Predators: a reimagining by Derridata

I hope Derridata doesn't mind me sometimes reposting our private correspondence, but now that the latest installment of the franchise is freely circulating, it is time to ponder what greatness might have been.....

My perfect Predator film would be set in the future of an Earth having undergone environmental collapse - the Siberian tundra has melted releasing methane with catastrophic effects in ocean levels increasing 60m-70metres. To exacerbate the struggle for low-tech resources, food and water among the survivors, the Predators bequest the most violent and dominating groups weapons, Zardoz-like, retrieved from munition dumps and military bases. In my version no one survives - Predator and human succumb to the climate catastrophe, and the remaining Predators abandoning earth as too hostile a drowned world and bereft of challenging prey - my film would begin with the Predators hunting in Africa amongst the gorilla murders taking place in the resource wars of the Democratic Republic of Congo (the predators silently watch the procession of the bodies of executed gorillas being carried out of the jungle), and ends with the extinction of all primates, the final battle taking place in the oasis of corporate towers (in one scene a Predator is drowned, trapped under the weight of the glass case containing Damien Hirst's pickled shark).

I think I'm "hinting" at the achilles heel of the Predators - their repeated failure to carry out adequate risk managment...on a long enough timeline they succumb to complexity within their ritualised systems.

Here are the real world parallels of "animal capital":


"The story is a kind of microcosm of the war in the Congo and the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. It involves brutal militias, corruption, smuggling and an unfolding environmental nightmare.But it is also a story of simple horror, and of a moving human response. Stirton tells Terry Gross that the evacuation of the gorillas' bodies from Virunga was unlike anything he'd seen in more than a decade of covering some of the planet's worst atrocities.

"What Stirton and writer Mark Jenkins learned was that the answer is complicated: The story is a kind of microcosm of the war in the Congo and the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. It involves brutal militias, corruption, smuggling and an unfolding environmental nightmare.

But it is also a story of simple horror, and of a moving human response. Stirton tells Terry Gross that the evacuation of the gorillas' bodies from Virunga was unlike anything he'd seen in more than a decade of covering some of the planet's worst atrocities.

"I've never seen that degree of stoicism, or sobriety, or somberness," Stirton says. "It was a very sober affair. There was no talking. ... For many moments at a time the only thing you could hear was the sound of people walking. ... I've never seen that before, even when people were collecting the bodies of humans, when I've seen massacre sites."

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91835032