Flasz On Film

The Predator franchise belongs to that weird exclusive club of film series that somewhat naturally cultivated a cultural universe around them despite the fact that nobody really expected (or even wanted) them to do so. Predator, Alien and even The Terminator deployed only minimal worldbuilding in their narratives because their aims were much simpler and smaller. At the core of it all, Alien was only a slasher in space, The Terminator was a slasher with the villain coming from the future… and predictably, Predator was equally just a slasher in a jungle.  

What made that movie special was (1) the fact Arnie was in it in top physical form and (2) the villain he faced was cool. Sure, there’s way more to that, from quips and ensemble camaraderie to Alan Silvestri’s iconic score and a truly immeasurable memetic potential, but what I believe was the seed that led to the inception of a franchise with extended worldbuilding crossing over into many other cultural items was the titular Predator himself. Built like a brick shithouse, armed to the teeth with cool gadgets and incredibly cinematic technology with an ability to see infrared radiation the way we perceive visible light, not to mention the beetle-like demeanor hiding beneath his mask, Predator must have given fans the world over a substantial nerd-gasm at the time of its release.

Therefore, it was naturally a matter of time for Predator to take on a life of its own, partly spurred by a handful of Easter eggs casually left behind by the filmmakers in the 1990 sequel starring Danny Glover. Namely, the hard-to-miss trophy of the Xenomorph displayed proudly on the Predator’s spaceship and the moment towards the end when a bunch more Predators swoop down to recover the corpse of their fallen comrade and leave an 18th-century flintlock pistol in the hands of the thoroughly discombobulated Danny Glover. This suggested that Predator and Alien could exist in the same universe (which then spawned movies, comic books, video games and extended universe novel capitalizing on this supposition) and that Predators have visited Earth in the past… which immediately lent itself to a flurry of what-if scenarios polluting many a conversation between adolescent boys and grown-ass men alike.  

That’s more or less where the bulk of worldbuilding allure behind Predator movies stems from. Wouldn’t it be cool if the Predator fought a Xenomorph? Who do you think would win: Batman or Predator? It’s Batman, by the way. There’s at least one comic book exploring this hypothetical scenario. What would it be like if Predator came down to Earth during the conquest of the Americas and you had Comanches with their tomahawks squaring off against Predator? It’s literally now a drinking game of “who do you think should fight Predator next?”  

However, at the same time the people who would go on and reduce these drinking game ideas to practice needed some narrative glue to keep their stories together. Therefore, the series grew its lore the way a poster stand grows thicker by virtue of having new layers of advertisements glued to it without anyone bothering to remove the old stuff. And somehow we ended up in a world where the Predator series has the baggage of its Yautja lore, the honor code, language and all sorts of bullshit reasoning behind their biology and culture which retroactively rationalizes decisions made while making the original movie by people who never intended for these elements to make any sense at all.

If you care to  dive deep into poorly-written fan fiction written with the skill of a creative writing dropout who went on to write stories for second-rate role-playing video games, you can learn all about the reasons why Predators have green blood, why they have dreadlocks and anything else, really. If you don’t mind literary dumpster-diving, you can become a local expert on Predator franchise in five minutes flat. Hell, you can even skim-read some of the many wiki pages maintained presumably by socially awkward neckbeard incels who engage in spewing anonymous online vitriol at anyone who dares to contradict the accepted Predator and Alien canon, or something.  

And I think it won’t come as a surprise to anyone when I respectfully point out that none of the ancillary world-building found in the Predator extended lore counts as even remotely original or interesting. It’s all a cultural distillation of surface-level references put together by people who otherwise didn’t have an interesting story to tell and funneled the most identifiable elements of iconic movies, books and videogames into what essentially became a pop-cultural soup. 

Now, lo and behold, the world has officially folded upon itself because we have found ourselves in a position where new movies are made based on material already distilled from other sources and filtered through the monochromatic lens of the single franchise their authors ever cared about. The new addition to the Predator franchise, subtitled Killer of Killers is a perfect example of such twice-regurgitated cultural nonsense packaged into an animated anthology and dropped unceremoniously onto Disney Plus and Hulu. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg (who previously helmed Prey and is about to come out with—Lord, help us all—another Predator movie later in the year, subtitled Badlands) this is a collection of a few of these what-if scenarios. What if a Predator fought a Viking? Or a samurai? Or what would happen if a Predator ship got tangled up in a WWII battle in the North Atlantic? Or, or, or… hear me out, guys! What if we got a Viking, a samurai, and a WWII pilot and then took them all to a Predator planet and had them fight Predators to the death and then—aspirate, aspirate!—they would fight like a mega-Predator with dreadlocks down to his ankles? And there would be cool weapons and stuff and ships and the samurai and the Viking would have no idea what the other one says and thinks but they would have to work together? WOULDN’T THAT BE COOL?  

And the chorus of Trachtenberg’s cheerleaders would reply in unison that indeed it would be totally fricking rad, yo!  

Jesus H. Christ!  

This is where we are as a species where millions of dollars are spent on a movie that contributes absolute bupkis to our collective experience on this planet and peddles nothing but shameless fan service aimed at sexually frustrated twentysomethings still living in their parents’ basements and refusing to develop a personality or a set of skills good enough to survive on their own in the wild. And it is all put together using the kind of animation technology I remember finding in cutscenes from videogames I played in the mid-2000s. Twenty years ago!

Look, chief. I ain’t gonna lie to you here—Predator: Killer of Killers is a stinker among stinkers, a turd so profoundly turderific that it could help you revise upwards any terrible movie you’ve seen in the past year. It is a colossal waste of time, money, effort and energy. In fact, it’s the energy I worry about the most here because you have no idea how many megawatt hours it took to render this movie and how many metric tonnes of carbon dioxide ended up expelled into the atmosphere while this movie was being made powered by Nvidia. Next time you hear a news item about the global temperature creeping up and how we’re not doing enough to slow it down, let alone reverse the trend, think that a small fraction of this increase in global heating was attributed to Dan Trachtenberg insisting to his financial backers that it was indeed a good idea to make this piece of doo-doo, spend months animating it and then release it upon the unsuspecting masses… many of whom (based on how this turd was received) ate it up and massaged their tummies as though it was the best thing they saw this year.  
 
Wow. Just wow.  
 
I don’t normally allow myself to stoop to this level of visceral anger but Predator: Killer of Killers really made me re-evaluate my life choices, because there were many things I could have done with my life in the ninety minutes it took to watch this fan-fic calamity for horny incels. I could have smoked like twelve cigarettes or gone outside to find a pit bull I could antagonize. Either of these choices would have been much more enriching as far as I am concerned.