Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Predator
1987 · John McTiernan · Predator on Sightlines
4 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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Count what the men are still carrying. The film takes their equipment away piece by piece.