PREDATORS sneak peek footage is ambiguous but reassuring
PREDATORS sneak peek footage is ambiguous but reassuring
Mar 15
Robert Rodriguez is a name that can pull bucks. Nimrod Antal is not. Some people still think Peter Jackson directed District 9, because his name is the only one they recognise from the poster, but, as with Rodriguez on the Predators reboot, he just served as a producer, a kind of godfather and lightning rod for cash. So having Robert Rodriguez introduce the new sneak peek footage of Predators is a little odd — why isn’t the director allowed to hype us up about his own vision? Regardless of this confusing switcheroo, the recently released sneak peek provides our first glimpse of the reboot, and the important question is: how does it look?
The teaser spends as much time showing behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with Rodriguez as it does actual footage from the film. I’m hoping it’s still early days and the film hasn’t been properly processed and graded, because it all looks a little flat and desaturated, but otherwise it looks pretty solid. We get a few glimpses of the cast looking grim and surly (never frightened, of course), a couple of super-fast shots of the Predator/s themselves, and so forth. What we don’t get is any semblence of character or plot. There’s some cliche about “What’s the last thing you remember?” “Falling” and something about the planet being a game reserve, and the humans being the game, but they’re just the kind of macho one-liners you’d throw into a teaser like this. They don’t actually demonstrate characters in any meaningful light, so I guess we’ll have to wait till an actual trailer is released till we get our first insights into the folk chosen to be hunted by the universe’s ultimate hunters.
Rodriguez speaks briefly about the direction the film is taking, claiming that he wants Predators not to feel like the fifth or six film in a franchise, but the first. This is a strange and unique form of reboot we are quickly becoming accustomed to, where everything but a character is removed from a movie to kickstart a new series. If any franchise needs this treatment, though, it’s Predators, so I’m willing to take Rodriguez at his word on this one. Rodriguez also seems keen to please fans of the franchise, but at the same time wants his production to take on a life of its own. I’m not overly fond of fan-service, which is the greatest height of quality the two Alien vs Predator films ever aspired to, so I’m hoping the final cut of Predators leans more towards taking on a life of its own, rather than focusing on appeasing the fickle and nagging fans that crowd the internet like so many buzzing flies on a bloated corpse.
For some reason I was excited to click play on this teaser. Similar to the Apes situation, the only good film in the Predator franchise is the first, and I’m eager to see the last twenty years of sub-par filmmaking get swept under the rug once and for all. The cast of the reboot is solid — Adrien Brody, Laurence Fishburne, Danny Trejo (and Topher Grace, but let’s hope he’s the whiney, useless schmuck that dies first, shall we?) — and Robert Rodriguez is known for having the balls and the talent to get his movies made however he wants, and this all bodes well for the Predators reboot. Just as long as nobody mentions a helicopter or drawls “If it bleeds, we can kill it.” There’s some things you just don’t touch, and Arnie is one of them.
