Perhaps They Had Other Business

I rewatched Predator Thursday night. I love that film so much. The explosions, Arnold's various lines/vocalizations*, Jesse Ventura pontificating upon the sexual enhancement that comes with chewing tobacco**, Mac threatening to bleed Dillon and leave him in the jungle if he gives away their position again, the action, the crude jokes, Billy's outstanding lunatic laugh***, all of it.

I think my favorite scene is immediately following Jesse Ventura's death, when Mac mows down a good chunk of the forest with the Minigun, only to be joined by the rest of the squad, who help him in fighting the reforestation of the rain forest. Because there were bad guys to find, and trees make good hiding places, damn it!

Still, something came to mind while watching that scene. The whole reason they were in that section of jungle was because the heli couldn't come to the encampment they had destroyed. If you will recall, there were more guerillas all over the place, 1 or 2 klicks away, tops. Since the military couldn't be there****, the squad had to get someplace safe to be picked up. So off they go into the jungle. Well, what happened to those guerillas?

Figure they hear the fighting and return to the encampment. Wouldn't they try and hunt down the people who destroyed their base? How could they not catch up? It's not as though the squad was making great time. They stopped when Billy had a bad feeling, then their hostage escaped, then Hawkins was killed, then they spent time trying to find his body, then they wiped out a couple acres of forest, then they camped for the night, had their position given away when the pig triggered their traps, then the next morning they set that elaborate trap with the net, and the swinging logs, after that failed, Mac and Dillon chased the Predator, the rest tried to carry Ramirez and his broken ribs until he died, then Dutch took another night to have a big fight with the Predator, which was full of explosions, yelling, and various other position betraying noises.

So where were the guerillas? Did the Predator kill them, so they couldn't interfere? It was watching the big assault from the trees, so he could have waited for the guerillas, and wiped them out, but that would have taken time, if there were enough of them that if was prudent for Dutch and his squad to withdraw quickly. We know it'd gotten ahead of them by the time Billy had his bad feeling and the girl tried to escape. So did the guerillas just get scared? Maybe they saw what happened to their base, got angry, started to pursue, then heard the attackers laying waste to the forest ahead of them, remembered how effectively their base was wiped out, and decided discretion was the better part of valor?

* 'Get to the chopper!' being the famous one, along with 'If it bleeds, we can kill it', but I was always partial to the bestial yell he calls out the Predator with. He has some impressive lungs. My job requires me to spend a lot of time in the woods. I really ought to cut loose with one of those while my coworkers are around. However, I do let out a Ric Flair "Whooo!" upon completion of another work day.

** It probably just about offsets the damage to his testicles being done by the steroids he was probably taking. That's not fair of me, is it? I don't know that he was taking steroids. OK, if he was taking steroids, the tobacco probably only offset the testicular damage. If he wasn't taking steroids, then I guess it really was making him 'a goddamn sexual Tyrannosaurus'.

*** Since it was his laugh the Predator was aping when it triggered its self-destruct sequence. That is my favorite deranged laugh of all time.

**** Here's something else. During the big attack scene, Dutch tells Mac to get everything ready to go, 'No traces'. How the heck is he supposed to eliminate all traces of U.S. military presence? They must have wasted thousands of rounds of ammunition. And if that stuff isn't the traces, then what was Arnold talking about?