I first saw this film on VHS after my brother rented it. It's a classic film, and certainly one of the best from Ahnuld's action stable. The film starts off as a war film with some suspenseful tones that create tension, the military team start as the predators hunting the missing personnel, and later the rebels. Slowly hinting that something else is out there hunting them, before the predators turn into the prey.

It's a good choice that the Predator creature isn't shown until nearly the end of the film, just the ghostly distortion of his cloaking field to hint that he's out there. Since your never quite sure where it is, or was that flicker it just then, you spend the early parts of the movie on edge looking out for it to appear. The creature is a brilliant design, large, powerful, and an interesting combination of a lizard and a crab. Quite iconic!

The story is quite good, something a bit different. Action packed with some good suspense, and well thought out. The fact that the predator hunts using heat-based vision is quite clever, especially when the hero deduces that he can turn invisible by masking his body heat. The theme of concealment is used multiple times on both sides; concealed bodies, hidden agendas and traps, etc.

The DVD I have is the twin-pack Predator I and II. It doesn't have much in the way of extras, just a trailer and commentaries. I would have liked the Collector's Edition because it has a lot of behind the scenes material, but as it was a gift I'm not complaining.

The picture is pretty good for a movie its age. There is some dust and grain evident, particularly during the titles at the beginning. Mostly they aren't hugely obvious because of the busy backgrounds; they tend to get lost in the complexity of the foliage. It would have been nice if the studio had given this print a proper cleanup, as it wouldn't have taken much to make pristine, and it's definitely a piece of movie history worth preserving.

The sound is excellent with good use of the surround channels, and good detail from the little clicks the predator makes, to the loud gunfire. I get a lot of complaints from the wife about the noise this one makes.

Well worth seeing, and definitely worth owning if your an Arnie fan. This is another favorite of my daughters, who is a massive Arnold fan. I keep waiting for her to bring home a huge hulking Bavarian boyfriend one day.

Plot Synopsis:

An alien vessel approaches Earth and drops off a small pod that hurtles down towards the surface. In South America a helicopter drops off an American military team at a small base in the jungle. Dutch (Schwarzenegger) meets with the commander and an old friend about an operation to retrieve some missing personnel from in the jungle.

The team are deployed in the jungle and eventually locate the crashed helicopter. The personnel are all missing, and after searching the eventually find them; skinned and hanging from a tree. They go looking for the rebels that did this, and attack their encampment. It then transpires that the rescue was just a cover to find this village, eliminate it, and pickup any intelligence they could find. Dutch is pretty angry that he was manipulated and his team put at risk. He resolves to head for the extraction point.

Members of the team are killed brutally, quickly, and efficiently while they travel through the jungle. They realise that something in the jungle is hunting them. After a few deaths and a couple of sightings of something shimmering in the jungle, they settle in for the night and construct elaborate traps should the unknown come for them. The predator has no problem circumventing the traps and attacks during the night. It continues to pick them off during the remainder of the trip until only Dutch remains.

Discovering that he can conceal himself from the creature by covering his entire body in thick mud, he creates traps and weapons, then attracts the creature to fight and hopefully destroy it. After some initial success wounding the creature, and disabling its shoulder-mounted cannon, Dutch finds himself battling the predator hand-to-claw, and eventually defeats it with a carefully concealed trap. As the predator lies dying, it activates a self-destruct device, which Dutch luckily manages to outrun. The extraction helicopter arrives to find Dutch standing in the middle of a large area of flattened and scorched jungle.