Predator 1987's Hidden Meanings Make It Deeper Than You Realized
John McTiernan's original 1987 Predator movie has long surpassed cultdom and is now widely considered a certified classic of 1980s macho action cinema – but its hidden meanings make it much deeper than many realize. The film has spawned several sequels and even a crossover that saw the Predator hunt Xenomorphs in the Alien vs. Predator films. However, coursing beneath the original Predator's wanton display of carnage and graphic violence are hidden subtexts and a level of intelligence and filmmaking craft that belies its wider reputation as a hollow genre spectacle or just another Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle.
One of the ways in which Predator transgressed its contemporaries was by essentially splicing together two of the most commercially successful genres of the 1980s that had begun to languish creatively by the latter half of the decade: the slasher and the action thriller. By applying the violent mounting body count dynamic of 80s slasher fare to the muscular, explosive, and testosterone-fuelled formality of the latter, Predator emerged as a unique and enduring genre hybrid. It's as if McTiernan's film takes the initial slasher qualities of The Terminator – another early Schwarzenegger film – and runs with it. Judged in slasher terms, the extra-terrestrial Predator becomes the masked killer, and Arnie becomes the final girl.
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In doing this, Predator can also be viewed as a sly subversion of the oiled-up machismo, flagrant gunplay, and wanton destruction that was prevalent in every over-the-top 1980s actioner, such as Invasion U.S.A., Eye of the Tiger, and just about anything from the Cannon Films assembly line. On the surface, Carl Weathers and
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