The Sci-Fi Thriller That Tried To Save The All-Time Manliest Franchise

By Joshua Tyler
| Published 1 hour ago

Predators wants to be the sequel that John McTiernan’s 1987 movie Predator deserved, and while it’s better than many of the earlier sequels it got, I’m not sure that’s saying much. After Predator 2 and the AvP movies, the bar was pretty low.

Still, give director Nimrod Antal’s 2010 take on the franchise some credit: It tries. It really does. That’s more than you can say for some prior efforts. There’s an obvious affection for the iconic alien hunters in the material, and even more affection for the original film, which they’re aiming to be a direct successor to. It’s enough to make it worth watching, but at the time, it was not as much as this franchise’s audience deserved.

Unlike all the other attempts at resurrecting Predator, this one at least had a good idea for a story. It starts with an unconscious man, free-falling from a great height. He awakens in mid-air and starts screaming.

It’s a genius way to start a movie, or it would be, if this scene were even remotely scary. The camera falls with him, plummeting at an insane pace through whipping wind and dizzying heights. This scene should be terrifying. Or if it isn’t terrifying, it should at least be thrilling. It is neither, and it’s just the first of many scenes that seem like they should really work on paper, but somehow, when they actually end up on screen, don’t.

Part of the reason the original Predator is so good is that it’s flat out scary. It’s a horror movie more than an action movie, and though you never get to know the characters in it intimately, you’re rooting for them to survive.

It’s a brutal film, full of gore and violence, which only serves to heighten the thing’s gritty reality. You believe that Dutch and his crew are being stalked by some sort of ultimate, unstoppable killing machine, and it’s utterly terrifying. You care about Dutch not because he has a lot of heartfelt talks with his soldiers, but because he’s simply that badass. Predators tries desperately to duplicate all of that and can’t.

There’s not a single edge-of-your-seat moment anywhere in Predators. It’s not scary. Not even a little. It never gets any better than that opening freefall: crazy things keep happening on screen, things which seem like they should be thrilling, but somehow never are.

Antal doesn’t really seem to have a knack for this sort of storytelling. He points his camera at what’s happening, but he’s either incapable or uninterested in doing anything to build tension.

It’s obvious from the beginning what’s going to happen. Take the plot of the original Predator, add a few more aliens, and make the human characters less sympathetic, and you have Predators.

On paper, it shouldn’t be this similar. We’re told repeatedly throughout the film that this plot is different. The original movie was about special forces soldiers dropped into a jungle where they encounter a lone Predator. This one is about a group of killers, kidnapped and dropped on an alien planet where they’re hunted for sport.

But aside from the occasional bout of mania, the killers act pretty much like any military unit, and aside from a single scene in which we see a bunch of weird moons, the alien planet looks exactly like that same Earth jungle we saw Dutch running around in back in 1987.

Predators contains more than one Predator, and that should be different. Except we rarely see more than two of them on screen at any time. Most of the movie’s battles pit a single Predator against a single human.

Predators sets out to pay homage to the original movie by echoing it, but instead it mostly ends up duplicating it. It’s a well-made film, but you won’t be thrilled by it, excited by it, or scared by it. Adrien Brody is a surprisingly convincing badass, and the sets are actual constructs rather than just a lame explosion of CGI. That’s nice, but a lot of it feels dated in a way the original 80s movie still doesn’t.

In spite of these issues, if you’re a Predator fan, if you missed it the first time around, I’d recommend streaming Predators. A brief appearance by Laurence Fishburne gives the movie enough life to keep you interested, and even if it’s not shot in a way that’s all that exciting, the movie has a few good ideas.

Predator versus Samurai? It’s every sci-fi fan’s dream. You’ll see it, enjoy it, and forget about it. Good enough.

Predators is currently available to stream on Hulu.