If you thought maybe the novelization of 2018's The Predator had the original third act and other scenes we saw in the trailer that were markedly absent from the final cut, I have some bad news for you: it doesn't. In a move I have to find pretty amusing, the novel itself was overhauled just as the movie was, as the studio demanded that the adaptation reflect the movie's changes.
If this were the '80s or early '90s, I'm sure the book (originally written by Christopher Golden, with the changed/new material adapted by Mark Morris) would play out like Shane Black's original version to some extent. But alas, what we got has only a few, mostly superficial changes from the movie we saw and (for the most part), didn't like very much.
For the record, as someone who doesn't care much about this franchise but DOES care a lot about Shane Black movies, I found it to be pretty fun and the only one I've seen more than twice. But I know I'm in the vast minority here.
The biggest difference wasn't much of a surprise: the novel retains the original introduction scene for Casey, played by Olivia Munn. The scene, in which she is walking her dogs and repeatedly rejects the flirting of a jogger, was cut only a couple of weeks before the movie was released, once it became public knowledge that the actor who played the jogger was a sex pest.
Ideally, they would have just taken a cue from the Kevin Spacey/Christopher Plummer situation and reshot the scene with a new actor, but I guess by that point, Fox was sick of spending money trying to fix this thing and opted to chop most of the scene out entirely. Unfortunately, this means Munn's character is just dropped into the narrative with zero attempt to explain to the audience why we are cutting to her all of a sudden, setting the tone for the jumbled, confusingly edited 90 minutes that follow.
Indeed, most of the changes throughout the novelization produced a “Oh, so that WAS a little clearer at one point” kind of reaction in me. Jake Busey's Keyes is clearly established as the son of Gary Busey's character from Predator 2. The RV full of guns the Looneys obtain out of nowhere is from a survivalist they meet at the motel; Casey's seeming teleportation act during the climax is chalked up to a motorcycle she found, etc.
And the film's most confusing moment, where Traeger (Sterling K. Brown, the film's best asset) accidentally kills himself with the Predator's shoulder-mounted gun, is naturally a lot more coherent on the page. What happened was, his pants had caught fire, something he didn't even notice because he was so focused on the hunter. This is what prompts Casey to suddenly yell “Traeger!”, and why he panics (as the device automatically protects the wearer from danger), so at long last, it's perfectly clear how he ends up losing his head a millisecond later.
The authors also give us a very different version of Baxley, played by Thomas Jane. In the movie, he has Tourette's syndrome and is incredibly twitchy, coming off as the looniest of the Looneys by far. But here he's not much different than anyone else, and we lose a lot of his funnier lines (no “F— me in the face with an aardvark!”) in the process. His death is also slightly modified; while Coyle (Keegan-Michael Key) still puts him out of his misery, Baxley doesn't return the favor to his equally injured friend as he does in the film, leaving Coyle to die of his injuries naturally.
I was surprised to find there were a number of funny lines and exchanges that didn't make it into the film. There's a pretty good gag where the guys watch one of Dateline's “To Catch A Predator” segments while holed up at the motel, and a nice bit where Rory (Jacob Tremblay) admonishes Nebraska (Trevante Rhodes) for his nicotine habit. Then, when the man asks if he has any ideas how to kill the Predator, Rory suggests they get it to start smoking.
However, Traeger comes off more as a generic CIA jerk here than the kind of “guy you love to hate” version Brown offered audiences. It also curiously lacks the begrudging “truce” between him and hero McKenna (Boyd Holbrook), where they agree to kick each other's asses after they take care of the Predator, offering a quick shoulder clap to one another before getting into battle mode. These little moments are a big part of why I enjoy the movie despite all of its narrative blunders (which, again, are mostly the fault of a meddling studio), so it was frustrating that they were largely absent here.
McKenna gets a little more characterization than the movie offered, however. Through interior monologue we learn that his wife miscarried, suggesting that was part of why their marriage failed. On the bus, he dozes off and has a dream/flashback of Rory screwing up an easy play during a baseball game because he was fixated on his helmet, which prompts an angry dad in the stands to yell insults at the child, and McKenna, in turn, to beat the man silly.
Similarly, we are in Rory's head a lot. We even get an earlier suggestion that autism is merely the next stage of human evolution, which isn't the movie's finest moment in any capacity, but at least got it out of the way early, rather than it just coming out of nowhere near the film's (already not-great) climax.
As an autistic person myself, I don't mind the characterization/idea, partly because I've seen far worse examples and also because Rory has one of the movie's best lines (absent here) when Traeger tries to patronize him with some reverse psychology and the child replies “I can do that too: DON'T go f— yourself.” Overall, the character won't win any awards for the most accurate depiction of an autistic person, but again, in a world with so many extreme versions like Rain Man or Gigli, I can't get too uptight about this one, which at least presents him as a capable human being more often than not instead of relying on “helpless” stereotypes.
Oh, and the guy who accidentally cuts his own hand off with the Predator's shuriken/boomerang type device? He's given the name Bruce Willis here, saying his name is a blessing and a curse given the more famous one, and instead of being executed by Traeger, he survives for a while and dies at the hand of the Ultimate Predator (dubbed “The Upgrade” here) a few scenes later. It's an insignificant change, and almost has to be the author's invention, but I was so amused by how random it was, I figured I'd mention it anyway.
Ultimately, this novelization won't change anyone's mind about the movie, and it's unfortunate that Fox took the time to have the book rewritten to reflect its mangled cinematic counterpart (it even removes some of the scenes that are available on the Blu-ray's deleted scenes section, such as McKenna and Traeger's first encounter). I was very excited to see how the film was originally supposed to end, but apart from removing the movie's stupid epilogue (where McKenna is gifted his own Predator suit) and the handful of variations described above, the much-overhauled third act plays out on the page the same way it did on screen.
With Dan Trachtenberg reviving the franchise with Prey and Badlands, there's even less chance this movie will ever get a full reevaluation or a “Release The Black Cut” movement, making the book a somewhat pointless curio in retrospect. There's simply not enough difference between the finished film and the novelization to make it worth tracking down, whether you liked the movie or not. But if you must, at least it's cheap, and there's even an audiobook version if you want to let it accompany you on your morning commute.
