--Adrian Brody, Predators
A much better reboot of its franchise than the MCU-style comedy The Predator, Predators takes place away from Earth, showing a planet used as a giant hunting area and expanding the series lore even as it keeps plenty of ambiguity all the way through. Most of the humor is mild, based in sarcasm instead of outright attempts to make comedy the focus of a scene. The action only complements the mystery and does not rely on an abundance of CGI. The performances are strong all around. Moreover, the film makes genuine additions to the lore, such as its introduction of Predator hunting "dogs," Predators of different sizes, and even the fact that the Predators have an entire planet they seem to have taken over for use as a game preserve of sorts.
Production Values
With the forests of the alien planet (said to have been filmed in Hawaii) as the main location, Predators has plenty of non-CGI areas and scenes that demonstrate the creators were not rushing to fill their project with unnecessary, artificial-looking digital effects. The cloaking technology and weapons of the Predators are pf course realized with CGI; it just never tries to usurp the emphasis away from the more human-oriented story and the actual jungle around the characters. As far as the effects go, Predators has very understated reliance on things beyond people and physical sets or places. Thankfully for the integrity of the series tone, it also has very understated uses of humor that are never the heart of the dialogue.
What of the acting? Adrien Brody, Danny Trejo, Alice Braga, Walton Groggins, and Topher Grace are likely familiar to many avid lovers of cinema, and each of them, along with several other characters that include a surprise cast member I will not reveal, gets a chance to express their own personalities and contribute to the group. It is to the film's credit that the core group of characters does not have the same over-the-top confidence of Dutch's group from the original movie. They overcome intergroup conflict, face obstacles with authentic performances that sometimes lean into multifaceted desperation, and reveal things about themselves in ways the original's story does not allow for.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
A group of seemingly random people find themselves falling from the sky with parachutes that activate close to the ground. Armed with weapons (with one exception), they overcome initial pressures to fight each other, exploring the forest around them together. Evidence mounts that they are not on Earth: the sun does not move as quickly as Earth's sun does, exotic planets or moons appear in the sky, and a bizarre species of dog-like creatures attacks them. It becomes clearer that they were probably taken from Earth to be hunted as trophy kills, examples of diverse human warriors that will provide great sport as prey.
Intellectual Content
Buried in the enigma of the setting and the science fiction trappings is a story about people choosing between survival at the expense of moral firmness and helping others even if it puts them at great risk. This is never emphasized in a way that disrupts the story; actually, this theme emerges naturally from the story over time. Issues like the existential significance and epistemological unverifiability of extraterrestrial life (how would a person be able to prove that an alien species is not just an especially exotic species from Earth that they have never seen or heard of?) are set aside in favor of a tale much more focused on how a handful of people personally respond when threatened by advanced aliens. This, in its own way, has genuine depth.
Conclusion
Better than the original in some ways, which even by 1980s standards had some moments with terrible effects and had less character development, and much better than 2018's The Predator, which abruptly mixes near-constant comedy with the once serious backbone of the series, Predators is excellent as a science fiction movie, as a Predator movie, as a sequel that expands on its predecessor(s), and as a film with a full plot that actually reveals very little about its universe. It would have been an objectively better springboard for a prolonged continuation of the franchise on practically every level than its 2018 sequel turned out to be.
Content:
1. Violence: In the most violent scenes, people are bloodily disintegrated by energy weapons and Predators have their heads cut off.
2. Profanity: "Damn," "shit," and "fuck" are used, and used quite a bit in the case of the latter two.
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