Predators is the franchise's most respectful sequel, a film that understands what made the original work and attempts to replicate its essential structure in a new environment. Nimród Antal's 2010 film, produced by Robert Rodriguez, takes the original's premise of elite humans hunted by the Predator and scales it up, dropping a group of the world's most dangerous killers onto an alien game preserve planet where they become the prey. It is a more modest and more satisfying film than its ambitions might suggest, and it is the franchise's strongest entry between the original and Prey.
At a Glance
Director: Nimród Antal
Runtime: 107 minutes
Starring: Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Alice Braga, Walton Goggins, Laurence Fishburne, Danny Trejo
Release: 2010
Critics Rating: ★★★½ (3.5/5 stars, the franchise's strongest sequel until Prey)
Audience Rating: ★★★½ (3.5/5 stars, a solid return to form)
Review Breakdown
Plot
A group of killers, soldiers, and criminals find themselves dropped onto an alien planet without explanation, hunted by a clan of Predators using the world as a game preserve. The ensemble is assembled with more care than the genre typically allows, each character defined by a specific kind of lethal competence that gives the film's systematic reduction of the group a dramatic logic the more anonymous ensembles of lesser films lack. The alien planet setting is the film's most significant creative decision, giving the franchise a new environment that reinforces the original's central inversion: the hunters become the hunted. The Noland sequence, in which Laurence Fishburne appears as a soldier who has survived on the planet for years, is the film's most dramatically interesting passage and its most effective piece of world-building.
Characters
Adrien Brody's Royce is the franchise's most morally ambiguous protagonist, a mercenary of considerable tactical intelligence and minimal human warmth whose arc across the film is a gradual and reluctant discovery that survival requires cooperation. Brody committed physically to the role in ways that surprised audiences expecting a more conventional action lead, and his performance gives the film a centre of gravity that holds the ensemble together. Alice Braga's Isabelle is the film's most conventionally heroic character, a sniper whose knowledge of the original film's events gives the audience its most direct connection to the franchise's mythology. Walton Goggins' Stans is the film's most purely entertaining creation, a death row inmate whose cheerful sociopathy provides the film's darkest comedy.
Tone
Antal pitches the film at a register of sustained tension that is closer to the original than to Predator 2's urban chaos, using the alien jungle environment to recreate the original's sense of oppressive, hostile landscape. The film is less interested in action spectacle than in the mechanics of survival, and the set-pieces are staged with a spatial clarity and a physical intelligence that gives them a weight the more effects-heavy entries in the franchise lack. The tone is the film's most consistent strength, maintaining a register of genuine dread throughout without the tonal inconsistencies that undermined Predator 2.
Meaning / Themes
Predators extends the original's concern with the ethics of hunting into a more explicitly philosophical register, using the alien game preserve as a mirror for human violence. The film's central irony, that the world's most dangerous humans are themselves prey to something more dangerous, gives the franchise's central theme its most direct expression: that the experience of being hunted is the only thing that can make a killer understand what it means to be prey. Royce's eventual decision to help Isabelle escape rather than simply survive alone is the film's most significant dramatic development, a moment of reluctant humanity that gives the film an emotional resolution the more purely action-focused entries rarely achieve.
Direction
Antal's direction is confident and spatially intelligent, using the alien jungle environment with a craft that gives the film a visual identity distinct from the original while maintaining its essential atmosphere. The Predator reveal sequences are handled with a restraint that suits the material, and the film's practical effects work gives the creatures a physical presence that the CGI-heavy later entries lack. John Debney's score draws on Alan Silvestri's established themes while giving the alien environment its own sonic character, and the result is one of the franchise's more effective pieces of film music.
Cultural Reception
Predators received solid reviews on its release and was a modest commercial success, widely regarded as a significant improvement on the franchise's previous entries and a respectful return to the original's approach. It is now consistently ranked as the franchise's second or third strongest entry, behind the original and alongside Prey, and its reputation has grown as audiences have come to appreciate its restraint and its craft. The Noland sequence in particular has been increasingly celebrated as one of the franchise's most inventive individual passages.
Final Verdict: The franchise's strongest sequel until Prey and a film that understands what made the original work. Brody's Royce is the franchise's most morally complex protagonist, Antal's direction gives the alien environment a spatial intelligence and a sustained dread the more action-focused entries lack, and the film's restraint is its greatest strength. Predators does not reinvent the franchise. It reminds you what the franchise was capable of.