Real Predators, who must be many thousands of years ahead of us, have presumably moved beyond this.Īs unlikely as the Predator may be, even aside from its oddball, anthropomorphic appearance - a brushed steel Samurai with dreadlocks - it’s still more believable than Alien. Killing just for the fun of it, as the Predators do, is no longer considered socially acceptable in most circles. We farm our food, and soon we’ll manufacture it. Even today, humans (who are a long way from being able to make sporting trips to other star systems) don’t rely on predation much. They then harvest this crop of useful compounds quickly, a tactic that can power an active lifestyle.īut of course, for an intelligent species with technology capable of interstellar travel, predation is oh-so Stone Age. Predation is an economic device: Carnivores leave it to plants or plant-eaters to slowly build up energy-rich molecules from sunlight or some other source.
So you can expect that there will be predators. Darwinian competition will be their lot, as well as ours. After all, any biology out there will exist in a landscape of finite resources. We still can’t say what real aliens are like, of course, but science can provide some useful insights. It has the fascination of feeding time in the Big Cat cage. And even though the first part of the film, in which the humans work their way into Earth’s nether regions to explore and discover, is rather more interesting than the stochastic brutishness that follows, you’ve got to admit that it’s not every day that you watch a litter of noncarbon-based life forms (the Aliens) making a sincere effort to dine on a bunch of grunting hulks from another world (the Predators).
This really is a comic book, a video game and the extraterrestrial equivalent of a mano-a-mano contest of strength, wits, and spring-loaded weapons. Freshly hatched hordes of the former and a well-armed squad of the latter engage in a ritual hunt deep underground, while Weyland’s team alternately serves as victim, breeding accessory (for the Aliens) and occasional combatant.
The under-ice construction found by the satellite dates from the dawn of mankind, and is built in a mishmash ziggurat style that incorporates the most grandiose elements of the Egyptians, Aztecs, and others from our archaeological past who lived large on stone (think "Indiana Jones," among dozens).Īll this is just to set the scene for the film’s real raison d’etre: the battle between two species from classic sci-fi films that are box office draws in their own right: Alien and Predator.
Team leader Alexa Woods (played by Sanaa Lathan), is busy climbing her way up a precipice in the Himalayas that’s slightly steeper than the Washington Monument when she gets the call to action (think Kirk in "Star Trek IV"). Then there’s the obligatory montage as the "team" - a hodge-podge of reluctant, wisecracking academics - is assembled. Next, a wealthy, but terminally ill industrialist, Charles Bishop Weyland, decides to hire some experts to find out what the hidden edifice is, mostly to inject some last-minute thrills into his waning life (think "Contact"). The plot (don’t worry it doesn’t extend beyond the movie’s halfway mark) is cranked up fast, as an orbiting surveillance satellite finds a weird object buried thousands of feet under Antarctica (think "The Thing").