Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Predator
1987 · John McTiernan · Predator on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how often the camera drifts up to canopy height. (camera)
McAlpine keeps finding low and high angles that look through leaves at the squad. Long before you see anything up there, the shot itself feels occupied by a watcher.
Payoff: You are taught to feel a presence before the film ever shows it. In the reading: dicisign. An image that makes you aware of someone perceiving is what the reading calls a dicisign.
Listen for the clicking and chittering under the jungle insects. (sound)
The creature arrives in the soundtrack first. Its vocalizations, plus a faint shimmer when the cloak moves, sit inside the bed of water, wind and bugs until you learn to pick them out.
Payoff: The film trains your ears to hunt before it gives your eyes anything to find.
Count the weapons and gear each man still carries. (setting)
The squad starts loaded: miniguns, grenade launchers, radio, packs, intel. Scene by scene McTiernan removes equipment, and the men who lose it are the men who stop functioning.
Payoff: The film's real countdown is not bodies but hardware.
Watch the flexed-forearm handshake in the opening minutes. (performance)
Schwarzenegger and Weathers clasp hands and shake, biceps locked, a staged contest over who is stronger. Displays of strength between men keep recurring, in banter, in posture, in how the squad moves.
Payoff: The creature that hunts them wants trophies and worthy opponents, which is what that handshake wanted too.
Notice when the gunfire stops and the smoke lifts. (cutting)
The squad empties everything into the treeline in one sustained barrage cut for maximum force. Then the cutting slows, the smoke clears, and there is nothing there. No body, no blood.
Payoff: This is what the reading calls the crisis of the action-image: a man acts with everything he has and the world does not answer. In the reading: crisis of the action-image. The wire between seeing and doing goes slack, and you can hear it in the guns running dry.
Once you have seen it
Track the mud from the moment Dutch falls in. (setting)
He does not deduce the trick. He slips into a bank, the creature loses him, and from there every move is a small experiment: mud, traps, branches cut by hand.
Payoff: The reading calls this the small form, where an act uncovers a hidden rule instead of a plan solving a situation. In the reading: action-image: small form. Falling teaches Dutch the rule, and each trap afterward discloses a little more of the hunter.
Count how many men remain after each attack. (structure)
The ensemble thins on a steady slope. Formation dissolves, then banter, then speech. Nobody is rescued and no one is restored to the group once taken.
Payoff: Attrition here is a downward slope rather than a series of setbacks, which is why the last act feels inevitable.
Listen for the men's own laughter thrown back at them. (sound)
The Predator mimics scraps of speech and laughter from the dark. On a second viewing you can hear which lines it has been collecting, and from whom.
Payoff: A voice cut loose from the body that made it is the cruelest thing the creature does.
Watch the thermal point-of-view shots and what they miss. (camera)
The heat map registers no faces, no cover, no jungle. Only warmth. Rewatching, you can predict which of Dutch's improvisations will work by asking what the creature's vision cannot see.
Payoff: Perception is the weapon in this film, and Dutch survives by removing himself from an image that only reads heat.
Carry this in: Count what the men are still carrying. The film takes their equipment away piece by piece.