He said he had this script, and maybe I could direct it. I was at the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” Playboy Mansion party, sitting in my pajamas next to Joel Silver. How beautifully ’80s is Commando? Lester agreed to direct it while sitting next to Joel Silver at a Playboy Mansion pajama party. Lester (who’d directed Firestarter, his first major studio picture, the year before), feels like the first, and the ultimate “Arnold Schwarzenegger Movie.” He’d been in two Conan movies and was fresh off The Terminator, and was well on his way to bigger things, having succeeded mainly in proving that he could look like Arnold Schwarzenegger on film, which was a desirable quality in and of itself.
Commando arnold schwarzenegger shotgun movie#
It's not Oscar material, needless to say, but it's a great action movie in part because it already knows that.In 1985, Arnold Schwarzenegger was a giant buff dude, but he wasn’t quite a star. It is truly a fight between a group of predators, which we understand because they are human like us, and a single predator whose powers and weaknesses are unknown. In some cases, this transition takes place during a single shot and with virtually no movement in the shot at all except a change in someone's expression. Consider, for example, the ease with which the movie switches from showing the guys hunting the alien to their realization that they are the ones being hunted. Yes, the movie occasionally gets embarrassingly macho, but the skill with which it is put together far overshadows any tough-guy goofiness. Oddly enough, it is not until the awful Predator 2 that we learn that it kills for sport. The first deaths suggest vengeance if not some sort of ritual, but later ones suggest that the alien may be feeding off of his (or her) victims. Just enough is shown to show how vicious the alien is, and there are some strange things done to and with the bodies that make you wonder about the alien's intentions or needs.
They are just gory enough to illustrate the violence of the enemy without being gratuitous. The death scenes are actually pretty tasteful, given the genre. This is also, incidentally, weakly rehashed in the sequel, using the secrecy of this mission and team as an excuse to have more guys who don't know what's going on. What Predator does do, very effectively, I think, is that it has the guys fighting some very human enemies, which allows the movie to later take its sweet time in having them realize that the new enemy is not human at all. Alien, on the other hand, went into remarkable detail about where its alien came from. Predator doesn't waste much time dwelling on the origin of the alien, we pretty much assume it came from a space ship that flashed across the screen at the opening of the movie. One thing that I notice about both of them is the way they take their time in introducing the enemies which, in both films, are aliens. I am currently in the process of re-watching both series', for obvious reasons. I watched Predator having never seen it from beginning to end and having just re-watched the original Alien. But I guess comic relief has to come from somewhere, and since complexity is not a requisite for movies like this, I can't really expect a lot of thought being put into the comedic content either. They don't reveal anything about the characters who say them, they don't add to the story or further the plot, and with rare exceptions, they're not funny. Arnold, on the other hand, is actually (and thankfully) given a relatively small amount of stupid one-liners, which are an idiotic byproduct of hard action movies that I've never really understood the necessity for. And the book's actually pretty interesting there are some funny stories in it about things that went on while they were filming this movie. Jesse Ventura even wrote a book which was released while he was the governor of Minnesota and he used his favorite line in this movie as the title. Interestingly, the movie features two eventual governors. It may turn out to be a movie about a lot of muscle-bound meatheads in the woods, but it doesn't insult the audience or try to apply complexity to a story that can't support it. This is one of the things that made First Blood so good. No romance, no complex back story, no soldier struggling with problems in his past or even trauma caused by the horrible things he experiences during the movie. The movie starts, the guys get dropped in the jungle, lots of blood and carnage flies across the screen, and the movie simply ends.
I enjoy watching his movies just because he's such a watch-able guy, even in his bad movies (which are many), but I think the thing that really makes Predator stand out is its simplicity. Consider that so many of the roles that Arnold Schwarzenegger takes on are so similar, including Predator, and yet this film is so much better than most of the others.
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