Article by Kelly Parks

Color Commentary by E.C.McMullen Jr.

AN ALIEN SCIENCE

Continued from Page 3
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PREDATOR and PREDATOR 2

If you were an alien and you landed on some random location on Earth and that location happened to be on the property of a gun-toting militia in the Montana outback, would you assume that those human's represented typical humans?

Of course not.

By the same token it would be foolish to assume that the handful of Predators we meet in these two movies are representative of their culture. Maybe most Predators are granola-eating vegetarians who listen to New Age music and vote for their equivalent of Ralph Nader. The ones we met might be extremists who couldn't stomach all that love and understanding crap and went off into the universe to live as they pleased. Who knows?

What we do know is that these boys (or girls or whatever) are here to hunt. They don't eat the humans they kill but take skulls (sometimes with the spine attached) as trophies. And in the amazing final battle scene at the end of PREDATOR 2 we see these trophies in an alcove on their ship, along with fearsome looking skulls from a variety of unearthly beasts, including one very familiar long skull: an Alien warrior.

Predator technology is more advanced than ours but not by much. My criterion for a little advanced versus very advanced is Clarke's Law:

"A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

If you can look at their tech and not understand exactly how it works but at least understand the physical principles, then they're just a little more advanced.

This doesn't fit very well with what I said in the beginning of this article about the odds of meeting a race near your own tech level, so I'm going to assume that the Predators are, in fact, very much more advanced than we are. But this particular group of Predators is choosing (maybe for sportsmanship or maybe because they're the equivalent of the Amish) to use - to them - very old-fashioned technology (like modern day bowhunters - Feo).

Which brings us, finally, to the Aliens vs. Predators contest itself.

Based on my long string of assumptions (a House of Cards that Richard Hoagland himself couldn't surpass), this means that it's really no contest in the sense that the Predator race is certainly in no danger from the aliens. They've had their number for a long time. To them it's just sport. Only to the humans caught in the middle is it deadly serious. The perfect ingredient for a good movie.

END

This article copyright 2004 by Kelly Parks and E.C.McMullen Jr.

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