Predator 3-Movie Collection
[4K & Blu-ray]
I remember a time when Predator was not just a scary movie but also a cool one. It had all the right ingredients: military heroes, Arnold Schwarzenegger, a contra-like scenario, aliens, cool visual tech, and a squid-like monster with what clearly were supposed to represent dreadlocks. It also gave us a cool shot of muscled arms clutching each other. The backdrop of Predator is very simple both in setting and colors: a claustrophobic jungle full of browns and greens. So, to inject an interstellar creature who sees in neon colors more than helped imbed its strangeness into my young little brain.
Instead of letting a good thing exist, Hollywood felt it had its franchise on its hands, no doubt due to the Alien movies which made it seem like all we wanted was to fight scary creatures from outer space. So, we got a weird sequel in Predator 2 and an actually decent follow-up decades later with Predators: a criminally underrated movie that both revisited the formula of the original, turned it on its head, and expanded the universe.
Unfortunately, Predator is now being rebooted (instead of just continued) with a formula oddly similar to Predator 2. Fortunately, this means Fox is giving us the complete Predator series in glorious 4K to jog our memory as to why exactly we love this universe.
There’s no doubt, the original Predator has aged surprisingly well, especially considering that its setting and characters were strictly of their time. This movie is all about the 80s: the war was in Central America and the men were cigar-smoking, machine-gun-wielding meatheads. It almost makes you grateful the Predators chose them as a target. Predators is the movie no one saw coming, and as we already mentioned is impressive for how much it tried to do and how well it did it with so little. The less said about the second Predator, the better (especially considering the rumors that it doesn’t play well on UHD players). But, it wouldn’t be a complete box set without it.
This Predator box set gets the job done reminding us of how engrossing this franchise is and that these movies are still so much fun to watch.
