The jungle looks like Earth until you see the sky. That is the first real idea in Predators, and it is a good one: eight people wake up falling through the air, land in dense green country that could be anywhere, and only later notice the moons and the planets hanging above the trees. By then the cages and the deadfall traps have already told them something is wrong. The 2010 film, directed by Nimród Antal from a script by Alex Litvak and Michael Finch, is the third installment in the Predator franchise, and its best stretch is the one where nobody knows anything yet.
Trailer, via PredatorsTheMovie.
Eight Killers Fall Into a Jungle
The premise is clean. Royce, a mercenary and ex-U.S. Special Operations Forces veteran played by Adrien Brody, meets the others as they arrive the same way he did. There is Cuchillo, a Los Zetas enforcer, played by Danny Trejo. There is Nikolai, a Spetsnaz Alpha Group soldier, played by Oleg Taktarov. There is Isabelle, an IDF sniper, played by Alice Braga. There is Mombasa, an RUF officer, played by Mahershala Ali. There is Stans, a San Quentin death row inmate, played by Walton Goggins. There is Hanzo, an Inagawa-kai Yakuza enforcer, played by Louis Ozawa. And there is Edwin, a physician, played by Topher Grace.
Each of them is a killer. That is the point of the cast list, and the film states it early and then does less with it than it should.
A Monument, Empty Cages, and a Sky With Moons
Following Royce, the group finds a strange monument, empty cages, and deadfall traps set by a U.S. Special Forces soldier who did not survive. Then they look up. The sky has visible moons and planets, and the realization lands: this is not Earth.
A coordinated attack by a pack of alien beasts follows. Royce works out the shape of the thing — the planet is a game preserve, and they are the prey. Cuchillo is killed, and his body is used to lure the others into a trap they manage to evade.
Three Larger Predators Arrive
Tracking the beasts to a camp, the group finds a captive Predator. Then three larger Predators — Tracker, Berserker, and Falconer — attack. Mombasa is killed. The others escape.
Isabelle identifies the captive Predator as matching the description of a creature that killed a special operations team in Guatemala before a lone survivor defeated it in 1987. That detail is the film’s one real bridge back to the 1987 original, and it is placed with care.
Ronald Noland Has Been Hiding for Years
After the group sets a trap for the Predators and only attracts a different alien creature, they meet Ronald Noland, a U.S. Air Cavalry soldier played by Laurence Fishburne, who has survived alone for years by hiding and scavenging. He brings them to his hideout.
Noland explains that the Predators abduct worthy prey from other worlds, and that a blood feud exists between the larger and the smaller Predators. He likens the difference to the difference between wolves and dogs. It is the film’s best piece of world-building, and Fishburne delivers it with the right amount of damage.
Royce devises a plan to free the captive Predator, hoping it will take them home. The group falls asleep. They wake to Noland trying to suffocate them with smoke. Royce detonates an explosive, exposing the hideout.
Brody Put On Twenty-Five Pounds
The casting is the film’s most deliberate choice. Antal and producer Robert Rodriguez specifically wanted to avoid an actor physically similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger. They wanted, in Antal’s words, to “go in a very different direction,” reasoning that real soldiers are wiry and tough rather than burly.
“We thought casting a physically ‘Schwarzenegger-esque’ character would have done the original film a disservice,” Antal said, “and would have done this film a disservice because we are not trying to remake or copy the original film. I told everybody early on that I can make anybody look tough. What I can’t do is teach them how to act.”
Brody put on twenty-five pounds of muscle for the role. He said he had been “blown away” by Predator and viewed the part as a challenge, wanting to bring a complexity to Royce that would contrast with Schwarzenegger’s work in the original. “I want it to be entertaining and part of the ride that people see when they see a movie like that,” Brody said. “But that’s not really why I’m in it and that’s not really what I brought to it. I brought the same kind of discipline that I would to a film like The Pianist.”
Brody has said he would be interested in playing Royce again in future sequels.
A Script Rodriguez Sat On Since 1994
Rodriguez had developed a script for a third installment as early as 1994, after seeing the original film. 20th Century Fox did not greenlight the project until 2009. Filming took place in locations including Hawaii and Austin, Texas, starting in September 2009, and lasted 53 days.
Rodriguez has said the title Predators is an allusion to the 1986 film Aliens. The title also carries a double meaning: it refers both to the extraterrestrial hunters and to the human characters pitted against them.
At the 2009 San Diego Comic-Con, Rodriguez said the film would feature an ensemble cast and that the most important element would be “great characters so that the audience feels they’re going on this journey with them.” He and Antal wanted each character developed enough to stand alone. Rodriguez also hoped to bring Schwarzenegger back for a cameo as Dutch, his character from the original film. That did not happen.
Topher Grace, who plays Edwin, was dubious when he first read the script. “I really liked the first Predator, but all the sequels haven’t been as good,” he said. “Then when I read this, I thought, ‘What Aliens was to Alien, this is to Predator.’ Because Predator never really got its due; it never really got that sequel.”
Edwin presents as a doctor who does not seem to belong among hardened killers. He reveals later that he is also a psychopathic murderer. It is the film’s one genuine swerve, and it lands because Grace plays the first half so mildly.
What Predators Gets Right, and What It Wastes
Here is the case for the film. The premise is strong enough to carry a franchise entry on its own: take the hunters’ logic from the 1987 original and reverse the camera, so the humans are the game. The planet-as-preserve idea gives the movie a structure, and Noland’s explanation of the wolf-and-dog feud between the larger and smaller Predators gives it a mythology. The Guatemala detail ties Isabelle’s knowledge to the first film without leaning on it.
And here is the case against. A movie about eight professional killers should be about eight professional killers, and Predators keeps losing interest in its own ensemble. The cast is deep — Brody, Grace, Braga, Goggins, Fishburne, Trejo, Ali, Ozawa — and the script kills most of them before they have had a scene worth remembering. Mombasa dies in the first big attack. Cuchillo dies early and becomes a lure. The film sets up a group of people defined by what they do for a living and then treats them as bodies in a jungle.
The action is competent without being distinctive. Antal can stage a chase and he can stage an ambush, but nothing here has the sweat and clutter of the original’s best sequences, and nothing has the scale the premise seems to promise. The 107-minute runtime moves, but it moves past things it should sit with.
The Predator design work is the exception. Three larger hunters against one captive gives the film a visual hierarchy, and the distinction between Tracker, Berserker, and Falconer reads clearly on screen. The blood feud Noland describes is the most interesting thing in the movie, and the movie does not resolve it.
Here is how the film’s pieces rank against each other, best to worst:
- The reveal of the sky — moons and planets over what looked like a normal jungle.
- Noland’s explanation of the blood feud between the larger and smaller Predators.
- The three-Predator design hierarchy: Tracker, Berserker, and Falconer.
- Edwin’s turn from mild physician to psychopathic murderer.
- The Guatemala reference tying Isabelle’s knowledge to the 1987 original.
- The alien beast attack and the trap that follows it.
- The deaths of Mombasa and Cuchillo, both spent too cheaply.
The Franchise Math
Predators was released in the United States on July 9, 2010, by 20th Century Fox. It grossed $127 million against a $40 million budget. Reviews were mixed. A fourth film, The Predator, followed in 2018.
That $127 million is the number that explains the next eight years. A $40 million budget and a $127 million gross is a return, not a phenomenon, and the franchise went quiet for most of a decade afterward. The film’s own cast seemed to sense the ceiling. Brody has expressed interest in reprising Royce. Grace framed the whole project as an attempt to give Predator the sequel it never got.
The Part That Still Works
The best thing in Predators is not a fight. It is the moment the group looks up and understands where they are. Antal and his writers built a movie around a single clean reversal — the hunters become the hunted, on someone else’s ground — and for about an hour it holds.
What breaks it is not ambition but nerve. The film has eight killers and treats most of them as inventory. It has a wolf-and-dog feud and never pays it off. It has Laurence Fishburne for a stretch and then burns him as a threat. The pieces are all in the source material; the assembly is what fails.
Predators is worth watching for the premise, the sky, and Noland’s explanation of the blood feud. It is not worth watching for the people it drops into the jungle, because it never lets you know them well enough to miss them.
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