Mark Thomson

Predator

2:47 PM

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.

dvd

Aliens

2:46 PM

This is a really great film. I didn't get to see it until I was into my late teens, since we weren't allowed to see things that were scary, although my grandmother used to watch the sunday night horror movies with me, which is where I first saw Alien. Aliens dispenses with the monster/horror-house feel of the first film, and opts to turn it into a war film with horror elements.

This film redefined so many genres, and has inspired so many modern films and videogames today, particularly the popular Halo series. It also introduced new elements to the Alien canon; the military, expanded on Weyland-Yutani, and the alien queen. The DVD I have of this is the special extended edition which has an introduction from the director, James Cameron, and a lot of footage that was originally missing reinserted. This footage adds a lot to the story, expanding on Ripley's retrieval, the establishment of the colony, and the colonists being sent out to the alien ship by the Company. The picture and sound is probably the best I've ever seen it, certainly better than the original VHS version I'd seen, but obviously not as good as something newer that's been shot digitally.

The movie is still as scary-as-hell, with tension built gradually, only limited views of the aliens initially, good use of audio, lots of dripping, little noises etc. This film still sends my wife scuttling behind the couch. She can't understand how this can be one of my daughter's favorite films.

Plot synopsis:

Flight Lieutenant Ellen Ripley is retrieved from the shuttle Narcissis by a deep-space salvage crew purely by accident. After drifting for 50+ years in suspended animation, she was close to drifting out into deep space when they retrieve her. After being returned to a spacestation in orbit around Earth, she makes her recovery, only to find that anything she loved is dead and gone.

After an inquiry into the deaths of her crewmates and subsequent destruction of the Nostromo are glossed over, and her tales of the alien disregarded as fantasy, she's demoted to working the cargo dock at the spaceport. When communications from the colony that was established on the planet containing the crashed alien ship mysteriously cease, she is offered the opportunity to redeem herself if she will accompany a group of Colonial Marines as an advisor. She reluctantly agrees thinking that the Marines are going back to destroy the aliens, not capture for study.

They arrive on LV-426 to find the colony deserted, but her worst fears are confirmed when they discover some face huggers in stasis in the lab. Ripley and the marines find a small child living in the ventilation ducts, and Ripley takes her under her wing. Eventually tracking down the missing colonists to the atmospheric processor station, the marines head over in the APC to find them. On one of the lower levels they find the colonists cocooned into the wall, used as birthing hosts for aliens. An intense battle breaks out, and many marines are killed before Ripley can evacuate them in the APC.

Planning to leave on the dropship and nuke the planet from orbit, they summon the ship to pick them up. Unfortunately it is destroyed when an alien gets on board and kills the crew while in flight. Falling back to the colony command center, they fortify their position and attempt to wait out the night. Burke attempts to impregnate Ripley and Newt using the alien facehuggers in the lab, so that he can smuggle the gestating aliens back through quarantine to the Company for research. Ripley and the marines destroy the facehuggers before that is able to happen. The marines send Bishop out to the transmitter to summon down the second dropship from the Sulaco. Later the aliens travel across from the processing station using a maintenance tunnel, and manage to penetrate the command center. Once again the group is forced to flee. More marines are lost, also including Burke who gets his just reward, and Ripley and Hicks make it to the second dropship, unfortunately losing Newt in the process.

Ripley refuses to leave Newt behind, and instructs Bishop to take her to the processing station sho she can get her. She arms up, and heads down into the lower levels searching for Newt. She finds her just in time to avoid implantation, but on the way out, stumbles across the alien queen laying face hugger eggs. Destroying the queen's nursery, Ripley makes her escape, with an angry queen in tow. They just manage to escape in time on the dropship as the processor explodes and destroys a sizable chunk of the planet.

Back on the Sulaco, celebrations are shortlived as the alien queen reappears, having smuggled herself back concealed on the dropship. After a short battle between a powerloader-enhanced Ripley and the queen, she manages to open the airlock doors and suck the huge alien out into space. Ripley places Hicks and Bishop into the hypersleep chambers, before depositing herself and Newt for the long trip home to Earth.