Why isn't Predators (2010) great?

[Duracell]

After watching it again yesterday, i wondered: what is it that stops that movie from being more than decent, stops it from being great? I felt like i could feel the intentions of the writers and creators, so many great ideas, great actors, sufficient budget. I could see Rodriguez and some guys in my mind going through it having a few beers somewhere in Texas and it being the perfect Predator movie imaginable. To me mixing a group of random killers and mercenaries being dropped off on a hunting planet for the predators enjoyment seems like an awesome concept. What stopped it from being truly great? I kept wondering last night. Is it the script? Dialogue? Direction? It just seems some spark is missing, some magical ingredient...

[[cancerblack]]

@BlueMarsalis79 has brought up several times recently that it feels like an unusually high-budget fan film, which I think speaks to the same thing as you bring up about it just missing something.

[SM]

I really like it, but I feel it leans too heavily on the first film.

[razeak]

I dream of a day they make a sequel to Aliens, Terminator (well we can just stop those), Predator, or RoboCop that doesn't use a quote or visual from a prior film.

[BlueMarsalis79]

Aliens and Judgment Day totally used imagery and quotes from the prior film though?

[SiL]

It all feels a little cheap, a little rushed, a little too pieced together from the other films. The ideas are kind of half baked. The direction is just kind of bland.

Describing it as feeling like a fan film definitely fits.

Aliens and Judgment Day totally used imagery and quotes from the prior film though?

And effectively at that.

[Acid_Reign161]

@BlueMarsalis79 has brought up several times recently that it feels like an unusually high-budget fan film, which I think speaks to the same thing as you bring up about it just missing something.

^THIS

[Mr.Turok]

It had so much potential, just that it was way too rushed with no proper development of anything. We had to keep rushing to one action scene to the next nearly all the time. It was almost like the film had ADHD, and I have ADHD and that shit annoyed me.

Look at the first two films and Prey for comparison. We took time to learn about the characters, the environment, the current situation, and the build up of tension to the perfect execution of the action. Predators kept everything going with barely any moments for us to simmer into any of that like how they managed to nearly kill half the group in the first half hour of the film.

The biggest one for me is the Super Predator concept. Such a great idea to introduce a clan war but it's barely touched on with very little to learn about the difference between the groups besides "dogs and wolves' and "stronger and faster." I said this before but when Mr.Black fought Captive, was Mr.Black incompetent for fighting a weaker Predator or was Captive that skilled?

Oh and thanks to Prey and Avatar, they never took advantage of fleshing out a truly alien world and having the Predators hunt other lifeforms to see their ability and how deadly this hunting preserve really is. Like it doesn't have to be vast like Avatar but enough to show how it's a death world and make us wonder what else is out there.

Predators for me will always 6/10 for showing great ideas but just poor execution.

[BlueMarsalis79]

Adequate execution, but just, not remarkable.

[razeak]

Aliens and Judgment Day totally used imagery and quotes from the prior film though?

To expand on my comment (and it doesn't have to be 💯 no repeated moments if done effectively.

For visual, Terminator has Reese with a shotgun with a string to hide it.

Salvation felt we had to see young Reese do the exact same thing for a different reason. So he could grapple it back. That's vapid.

For dialog, in T1, Reese says "come with me if you want to live" when he first rescues Sarah.

In T2, the T-800 says the same thing when it rescues Sarah. It's a huge psychological jolt to her to hear that same phrase from the face of her worst nightmare. That's a quality use of the element because it served a story purpose besides just blindly being inserted.

We see facehuggers emerge from eggs in multiple movies. There really isn't any other way to show it. That's logical. That works.


Aliens, as much as I love it and rate it one of the greatest movies ever, I can still think blowing the alien out of the airlock again could have been something else. It is a negative that Cameron repeated the same beat in the very next sequel. It was masterfully done no doubt. It certainly doesn't ruin the film.

AVP "you are one ugly...." Blah blah

Really it was more directed toward it being done over and over and over.









Lol AvP did change it up with the queen, but visually it looks similar.

[BlueMarsalis79]

I really love amongst other things Alien³ going against type in that sense, like the thermal explosion being the demise of the Alien, set up by the bucket earlier.

Like Aliens and Alien, Resurrection uses space and gets some points but only barely for the acid being used against the Newborn but otherwise like Covenant, it uses space to defeat the Alien threat.

[(Bad Blood)]

My personal opinion, many things held it back from being a great film. My personal reasons on what those things are and what should be improved are as follows.
1. Super Predators should have been just Bad Bloods, regular bad predators and not some new subspecies or genetic abomination.
2. Bad CGI, especially the last part with Berserkers head removal. It needed more work in this department.
3. The face animatronics or lack there of, predators not being able to close their mouths really throws off a scene.
4. There should have been more humans to kill off to show the effectiveness of the predators better.
5. The humans being less character archetypes and more realistic.
6. Better writing to flesh out the character development better in the time constraints.
7. Much better predator fight coordination.
8. More impressive set pieces since it is on an alien planet.
9. More than one good/hero predator to make the fight less one sided.
10. Some sort of actual ending or resolution.

[Yautja888]

Well, you get Rodriguez who tells you the super duper preds are wolves and classic preds are dogs, then you see that three of them hunting as a pack couldn't defeat a bunch of weaklings, all you can do is    out loud.Add a cheap classic pred cosplay into that mix and you get yourself something embarrassing to witness.
Since AVP, the predator aura was finished, from a mysterious and menacing killer to a humanized, samurai type warrior, who ended up in musical Youtube vids made by teens. We can't have that.


 

[Acid_Reign161]

There are only 3 Predator movies in my head canon; Predator, Predator 2 and Prey.

[BlueMarsalis79]

I get the sentiment, but Predators still counts to me, just as one in many looks at chasing the popular attributes of something without the meat underneath it.

It is not quite undercooked but, it is fairly bloody.