Mentions mental health /Su*c*de
In a moment of weakness, unchecked access to Disney plus led me to watch 2018’s ‘The Predator’. A confusingly named soft reboot taking the 4th or 5th spot in the mainline predator franchise. Googling to work out which number specifically would be showing it too much respect. It is, to put it bluntly, bafflingly terrible and offensive in a way that warrants some discussion. The aim of the game was clearly to reboot a classic franchise for modern audiences, with a view to making a few sequels, and in 2018 that meant trying to turn it into a Marvel movie. Spoilers from here on, for a 5 year old film you definitely weren’t going to watch anyway.
To give credit where it’s due, ‘The Predator’ is actually quite competently executed. It has fun enough action sequences and believable stunts, which is basically what we’re here for in a mid-budget action sci-fi. Beside a couple moments where the alien antagonist decides to spare anyone with thick enough plot armour, jarring when we’ve literally just seen him execute 5 guys with a flick of the wrist. Visually, everything is fine bar a couple shots where it lingers on some CGI for a moment too long. The titular Predator itself (himself? I don’t want to misgender an 11 foot alien) looks as good as ever. No performance sticks out as particularly bad and Sterling K Brown does a great job as the human antagonist. But the writing is where things get interesting.
Someone in the boardroom had clearly looked at the Marvel franchise and decided that the secret combination to the money printer was just sci-fi + witty banter. It’s difficult to tell at what stage this was foisted upon the writers room, but quite late on would make sense. The central themes revolve around subjects that should probably have a much more serious tone. To start at the beginning, the impetus to the plot is our main protagonist, a butch sniper warrior-type, witnessing a Predator's arrival, then subsequently being sectioned by the army as part of a cover up and joins the rest of the main cast on a bus to the asylum. Again, I refuse to look this up, but do the US army basically send people to prison if they have a mental break on deployment? Seems weird, but that’s too early a plot point to get hung up on. Where Marvel films might intercut all the lasers with some knowing winks or contrasting banal banter, The Predator is just tastelessly making fun of the neurodivergent for 90 minutes. Now this isn’t to say every film featuring neurodivergent characters needs be a grim, Loachian realist character study, but pointing and laughing at the guy with tourettes shouting swear words is lazy at best. The backstory for two of the ‘’loonies’’ as they are repeatedly referred to, was an incident where Keegan-Michael Key’s character turned to fire on his own squad, the only other survivor being our tourettes comic relief. The conclusion to their arc is that after both being mortally wounded by the Predator, they raise their handguns and finish each other off with a final shot. Was that supposed to be a ‘fitting end’ to an arc about soldiers killed by friendly fire? I have no idea. The disconnect between potentially dark subject matter and how abrasively it’s dealt with is constantly jarring. To give another example, another character is revealed to have been sectioned after attempting suicide, his conclusion is a final, noble act in committing suicide by throwing himself into the engine of the predators ship and bringing it down. The moral being that suicide is good in the right context apparently. Both examples are pretty grim and sadistic. Playing it off as ‘fitting ends’ is at the very least distractingly callous. At worst, outright offensive. Throughout, any discussion or attempt to deal with quite serious themes is made fun of or reneged upon by witty banter, making me believe all of it was forced in at a late stage by some executive who’d taken a quick break from delicately stroking a picture of James Gunn.
The side characters are complemented by possibly the worst case of autistic son trope i have ever witnessed in cinema. We are introduced to the main character's son in distress at an alarm going off, then having a rain-man moment picking up chess pieces. This is apparently all the context we need to believe a child works out an alien computer in an evening. The kid’s neurodivergence luckily seems to wear off by the end of the film, the phonophobia doesn't seem to be triggered by explosions or gunfire, and he’s even fully engaging in all the witty banter. Here, the autistic savant trope is used exclusively as a terrible writer's crutch, exploited then forgotten about completely when it becomes inconvenient to write around. Whereas the delirious tone on mental health issues with the soldier characters might be down to a last minute demand by executives, callously using then abandoning a character's autism is a much more grievous issue that appears to have got in on the ground floor.
One key aspect that keeps the Marvel films I keep comparing it to fun and light, is that we never see a huge amount of blood and guts. People basically get punched and fly offscreen, presumably unconscious, and the audience is told not to worry about it, look at the witty banter. In ‘The Predator’, our noble protagonists spend a lot of their time brutally executing their own countrymen, which is deeply at odds with the fun tone they’re trying to establish with all the cursed-seinfeld, half self-aware dialogue. A Predator film can’t really forgo the gore, alienating the adult horror/sci fi fans completely would be a predictable disaster. I’m not going to be caught arguing for any more films to try and do the Marvel light entertainment thing either, but they are at least trying to do one specific thing, and stick to it. Ironically the bizarre tone jumping is what might make the film an interesting watch to the masochists in the crowd. The reason why I’ve taken the time to write this at all is because the film is so painfully at odds with itself through every second that it serves as a sort of cautionary tale. Plenty of other films have used these tropes and exploited neurodivergency for quick writing shortcuts, ‘The Predator’ isn’t unique in this regard. But it is the most barefaced example I can think of in recent memory, and might be worth a watch as an educational experience. If you want to watch a modern Predator film non-ironically, the next film in the franchise, ‘Prey’, is actually good. Watch that instead.