Predator: Badlands Diorama
Once you start making dioramas about films you start seeing them everywhere. Case in point, I went to the AMC multiplex The Grove in LA and what do I see as soon as I enter the lobby? A diorama to promote the new Predator: Badlands film. It was a full-fledged installation with fake plants, a life-size Predator, rocks, glowing sword, and the like—I was impressed. Maybe the future is dioramas?
Predator with glowing sword as part of the diorama at the AMC Grove cineplex
Mikhail and I were actually heading to see this movie, so it was fun to find the life-size set in the lobby. The movie itself was bizarre, almost a throwback to 1980s sword and sorcery films like Beastmaster (1982) and their ilk—just with the veneer of the latest in CGI graphics. There was very little that seemed science fiction about the film, the ida of Predator clans and hunting mythical monsters made it feel much more like a D&D campaign. It was something of a big-budget b-movie rather than a Hollywood blockbuster. $110 million for a film with no real story, no production design, one star, and a hell of a lot of special effects would seem like a huge risk to me—but in just its first weekend it almost made its money back. The power of the diorama!
It’s something of a modern day “cinema of attractions” wherein people just go for the effect of the visual and sonic experience.* I laughed out loud at various moments given the absurdity of the story and writing. There’s a subtle self-consciousness around just how wooden and silly it all was; it walks that line of kitsch by playing an over empathetic, torn in-half android against the humourless Predator with daddy issues. The dearth of their “tool-based” relationship is only made more painful by the occasional attempts at comic relief with their orphaned pet Kalisk. It’s all very strange.
I think the real moral of this story is that the Predator figure is far cooler when the back story is left untold. Sometimes less is more. At the same time, I’m not sure why seeing it was so re-assuring, nothing like a really good bad action, adventure film to justify the $25 ticket and the 30+ minutes of commercials the theatre makes you suffer through. Turns out trash ain’t cheap.
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*My kids and I recently did that with Jurassic World Rebirth, which arguably much worse than Predator: Badlands cause it seemed to take itself so eriously.
