As I was watching this film all I could think of was how much of a legend Robert Rodriguez is, that is until I discovered that he was the producer as opposed to the director. I guess the difference I see is that the director tends to have a lot more creative input to the movie whereas the producer sees the movie come together from a more business orientated view. However, the modern movie tends to have a lot more input from a lot more quarters that, say, a book, meaning that one cannot generally point to a single person as say 'that is his/her film' though the accolades generally go to the director (and they generally also appear first on the list of the crew).
Basically Predators returns to the style of the original film, namely a group of soldiers wondering through a jungle being hunted by, and hunting, the predators. However, unlike the first movie which involved a special forces team in South America, we have a number of 'dangerous' individuals dropped onto the planet so that the predators can hunt them. Also, we are dealing with more predators than we did in the original films (and the AVP movies are pretty much being ignored here).
Mind you, I suspect that you could still insert this film (as well as Prometheus, though I did not particularly like Prometheus) into the Alien-Predator universe and still have a somewhat consistent approach to the film. I do suspect that there are suggestions in the AVP movies that the aliens were created by the Predators to hunt, and the thing with Prometheus was that there was a suggestion that it was not until that film that the aliens were created (whereas in the AVP movies they had been around for a lot longer than that).
I still really like the AVP movies, where they attempt to bring the best of both of the movies into a single movie, as well as attempting to answer the question that has been floating around since the mid-eighties, and that was who would win out of a fight between an Alien and a Predator. One could also through in the question as to who would win out of a fight between a Terminator and an Alien or a Predator (though I have not seen a TVP or an AVT movie, or comic book, yet, not that I have looked all that hard – I'm sure they do exist).
The thing that seems to flow through this movie though is that the Predators kidnap the most dangerous of the humans, equip them, and set them off on a hunt. However, there is also the idea that these humans are not necessarily humans, but rather they are monsters. However the problem with equating these humans with monsters is that many of them still have human aspects to them. For instance the Yakuza still desires to fight an honourable fight, and the unknown special forces guy (who we never learn who or what he is, even at the end) goes back to help the others. However, it is also interesting to note that the one that seems to be the most human is actually the most monstrous, though this is not revealed until the end of the film (and sorry about the spoiler, but I do mark all of my movie commentaries as such).
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