Predator (1987)
This movie is bad. Categorize it as violent Reagan era revenge fantasy against nameless Central American guerillas who die by the dozens at the hands of killer marines. And yet it receives mention here because the rain forest itself is the real antagonist. Never mind the opening shot showing a spaceship glide into earth’s atmosphere, the terror here is super-terrestrial. As the marines are hunted down and killed one by one, the natives are unequivocal: it is the jungle itself that is killing these American invaders. A terrified marine: “There is something out there waiting for us and it ain’t no man.” This is both the lethal mycelial intent of this environment—the toxic mushroom (no accident that the bulbous and mottled green head of the predator “alien” looks like a mushroom); and also the pure abstraction of death itself; that what waits for each man is the inevitable metabolic reclamation and recycling of the body back into the ecosystem; the death of a human is subservient to the life of the jungle. If anything one might view this movie as example of jungle-recoil: no wonder we can’t stop cutting down the rain forest.
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