Wow, Alien, Total Recall, Die Hard and Predator all in one week? Was it because my birthday was a couple of weeks ago? Throw in Star Wars and I'll levitate out of my chair. The scene has a different tone between script and screen. In the script, it reads as a final physical battle, with the Hunter gathering his strength for a final push, and Dutch relying on his instincts, and a little luck, to finish him with an arrow. But then the Hunter just disappears. Kind of anti-climactic. It doesn't "feel" like the ending of a climactic struggle (i.e., Death Star blowing up, the Ark of the Covenant going bananas, Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man being hit by proton packs). It feels more like a whimper than a Bang. There are also some logistical problems putting it on screen. Mainly, would a man really be able to flounder around in a pool of water, find a bow, orient it, get an arrow (from somewhere--the pool? his quiver?) pull it back, and fire a perfect shot into the throat, all before an alien super-hunter can simply throw a weapon he's already holding? There are some problems there. The movie streamlines it. The movie changes all this, I think for the better. First, I don't know if the script showed Dutch constructing his network of devious booby-traps, but the movie did, and this allows them to pay off. He beat the Predator not just with his brawn, but with his brain, as well. This makes more sense with the rules the movie had laid out: that the Predator is superhuman. In a purely physical fight, the Predator would destroy Dutch. But Dutch's traps gave him the edge in a believable way. Rather than have yet one more physical confrontation (the script implies that they've been going toe-to-toe for a while) which might just seem repetitive to the audience, the movie makes this a true, climactic end. This is a movie ending. The Predator is beaten. There will be no WWF-style marshaling of strength for an acrobatic kick and jump-up after we've just seen him virtually dead. Instead, one wily turn by Dutch deserves another from the Predator: He's got one more trick up his sleeve, and ends the confrontation with a decisive, spectacular display, his mimicking of Billy's laughter ringing through the forest. No quiet evaporation into the ether with an arrow in the throat. The movie ends with a satisfying exclamation point where the script ends with a weak question mark. Quick hits: Script: hunter's mimicking voice is electronically modulated, then becomes perfect. Movie: his voice is a good, but imperfect, mimic. The movie version makes sense because his helmet's off--where would the electronic filtering come from? Script: Hunter seems more human-sized (a karate kick sends him flying). Movie: The Predator is super-humanly tough. I like the latter. If you can just shoot him and he's dead, where's the threat? Making him a nearly unstoppable killing machine ups the ante, and forces the protagonist to push himself to the limit to win. Finally, I loved the way the writers had an instinctive feel for how strange--"frightening, horrible visage"--humans would look from the POV of a thermal imager. I always wondered if the frightening, skull-like appearance of the humans from the Predator's viewpoint was a happy accident of the filming process or if it was planned. I'm impressed that the writers knew it going in. It added a certain indefinable, disturbing "something," to those scenes--the "magic."

Elsewhere in the script, the predator was described as more reptillian, with claws on its feet (kinda like raptors) that made a clicking sound. It also could mimic people's voices and lured one of the combatants to death doing so. That last bit where it's mimicking Shaefer is actually a payoff for a scene that was cut -- revealing that it was the predator that had lured one of his buddies to his death. Bit of trivia -- this is Jean Claude Van Damme's first American movie. He plays the invisible predator. They had him running through the jungle in red PJs. He didn't know that was the part he was getting. All he knew was he was getting to be in a John McTiernan action movie.

Ah, that explains the apparent discontinuity in the action description where the Hunter activates a spur on his wrist but kicks Schaefer and cuts him with his "terrible spur." (If the spur was on his wrist how did the kick cut Schaefer?) The raptor toe claw explains it.