Well, everyone else's taken a massive dump on the turd pile, so who am I to refuse?
I, being an infallible optimist, had...hopes for the movie, and I'd sincerely hoped that the rumors about the autistic kid being a 'true warrior' was a load of ****. However, hearing things like; 'Autism is the next evolutionary level,' and **** like that proves conclusively that the PC brigade have finally managed to ruin pretty much everything.
To clarify; I do NOT have any problem with people being autistic, LGBT or whatever. But what really pisses me off is that people feel the need to shoehorn it into everything in every corner of our culture. If someone had said in 1987 that the Predator movie in 2018 would feature an autistic kid being proclaimed by a 9-ft super killer alien hunter monster thing as the ultimate warrior, they would have thought that person was probably high.
What made Predator great was that it combined OTT macho silliness with a genuine, intense and damn entertaining film. The true problem lies not entirely with Shane Black, though his hands were hardly tied, but with the fact that times are changing; in many ways for the worst, and, sadly, Predator has lost its place in our 'advanced' and downright suffocatingly politically correct era. The kind of macho swagger in Predator, the magic mojo that made it so damn good, has been thrown in the trash by a load of board execs that just want money.
Another example of a cornerstone franchise about to get the chop is that of James Bond; a truly iconic piece of film history, possibly (please don't kill me) more so that Predator. But Bond's way of life, the drinks, the action, the girls in particular, has been deemed sexist and prehistoric. While there are concessions and reason to some of this argument, the fact remains that it, tragically, isn't allowed to thrive any more because it's not what the PC brigade deem to be right (although ironically this goes against their values of equality).
But, I digress.The point I'm trying to make is that The Predator could never really have been what we wanted to see, not only because FOX doesn't care about the fans anymore, but also that the old-schooliness of Predator cannot be redone in 2018, for reasons previously stated.
Although the Predator did have a few fun moments and I did like the tie-ins a lot, as there really hasn't been enough of that in the franchise, I believe that the film's ultimate failure was inevitable, and even with the most passionate director at the helm, the magic was not meant to be.
Damn I need to get a life.
... one thing i did not heard from you guys is seeing Arnold return for at least a scene in this movie...
