This is an extremely early draft for a predators sequel, because the main character in this piece is Dutch and not Adrien Brody. Yes, THAT Dutch. Ahnuld the governator, Dutch.
The story begins on a boat. We get this kickass introduction where these invisible beings board a ship. People die and Dutch, in his long scraggly hair (I imagined Arnie in his Conan The Barbarian days for this image) tries to jump ship.
Dutch gets surrounded, and more of these invisible beings reveal themselves. It can only mean one thing, ooohh shhitti--
But no, they aren't Predators, they're people, in Predator's armour!! Huh? Seriously what the hell is going on here? Nevermind that, they capture Dutch. Of course, with the advance weaponry, there's no way in hell Dutch is going to try to escape, at least not now. So he complies and goes along for the ride.
Soon, we learn that these people are on some snatch and grab mission. Dutch is apparently a wanted fugitive of sorts, and being the badass that he is, he ain't going to be taken away too easily. After they bring him into the ship and shed all that cool tech, he makes a desperate run to escape the ship falling soo short of actually accomplishing the feat. Of course he fails and they go on a trip to drop Dutch off on some planet for prisoners.
So the team goes off onto the planet to drop off Dutch and collect their pay. Easy, drop and run operation.
There couldn't be any complications, right?
"Wrong".
As you can expect, things go to shit as they try to escort Dutch to the prison complex. Predators reveal themselves, the team gets captured and Dutch runs away. The humans wake up inside a Predator camp, locked in a cage. Something tells me they aren't going to eat smores and sing Kumbaya around the campfire.
Moving around the camp, we see other Alien life forms in the cages. We get this weird cockroach like bug alien, and a praying mantis like thing among others.
If anything, this is more of an Aliens/Predators hybrid if you can call it that. The world in the original Predators had modern day technology and didn't have any of the cool sci fi things that this world has. This draft feels like it's bridging the gap between the cool sci-fi marines of Aliens to the universe of the Predators.
One of the problems I had with the script is that there's no Dutch for a lot of the story. The humans get kidnapped, Dutch escapes and he's not seen again until one of the transport team escapes the Predator camp (one of the last survivors). But to Rodriguez's credit, we're given an intimate glimpse into the rituals and lives of these Alien Warriors.
Another thing going against the script is that it feature a lot of characters. And I mean a lot. And they're basically all for the sake of Predator fodder. It does get a little difficult at times keeping track of who's who in the group because they all talk in this hyper masculine voice (even the woman in the group talks like a guy with the appetite of a sexual Tyrannosaurus). And it's pretty indicative of a script thin on an actual story. Most of the second act is watching the guys trying to escape only to be met with an untimely end.
All things considered though, Rodriguez does try to make each character shine in their own way. For example, Cadillac's character quirk is his insatiable appetite, he munches on any kind of shit he can find cause space food sucks ass, Hardwick's the woman in the group, not unlike Vasquez of Aliens and that should tell you all about her. And the rest... not so memorable save for their unique names. It's definitely a loaded cast to keep track of but it luckily rips a page from Aliens and we find that most of the cast dies (Duh, how else are you going to show how dangerous these Predators are?) so we don't have to keep track of all of these characters at once.
Plus, a lot of the team dies in very VERY gruesome ways. Dutch goes back to "save" some of the prisoners in the camp but only to so that he could find someone to help him pilot the ship. I thought it would be interesting to have Dutch camp around to survey the environment and cut back and forth between his reconnaissance of the area and the captured humans. But instead we're treated with a very gory middle section that shows the cage matches of the various other species trying to fight each other for the Predator's enjoyment. It gets kinda slow and repetitive in the middle because of this. We keep thinking that it's a story that is more about Dutch but he doesn't get his chance to shine and kick ass until much later.
So about the humans wearing Predator armour? What's up with that? Apparently, the humans on Earth have traded off their soldiers to the predators in exchange for military weapons, not because the governments of the world are a bunch of douches (thought they are), but for self preservation. Supply the humans and avoid extinction. The script does touch on a complex issue that seriously surprised me. How far are you willing to go to preserve the human race? Are the lives of a few soldiers meaningless to the survival of billions?
We also get an answer for why Arnold survived his encounter with the Predator. Turns out that one he met on Earth was just a pussy. Yeah, Arnie barely made it out alive fighting the pussies of the race. Guess it gives new context to this picture...
Hardened motherfuckers they are...
I found myself enjoying the script. Sure, characterization is pretty much thrown out the window for the most part, but I think it's acceptable in these scripts and the kills can be pretty gruesome. You have to give the guy credit though for finding many ways of cruelly killing off the humans. NOBODY gets off easy when they die.
Rodriguez has a certain talent for Macho-talk that at times, I found myself thinking "This really is the true sequel to Predator". C'mon, the original film is full of quote-ables. "Ain't got no time to Bleed", "If it bleeds, we can kill it", "This'll make you a sexual Tyrannosaurus", etc...
And of course, it isn't an Arnie script unless he's got a cheezy one liner, yep he has that too in this script. Dutch latches on to the ship as it flies away to escape, his legs get caught by the King Predator, Dutch gets his gun on him and says (in my imagined Arnold accent) "Fairwehl to Da King" and blasts his ass to Kingdom Come (couldn't help myself). Hehe, Classic Arnie.
Love it or hate it, bits of the script felt too much like Aliens. Instead of Space Marines, we get these... Space Marines with Predator technology. It felt more of a hybrid between Aliens and Predator and not necessarily an Alien vs Predator story. The macho talk from the original added with the cockiness and cool tech from what feels like James Cameron's Space Marines from aliens. Of course, it's not going to get more blatant than this line on pg 84
"this is the closest thing we'll see to an Alien vs Predator movie"
In all of the scripts that I've read over the past months (a year now actually...) I've come across a few that I've legitimately enjoyed enough to forget about the script's problems (Van Damme vs. Seagal anyone?). This is entertaining, and it reads like a movie. How many scripts have you read that are fun? Not too many from what I've come across in my time reading them, either I got bad taste in choosing scripts or script reading just isn't my thing.
One of the things I feel that gets lost for many writers when writing a script is having fun with an idea. It's scriptwriting, and many of your favourite films aren't going to be Casablanca or Citizen Kane, it's going to be some movie you have fun watching time and time again despite it's silliness. So don't try to be important when you write. Have fun and remember the lost days of when you were a kid playing with your action figures. It's kinda like the same thing except... you know with words. And lots of sitting on your ass.
There's no doubt that Rodriguez understands fun whenever he steps behind a camera. Just look at his films, Spy Kids, Planet Terror, the upcoming Machete, and Sin City plus some more of his films that I haven't seen yet such as El Mariachi. They don't try to be more than what they are on celluloid and I like that about his films.
I enjoyed this script, it was a fun romp.
4/5
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