This is the first animated production in the franchise beginning with Predator (1987), starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. The basic premise is a highly skilled military officer, something like Army special forces or Navy SEALs, fighting an alien from outer space who has advanced technology and super strength with the singular goal of hunting and killing Earth's best warrior. In Predators (2010), the concept was introduced that the aliens were abducting humans and taking them from Earth to another planet where they would be fodder for deadly hunts or gladiator-style fights that are kill or be killed. Often, the humans in question were men in the military, but the franchise began introducing other types of human demographics as the one to fight the aliens.
Dan Trachtenberg is the filmmaker who directed and co-wrote Prey (2022), a film that had a Native American woman in the year 1719 fighting one of the aliens. For this animated film, also directed and co-written by Trachtenberg, he does it again with having the alien fight another person of a different demographic and different time period, or in this case the aliens fight multiple demographics from multiple time periods. In fact, we see three such fights.
The first fight takes place in the middle of the 9th century in northern Europe with a female viking. The second fight takes place in the early 17th century in feudal Japan with a samurai and a ninja. The third fight takes place in the southeast United States in the mid 20th century with a Latino pilot who serves in World War II. Each fight is essentially one long action sequence. Each one is also very violent, very bloody and very gory. It's mainly one evisceration after another and one decapitation after another. It's a lot of violence for violence's sake. Yet, it's probably not anything new for adult animation that one would see in a lot of hardcore anime. It's brutal martial arts.
If one is familiar with these Predator films, the pattern can get rather repetitive. The alien will stalk some human warrior out of a bunch of others. It seemingly picks the best fighter and then attacks that person, using its technology to kill others. While the alien is killing others, this usually buys time for the human in question to observe how the alien's technology works and what are its blind-spots. The human is then able to use the environment, as well as the alien's own technology against it.
Each fight is its own vignette, providing brief insight into these different characters. Each vignette offers some kind of lesson. The female viking learns a lesson about vengeance. The ninja learns a lesson about brotherhood and working together. The pilot learns a lesson about ingenuity and perseverance perhaps. These lessons are great but in service to what? These Predator films are akin to slasher flicks with science-fiction and action conventions utilized therein. These films can be enjoyed on visceral levels. However, Trachtenberg seems to be building some kind of additional lore that makes the actions of these aliens more baffling than anything else.
The aliens are meant to find the best human combatants. The viking and the ninja demonstrate why they would be considered the ultimate fighters. However, if one breaks down how each one won their encounters against the aliens, a lot of it comes down to luck or circumstance or by having help. The viking is helped by her environment, a cold environment, which works against the aliens whose technology is based on seeing heat signatures. The ninja is literally assisted by his brother, the samurai. Otherwise, he would've lost. The pilot is also literally assisted by other pilots in other airplanes. Also, in no way, would that pilot fare against a hand-to-hand fight with the alien. Therefore, I don't get what the metrics are for determining why these people are targeted.
Also, there doesn't seem to be any self-reflection on the part of these aliens, which has such advanced technology that allows them to travel through space. The limitation of the aliens' technology where they can only see heat signatures becomes a crucial limitation or weakness that over the course of a thousand years, they never examine or try to improve. It often feels like the aliens have no real strategy to what they're doing. They have all of this advanced technology but in their behavior otherwise, they act like wild animals who put no thought as to how to better themselves. It almost makes defeating them seem too easy in the end because these aliens don't learn or grow. Even in the recent season of HBO's The Last of Us (2023), the zombies learn and grow over time, but apparently not these predators.
Rated R for strong bloody violence, gore and language.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 24 mins.
Available on Hulu / Disney +.