Review of The Predator (2018) by Chris B — 29 Sep 2018

The Predator was one of the most astonishingly ill-conceived movie reboots I've seen. It retains almost none of the aspects that make the original predator interesting as well as writing the movie in the completely wrong genre.

This movie tries to emulate a marvel movie in tone and pace rather than use the horror genre which it is more suited to and the change is especially jarring given the uniqueness of the predator.

Rather than using stealth, guile and agility to harass large groups of heavily armed soldiers with traps and hit and run tactics these predators lose their camouflage, simply tank the bullets and walk slowly towards their victims like some sort of extraterrestrial Mike Meyers. Couple this with the wise cracking buddy cop feel of the protagonists and any semblance of the terrifying cat and mouse game with an unseen alien of the classic films vanishes.

That enough would be enough to make this movie not enjoyable but the movie also suffers from one dimensional characters, bizarre awkward dialog, and an outlandish insensitive plot.

The only reason for giving this one star is it contains two of the most unintentionally hilarious movie moments I've ever seen. one is the demise of one of the antagonists played by Sterling K. Brown, and the other is the final scene between Thomas Jane and Keegan-Michael Key.

If you've seen the movie you know exactly which scenes I mean.

Now for the elephant in the room. The movie portrays autism, a condition which causes many people lifelong hardship, as a super power and then forgets that the child with autism has it immediately after introduction of it as the child portrays remarkable poise and insight during traumatic scenarios with brand new people. If this is what autism was really like its no wonder that predators want to steal it for their genome. There are certainly high functioning autistic people who have achieved a lot but this is in spite of their autism not because of it.