Remembering Predator 2

Like Robocop 2, Predator 2 is a 1990 sequel to a classic 1987 sci-fi action film depicting a cop fighting crime in a major urban area in a near-future America descending into chaotic cyberpunk nightmare--and which was less successful with critics and audiences than the original. Like Robocop 2, I also enjoyed it, and now looking back find it an interesting time capsule--reminding us of where people thought the world was going, starting with the opener here, which in a combination of tabloid "trash TV" with a city collapsing into failed state levels of violence with Morton Downey Jr. (as "journalist" Tony Pope, but really we're supposed to recognize Downey Jr. here) reporting from a gang battle in Los Angeles being fought with grenade launchers.

Of course, in contrast with Robocop's social satire (it was, after all, a movie about the privatization of the public sphere, corporate power, and the links between big business and the equally business-like business of crime), Predator 2 had little to offer, merely wallowing in the image of breakdown--such that Downey Jr.'s inclusion in the film plays like endorsement of the figure, his politics and the mean-spirited idiot sensationalism of which he was then the face than criticism of the cultural direction he represented. Indeed, the commonplace that the city/country/world is "going to hell in a handbasket" was here merely taken for granted--the idea that the "urban" jungle of 1997 Los Angeles would be just as much a war zone as the original Predator's civil war-torn Central American setting simply a jumping-off point for another round of the aliens at their gruesome sport.