PREDATOR: Advanced Technology and Surviving Progress

By Christopher Barr │POSTED ON JANUARY 15, 2020

"Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman - a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking-back, a dangerous trembling, and halting."  - Friedrich Nietzsche

Predator is a 1987 science fiction action movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger about an elite U.S. military rescue team that is given a mission to extract soldiers out of a Central American jungle.  The Army Special Forces team's mission is to quietly get the U.S. soldiers, who are believed to be held captive at an insurgent guerrilla camp, and quietly get back out again, undetected.  The problem here is they end up encountering an alien in the jungle hunting them all down.

Dutch's team find the men they are there to rescue skinned alive and strung up in the trees, they also attack the guerrilla camp and kill all the insurgents.  They soon discover that they are being hunted just as the team they were there to rescue.  This Predator starts to kill them one by one and blending back into the jungle along the way.  

Paralleling our own brutal nature during war, the film mirrors the Predator's cloaking technology to the Army Special Forces camouflage clothing and face paint, the Predator's skill, and silence during its kills and Dutch's teams skill and silence during the camp attack before they encounter the alien.  They are all cut from the same killing cloth, it's just that the Predator's technology is far more advanced.  

"If it bleeds.. we can kill it."

Watching the guerrilla insurgents kill their tied up prisoners allows us as a viewer, to feel justified in killing these predators during the camp attack, just as the Predator gets its justification from Dutch's team not only trying to kill it but thinking they can.  The arrogance wrapped in these justifications is littered throughout the film. The men face an enemy far more skilled then they are, just as their enemies faced the same.  Power begets power, war begets war, violence begets violence.  The film is about the egotistical lunacy of war, it is about the circle of war and the inevitable death that is tethered to war. 

"This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine."  - William Shakespeare (The Tempest)

When Mac and Dillon go after the Predator it isn't just to avenge Blain or settle a score, it was also - subconsciously of course - to prove that humans are everything that we bluster about ourselves to be, that we hold dominion over this planet.  Mac and Dillon are like the Titanic hubristically sailing the Atlantic thinking they are unsinkable, they underestimate their enemy.  Once the Predator closes in its likely they might want to die just so they don't have to live in a world that they were wrong about.  These are the extremes the human mind will go to avoid damaging the ego and ultimately avoiding cognitive dissonance.  

I'm reminded of a scene in Maximum Overdrive when the discombobulated posturing waitress storms out of the diner screaming at the machines turning on them that, "We made you!".   She is then riddled to death with bullets by a machine, shutting down her 'idea of the world' to the stark reality of our overall lack of power. 

The Predator's arrogance of power is a reflection of our own, except he is as advanced as his technology.  He is from a civilization I imagine, that has achieved what we are desperately thriving to achieve, which is complete technological mastery.  The argument could be made that the Predator is bored with his technology, he could very well be bored with his existence, which is why he keeps going off on these safaris to excite himself.  He hunts down the greatest warriors any given world has to offer knowing that he's better, more advanced, and skilled than any of them.  

Herein lies the problem with progress and the ego, we, like the Predator, still have this hunter mentality but we are consumed by our technology.  This technology is a crutch that massages our egos into believing that we are invincible.  We are like Tony Stark posturing in this way, in that we avoid acknowledging our weaknesses and are only interested in our so-called strengths, which are only there with the help of our technology.  You see the problem with this line of ego-centric thinking?  The Predator's world has turned him into a god while Tony Stark played god a couple of times in the MCU, especially in Avengers: Age of Ultron. 

"Get to the copppaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!"    

The Predator is us in the future, bored, lonely, and angry.  We have given our knowledge and our humanity over to our technology.  We once advanced our minds through science, psychology, and philosophy where our knowledge was fought for.  Now our knowledge is a commodification existing within computer data and is bought and sold.  Tony Stark didn't build the Iron Man suit, his technology did, his A.I. operating system J.A.R.V.I.S did.  The Predator inherited technology without much knowledge to go along with it.  

"You are one...ugly..motha..fucka.."

Dutch, in the end, has to rely on his wits and doesn't have to rely on humankind's technology to save the day.  He uses his ancestor's archaic methods that have helped them survive long before the invention of the bullet.  Dutch uses the land to beat this predator while the Predator continues to rely solely on his technology.  Dutch makes a wooden bow and set traps but he does this knowing that he alone couldn't beat the Predator.  Here's the difference between someone picking up a gun and shooting someone with it and what Dutch does to defeat the Predator.  Dutch takes responsibility for his weapons, he makes and understands what they do.  There's certainly a large part of him that would rather not do this, but he has to in order to survive.

For all his testosterone and machismo, Predator is not about the big muscles, and the cheesy one-liners and might-is-right.  It is truly about the survival of the fittest, not by strength but rather by the intellect.  This film gets little to no credit for how smart it is, how intelligent its main character is.  The cleverest part of the movie is the last act, just Dutch vs the Predator, but most people generally remember all the bro-mancing, the cool, cunning kills by the Predator and 'I ain't got time to bleed' moments, but that was all camouflage.  This film is about the dangers of technology when put in the hands of people that don't understand, respect, or deserve to have them.  In our society, many of us take personal credit for technological advancements like we were right there along with the inventors themselves.  Much like we take personal credit for when our favorite team scores in the play-offs, like we hit the ball or slapped the puck.  If the truth be told, if any of us got dropped in the jungle with none of our technology to help us survive, we'd be fucked.

Predator is about using our technology responsibly as we move forward.  The alien was not using it responsibly, it used it for a sport to stave off boredom by collecting trophies.  In the end, Dutch became Nietzsche's Superman by seeing the iceberg before it hits and sinks the ship, before falling back into the safe and secure notion of ego domination.  While Dutch prepares to defend himself by setting up traps, the Predator polishes skulls.  The Predator isn't worried in the least, he's just concerned with his trophies to show off his dominance to whatever fucked up culture he's from.  He's concerned with his things, much like we are in our culture, objects that represent our so-called worth to our tribe here on Earth.  The most worrisome part of this film, technologically speaking, is the very end when Dutch defeats the Predator by dropping a massive log on its head.  Here we see that the Predator doesn't play fair, he again uses his technology, symbolizing the peak of his civilization, to kill Dutch even after he's been checkmated.  The dilemma here is this isn't two five graders pushing each other over who won the match, this is a massive atomic bomb level weapon that the Predator sets off in spite of his loss after Dutch showed mercy.

"This confrontation is the first test of courage on the inner way, a test sufficient to frighten off most people, for the meeting with ourselves belongs to the more unpleasant thing that can be avoided so long as we can project everything negative into the environment.  But if we are able to see our own shadow and can bear knowing about it, then a small part of the problem has already been solved: we have at least brought up the personal unconscious.  The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form.  It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness.  This problem is exceedingly difficult, because it not only challenges the whole man, but reminds him at the same time of his helplessness and ineffectuality." - Carl Jung  

When Dutch looks at the bleeding Predator dying under the massive log he curiously asks it, "What the hell are you?", mimicry being part of the Predator's defense programming, it repeats Dutch's exact words back to him, when it sees Dutch from its point of view, Dutch likely looks just as monstrous to the Predator as the Predator looks to Dutch, the creature then initiates his primary weapon on his left forearm console.  Through this action, the Predator essentially answers Dutch's question by showing him who the hell he is.  This is the biggest threat we face as a society where we live in an arms race and are not certain if the poor loser won't set off all their nuclear arsenal as they go down. "If we don't live, no one will fuck it all." Red buttons pushed all over the world sending the remaining members of us all back to the hunter-gather times only to start this lunacy all over again.