Arnold Schwarzenegger has had several notable costars in his movie career, such as James Earl Jones, Michael Ironside, and Tom Arnold. But his most memorable costar, for me anyway, was a seven-foot tall alien with a crab-mouth and dreadlocks. Predator is, without a doubt, one of the greatest action movies of all time. It has an all-star cast of thick-necked dudes headed up by Arnold as "Dutch," Carl Weathers as Dillon, Bill Duke as Mac, and Jesse 'the Body' Ventura as Cooper. The movie opens much like John Carpenter's The Thing, with an alien ship cruising through space, the dropping a pod as it passes by Earth. Man, Earth is like the all night truck stop to the whole galaxy, apparently. An random alien flying by sees our planet and thinks "That looks like a good place to stretch my legs, maybe grab a bite to eat." Anyway, we soon cut to Dutch and his commando team being flown in to a military outpost in Guatemala. He was called in by his old friend Dillon to find a U.S. Cabinet member whose helicopter went down in hostel territory. His team is dropped in to the enemy's end of the jungle, but before Dutch can locate the Cabinet member, he finds the skinned bodies of another U.S. strike unit that was sent in before him. Even with all of their combined jungle fighting experience, none of his men had seen anything this gruesome before. This is when the film starts to shift to the point of view of something in the trees that is stalking Dutch's team. The P.O.V. shots show Dutch and his crew in the infrared spectrum, meaning that whatever is watching them sees their body heat.
The team soon locates the rebel guerrillas' base camp, and Ducth and the gang make short work of it in spectacular fashion, with big, loud guns, even bigger, louder explosions, and arguably the greatest one-liner in movie history. After finding out that the missing cabinet member was a cover story to recover some CIA intelligence, and taking a single guerrilla prisoner (Elpidia Carrillo) the team treks back through the bush toward their extraction point. It is here that the groups invisible tag-along (Kevin Peter Hall) starts to make his presence known as he starts to pick off the commandos one by one. This movie is overflowing with amazing action and special effects; the special creature effects are the work of Stan Winston. It is one of those movies where it takes a while for the monster in question to finally show up, but there is so much else going on in the movie with gun fights and such that it's not very bothersome. I do like the fact that the film is not just a dumb action movie, but has some very interesting themes woven into it. For example, none of the soldiers are able to take on the alien with their firearms or military training as the 'predator' uses more advanced technology and is much more physically capable than the soldiers. In the end, Dutch has to resort to a primal cunning to fight this monster, forsaking his guns for a bow, arrows, and primitive traps. You have no excuse for not finding this movie and watching it right now if you haven't seen it already.
Note - I decided to show off the Italian movie poster for Predator, as it looks much cooler that the U.S. poster.
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