Predator

The creature you see in John McTiernan’s 1987 film is the second creature. The first came from Richard Edlund’s shop: a lumbering thing with a dog-like head and yellow eyes, worn by Jean-Claude Van Damme. He left because he looked small beside the rest of the cast and the suit overheated unbearably. Stan Winston rebuilt the design, and the mandibles came from James Cameron, sitting next to him on a plane. Kevin Peter Hall, fresh from playing the sasquatch in Harry and the Hendersons, took over. The invisibility was made in the camera, not a computer. The red suit was keyed out, the shot retaken without actors on a lens thirty percent wider, and when the two were combined optically the jungle itself filled the gap. A real thermal scanner supplied the hunter’s view. The first forty minutes are built as a mercenary picture before the genre turns. Nothing about the creature is explained; its abilities are taught through repeated thermal inserts, which is why reading the plot first spoils it. The Mexican shoot made the crew ill, the jungle needed heat lamps, and Schwarzenegger spent three weeks in mud. The exhaustion in the last half hour comes from there. For a viewer who likes deducing rules by watching. Not for one who needs the hunter’s origin spelled out.