#AHNOLD

[taletreader]

rip to ahnold’s other half of the classic handshake from predator. carl weathers, you’ll be missed as everyone from greef karga to apollo creed to…carl weathers.

[yeahiwasintheshit]

[sucka99]

[taletreader]

on my FB when i was talking about getting my shoulder surgery, i put "if it bleeds, we can heal it" but no one engaged with the post so fuck everybody

Predator (1987)

[mclmm-us]

[gleafer]

When your retired demon gets bored and has to fulfill his need to save you from IMMINENT DOOM.

[kingshook1]

[taletreader]

everything just reminds me of arnie

"In the Circle".

Aleksey Galushkov, 1920.

[zenathered]

I can't believe they just threw the line from The End of Days as a chat choice.

[a-mayan-joy-has-nuts]

Just realized that when I say “sorry” in everyday mundane life shit , I say it like Arnold Schwarzenegger accent. 😂

“Sohrry”

[lukzmarc]

You know what, hold this.

[untwinks your Link]

[talkstothemoonandstars]

In this news article, Ahnold talks about his medical issues, and the fact that he had multiple surgeries before this one. Several were BEFORE Covid, so obviously also before the Covid vaccine. (anti-vaxxers are really, really stupid).

Yes, it was totally the vaccine.

Not the fact he has, by his own acknowledgment, spent most of his life abusing steroids and smoking cigars. And his family has a history of heart problems.

ffs.

[yourplayersaidwhat]

(Terminator-knockoff Warforged is trying to get Blood Hunter to follow him out of danger...)

DM: "Ooh, say the line!"

Warforged: "What line?"

Warlock: "THE line!"

Warforged: "Oh!"

Warforged: (Ahnold voice) "Get to the haowse!"

Everyone: "NO."

[cobragardens]

I keep seeing this description pop up in fic and now here, and it barks the very shins of my brain so I have to make this argument.

Y'all. Yautja do not have small eyes.

What they have is eyes the size of human eyes in BIG. CHIBI. HEADS.

Look at a picture of Kevin Peter Hall in the Jungle Predsuit without the head. Look at the size of his eyes. Look at the size of his head. Now look at the size of the Predator's head. Yautja don't have small eyes, they have ENORMOUS SKULLS.

Like it is literally a plot and relationship-development point in AVP that Yautja eyes can look human. Scar's green eyes and dilated pupils (especially compared to the red-ringed yellow eyes and constricted pupils Predator fans are expecting) humanize Scar for Lex and for the audience when he removes his mask. That's why there's a close-up shot of his face BEFORE he roars at her: so the audience are forced to look at his eyes and receive the message that Lex has looked at Scar and seen a person and not a monster; that's how we understand why Lex doesn't flinch or run when Scar gives that iconic roar.

It's a great callback to the unmasking in the original Predator, and it uses the unmasking-closeup-roar in a new way, showing the audience that yes, this is a Predator, but he's not quite as alien and hostile as all the Predators we've known before. It's also a wonderful moment of communication between the characters: Scar's challenge isn't "I'm going to fuck you up, Ahnold," it's "Here I am, big and scary, can you still handle being friends?" And Lex' answer is "Yes, I see you, yes you're scary, but I'm not going anywhere."

That relationship-building is what gives the final action sequence of AVP its stakes, its emotional weight: this isn't just a random Predator whaling on a Xenoqueen, this is Lex' friend, risking his life to protect his friend, who accepted him and joined his murderclub. Scar's death is painful to us because he's personalized in a way Celtic and Chopper aren't, in a way no previous (canonical) Predator has been. That personalization revolves around that pivotal unmasking moment when Lex--and the audience--notices not how alien Scar's face is, but how human his eyes are. If Yautja eyes are not similar to human eyes, the entire end of the movie wouldn't work as well as it does.

[unsoundedcomic]

Something about Ufal in that last panel really just screams "Ahnold" to me. I want to caption that panel "Come vith me if Ufal to live."

[cantsayidont]

The *other* reason this happens, beyond the money/scope issues, is that the third installment of a movie series is often where the producers start struggling with existential questions about what the audience is actually coming to see, and in particular whether they're coming for the characters, the actors, or the premise. This is of course seldom wholly divorced from the money issue, because after two successful sequels, the original star(s) will likely either want a bigger piece of the action or be contemplating moving on lest they get hopelessly typecast.

This central question doesn't necessarily have an obvious answer, particularly with Nerd Media genre products. ALIEN and THE TERMINATOR, for instance, are horror movies (and TERMINATOR is functionally a slasher movie), which by nature tend to regard their characters as disposable. The area where both series run into problems creatively is, not coincidentally, the point where the films force viewers who were there to watch the continuing adventures of Ellen Ripley and Sarah Connor to part ways with viewers who are mostly interested in alien monster mayhem and in underwriting Ahnold's political aspirations. So, ALIEN3 went through a whole series of plot iterations (one of which, the William Gibson script, actually leaves Ripley in cryo the whole time and switches focus to Hicks as a way of delaying the question of whether Weaver would be willing to return), culminating in a finished product that ends Ripley's story in a way I don't think most people (including me!) wanted to see, while T3 not only cynically sabotages its predecessor's moral point, but callously dispenses with the Linda Hamilton character, who is simply written off as having died at some point between T2 and T3. (Boo!)

That both those series have female leads is of course not coincidental either, but the basic conceptual and financial pressures can still apply even if that isn't the case, with generally similar results. (After T3, the TERMINATOR franchise promptly ran into the same issues with Ahnold.)

New thesis: It's possible to make a good movie (shocking, I know, but occasionally true), and it may be possible to make a surprisingly good sequel, but decent third movies are very rare, and diminishing returns set in rapidly beyond that (unless the series is basically just a series of unconnected variations on the same formula, and sometimes even then).

(Before anyone brings up LORD OF THE RINGS, (a) Tolkien regarded LOTR not as a trilogy, but rather one large book grudgingly divided into three chunks as a concession to the publisher, and (b) considered strictly as a movie, THE RETURN OF THE KING is notably less effective than its two predecessors.)