Predator

Originally published on Letterboxd on 06/08/22

Colonial exploitation spatialized as venereal collapse. Its images, especially the primal tapestries present throughout the third act, are entrancing enough on their own (and at times they even reminded of Brakhage), but what binds them together is the way the camera seems to infect whatever it settles upon. Whenever Arnie's band of marauders is exposed to new environmental disruptions, the camera tracks their relationship with these disruptions, documenting how they interact with them and the emotional responses it provokes in them- which, in turn, guides them further into a leafy labyrinth.

A disease requires a vector in order to spread, and so the film identifies these vectors as the basest of bodily fluids- sweat and blood. When blood is shed, for example, it unleashes the production of disease. These diseases are not so much biological as they are psychological- the disease of hysteria seizes upon these professionals, reducing them to cavemen. It is only through a suppression of these biological functions via total sublimation within their environment that one of them is able to escape with their life, though perhaps not with their mind. The film's final frame, an inversion of the shot of helicopters superimposed against the horizon in Apocalypse Now, suggests not a swift withdrawal but a temporary escape that will soon be disrupted by the next imperialist invasion. The abyss has stared back.