Jane Austen meets John McTiernan. No, really.
The movie will start out as a Victorian/Edwardian-era costume drama of manners and class stratification, which will be interrupted by Predator — yes, the scary dreadlocked alien Hunter Of Humans from the 1980’s movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, and Jesse Ventura* — arriving on the scene to hunt down the inbred aristocratic twits vying for good marriage matches while pining away for true love in a cloistered social hierarchy. Wow, when I put it that way, it leaves me pretty much rooting for Predator.
Of course, other movies that change theme dramatically at midpoint tend to leave the audience very confused and unsatisfied with either story. Still, in its own way, it’s a perversely brilliant and subversive idea.
* Did you know that the same actor who played the Predator in the first movie also played the helicopter pilot, who comes in to rescue Arnold at the end of the movie? McTiernan did that as a favor to the actor, who was under so much makeup as the eponymous baddie that you’d never know he was actually a good-looking, muscular actor, and the guy wanted his face out there so he could get more acting jobs in the future. Sadly, the guy got AIDS from a blood transfuion (really) and died in 1991. Well, now you’ve got your movie trivia for the day.
