"Predators" to Invade Big Island?
20th Century Fox is scouting Hawaii for locations for a remake/reboot/sequel/whatever of the great 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi action film, Predator. (Source: Tim Ryan, via io9.com)
The working title?
Always nice to see Hawaii on the big screen, even as a stand-in for, possibly, an alien planet. But, really? A reboot of the Predator franchise? Didn’t Danny Glover exhaust the story’s dramatic potential as LAPD Lt. Mike Harrigan in the 1990 sequel, Predator 2? In that movie, an alien hunter of the type Arnie dispatched in the first movie has come to Los Angeles on safari. One of its first victims is Lt. Harrigan’s partner on the force of 15 years.
Can you imagine what Harrigan says by way of explaining his subsequent obsessive, extralegal quest to take down his partner’s killer? Take a wild guess. He says:
“Now it’s personal.”
Can Predators, slated to be released in 2010, contribute anything to our culture that will top the very line from Predator 2 that encapsulates the rich, useless futility of all sequels? Variations of “This time, it’s personal,” and “Now, it’s personal” are what real-life movie fans say, in mock movie-preview-narrator-voices, when they are making fun of lame follow-ups in played-out franchises. Predator gave us narrative—“I ain’t got time to bleed!”—but Predator 2 gave us metanarrative, the winking self-awareness of a film that says, “Yes, this movie only exists because the first one made a ton of money,” and a line of dialogue that we could quote as we wink back.
Predators.
Will I see it? Oh, probably. How can I not? They’re filming it in Hawaii, so this time, yeah, it’s personal.
