books I read making this point about the explosives in the projectiles the armed forces were using (the reason why they weren't supposed to use them in "Aliens" for fear of damaging a reactor) and getting hit by that (especially given that they were allegedly propelled by an electromagnetic rail to much greater speeds and so on) compared to a 20th century gun. Not to mention optics and motion sensors vs. visual camoflauge and the fact that mega-tech ceramic armor intended to stop (sometimes) explosive rail gun rounds is not entirely ineffective against what the predators were using (ie it's not a trivial matter to stick a hand claw through that, like it was with kevlar).

It's probably been 15 or 20 years since I read any of this stuff, and doubtlessly there are plenty of contridictions out there (and I won't claim my memory is perfect). The basic point of all this rambling is that there has been enough world building at various points where you can probably find someone answering any question you thought to ask about "Cameronverse" concepts, and some you probably never thought of.

Honestly though, it seems that most of that is simply ignored by the makers of movies and video games. For example when it comes to the cinematics of the last "Aliens Vs. Predator" game (which Unskippable criticized) I was kind of miffed with how they had a Predator ship simply decloak and open fire on an earth military vessel. I mean while things like that could happen, it seemed to ignore a lot of what was established, it wouldn't have been quite that easy to take the humans out (though they probably would have, they do have a bit of an edge technologically, not to an extreme degree though), and it would have been a pretty big issue which all of the crew would be unlikely to agree with. While the Marines do have a chance in that game, I would also tend to think that without some kind of extenuating circumstances preventing them from using their weapons until their numbers are down (like in Aliens) or a lot more Predators than the handfull that dropped, they would have mopped up everything on the planet in ground combat in short order. Discounting exceptional individuals on either side the general odds in some of the books basically seemed like 1 Predator being worth 2 Marines on average, and Aliens needing like 50 to 1 odds to handle either if they could use all their stuff. :p
 

bojac6

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Oct 15, 2009
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I have to disagree. This movie was awful. The first two acts are boring walking through the jungle scenes where nothing happens. They seem to have forgotten that the audience knows it's a predator movie, so why should we be startled or surprised when the predators show up? The movie forgot it's about entertaining the audience and tried to have it be about how confused all the people were. Well, nobody paid to see this movie because Adrien Brody has a Batman voice. We paid to see shit get blown up and Predators in action. There was what...one point, maybe two, where a predator ripped the spine and skull out of somebody. That should have been half the movie.
Two plotlines are introduced that are never followed up (two classes of Predator and another alien prey is on the planet). It's almost as if the interesting parts of the movie got cut to make room for yet more walking through the jungle. People don't die in cool ways or heroic ways, they just kind of disappear from the movie. You don't care about anybody because you don't know anybody's name or characterization. That's actually a running theme through the movie. "What's your name" "I'm too much of a badass to tell you my name." Oh please. If the only way people refer to the characters in your movie is as "The Russian Guy" or by the actors name (let's face it, everyone is just going to call them "Adrien Brody" and "Topher Grace" because they had nothing to distinguish them from the actors), you've done a bad job getting the audience to care about your movie.

In short, the movie as a whole is boring, stupid, poorly written, poorly acted and simply not violent or creative enough to pull off the predator label. It hints at deeper Predator mythology, but never explores it. Predator 2 was much better at this, expanding the universe, and I even enjoyed Alien Vs. Predator more. This are the major problems. Next are a few nitpicks.

The minigun must have been a .22, because it barely hurt the dog things that were easily taken down with pistol shots.

Laurence Fishburne sure looks chubby for a guy that's been hiding out on the planet for years barely surviving.

I cracked up every time Adrien Brody spoke. Seriously, his voice was hilarious.
 

Gaming King

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Apr 9, 2010
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I love how Movie Bob is so far into Loony Lefty Land that he doesn't think to realize that hunters eat what they kill and the meat you get from hunting ISN'T unhealthy SHIT shot full of hormones and antibiotics.
 

Da Joz

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May 19, 2009
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This was a decent action movie, but it's nothing I haven't seen before a thousand times.
 

Moloboen

New member
Oct 28, 2009
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I respect your oppinion Bob and you have alot of great reviews but this has got to be the worst movie I've ever seen (and I've seen a few). I feel bad for Lawrence Fishburne and Adrian Brody for getting this film on their résumé. I didn't go see this movie thinking it was going to be a great film. Maby just two hours of cheesy comments and hillarious action but after half an hour in it stops beeing funny and people started to look for the nearest fire exit.
 

inpachi

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Apr 17, 2009
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I saw this movie and i must say i liked it!

It wasnt the best it could of been but nothing ever is sadly...

But i was entertained and i walked out feeling content that is all that matters!

I was not blown away or any of that jazz but meh better than nothing i suppose!