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Predator
and Predator 2
If
you were an alien and you landed on some random location on Earth
and that location happened to be on the property of a gun-toting
militia in the Montana outback, would you assume that those human's
represented typical humans? Of course not. By the same token it
would be foolish to assume that the handful of Predators we meet
in these two movies are representative of their culture. Maybe most
Predators are granola-eating vegetarians who listen to New Age music
and vote for their equivalent of Ralph Nader. The ones we met might
be extremists who couldn't stomach all that love and understanding
crap and went off into the universe to live as they pleased. Who
knows?
What
we do know is that these boys (or girls or
whatever) are here to hunt. They don't eat the humans they
kill but take skulls (sometimes with the spine
attached) as trophies. And in the amazing final battle scene
at the end of PREDATOR 2
we see these trophies in an alcove on their ship, along with fearsome
looking skulls from a variety of unearthly beasts, including one
very familiar long skull: an Alien warrior.
Predator
technology is more advanced than ours but not by much. My criterion
for a little advanced versus very advanced is Clarke's Law: "A
sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
If you can look at their tech and not understand exactly how it
works but at least understand the physical principles, then they're
just a little more advanced. This doesn't fit very well with what
I said in the beginning of this article about the odds of meeting
a race near your own tech level, so I'm going to assume that the
Predators are, in fact, very much more advanced than we are. But
this particular group of Predators is choosing (maybe
for sportsmanship or maybe because they're the equivalent of the
Amish) to use - to them - very old-fashioned technology (like modern day bowhunters - Feo).
Which
brings us, finally, to the Aliens vs. Predators contest itself.
Based on my long string of assumptions (a
House of Cards that Richard Hoagland himself couldn't surpass),
this means that it's really no contest in the sense that the Predator
race is certainly in no danger from the aliens. They've had their
number for a long time. To them it's just sport. Only to the humans
caught in the middle is it deadly serious. The perfect ingredient
for a good movie.
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This
article copyright 2004 by Kelly Parks and E.C.McMullen Jr.
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