The predators are known as the Yautja, or the Hish-Qu-Ten, according to the expanded world, particularly comics. These humanoid but massive beasts are a race of extraterrestrial beings who are significantly more technologically advanced than humans and function based on an intrinsic drive to hunt for sport. They go to several worlds in search of the most powerful and dangerous warriors to hunt and develop their talents.
The Xenomorphs, on the other hand, remain their archenemy and primary victims, as they are not only tough to kill but can also be the cause of a Predator’s death. In truth, Xenomorphs are killed by Predators in order to gain the status of an adult Yautja or Predator. We have created various videos that explain the Yautja society’s history, biology, society, and culture. You might want to take a look at those films for much more fascinating information. In this video, we will go over all six films in which the Predators debuted and try to piece together a cohesive plot for this fairly disjointed franchise.
Predator (1987)
Major Alan Schaefer or Dutch was an ex-special force member who, along with his men, was hired by the United States Army to go on a rescue mission intended to bring back a cabinet minister who was abducted by Guatemalan guerilla forces. He came to the coast of Conta Mana only to meet with his old friend Dillon, who now works for the CIA and was supposed to accompany Dutch on the mission.
However, Dutch was apprehensive of having a spy on his team. They cross the border on a chopper and rope down into the thick and dense jungles of Guatemala. They soon discover the crashed chopper that was carrying the minister and his men. They anyway follow a trail and, on their way, come across the skinned corpses of three men. Can you imagine what it must be like to find skinned men hanging from treetops? Well, even for the bravest of us, it must be a horrific sight to behold. After investigation, the team finds out that the men were, in fact, being led by another one of Dutch’s old friends.
Dutch and his men soon locate a heavily armed and defended rebel camp, where the hostages may have been kept. After a short but fierce battle with lots of guns blazing and explosions, they manage to infiltrate and successfully take out the rebels. In the process, they also capture a rebel named Anna and bring her along. To their utter disappointment, they find out that the hostages had already been executed and that the hostages were none but CIA operatives. This revelation enraged Dutch, which made Dillon confess that the whole rescue mission had been a setup since its start. The objective was neutralizing the rebels, but after the previous unit to carry out the mission got eliminated, Dillon tricked his friend and a uber-cool commando Dutch into accepting the same mission. What a jerk you are, Dillon!
After destroying the camo, they head back to the extraction point, but an unknown and unseen creature is stalking them. Soon, two members of the team are brutally killed, and the rest realize that they are not alone in the dense jungles. While Dillon feels that it is the work of other guerillas, a team member named Billy feels that the work is not the task of an average human or any human at all. However, Billy’s opinion is discarded by all. The men who were killed, Hawkins and Blain, might have been alive had Anna not tried to escape. Hawkins was sent after Anna, and only his bloody innards are now left behind. When Blain went to look for Hawkins, he too was killed in the most gruesome way.
Interestingly enough, the creature spared Anna. After finding out that Blain was killed so brutally, Mac opened random fire into the trees. It didn’t do much damage but injured the strange creature just enough to bleed its green luminescent blood on a large leaf. The audience gets to see the Predator perform a small surgery on his injured leg. It is now that the group of commandoes realizes that something in the woods wants to kill them. It was soon dark, and the team decided to camp for the night and set traps around them in case something strikes them in the dead of night. However, a boar triggered the traps and tripwire mines that Mac killed.
But in the ensuing chaos, the Predator attempt to steal Blain’s corpse. Dutch deduced that the creature was traveling through trees, hence making their ground traps ineffective. Dutch frees Anna from her clutches and enquires her about the killer who was still at large. She explained that it had been coming to the jungles for quite a few years now and that it came especially during hot summers. Later Mac and Dillon both get killed. As more bodies started to pile up, the Dutch realizes that the Predator hunts as per a code of honor and didn’t attack unarmed people. Naturally, he sent Anna alone to the extraction point. While he himself slipped down a cliff and into a river and got covered in mud when he came out of it.
The mud made him invisible to the Predator and served as camouflage. Dutch lay there in utter shock and horror as the Predator collected trophies of skulls and spines from the dead people. However, he soon gathered his courage and used his environment to set ancient traps, etc. Later the two of them meet again, but an invisible Dutch damages the Predator’s cloaking device with an explosive arrow.
However, he soon loses his camouflage of mud and becomes visible to the Predator. Interestingly enough, the Predator removes his weapons and engages Dutch in hand-to-hand combat, but even the mighty big Arnold Schwarzenegger was tossed away like a ragdoll by the Predator. However, Dutch managed to crush the Predator under his trap. But in the last desperate attempt to kill Dutch, the Predator activated his self-destruct device and laughs maniacally in Billy’s voice. But Dutch realized what the alien had done and runs for his life, only to be rescued by Philips later.
The film was neither Arnold Schwarzenegger nor John McTiernan’s best artistic work, but it still stands out as the best film of the franchise for the sheer tension that it builds. No other Predator film could build such tension or a sense of dread. What starts off as just another Arnold action film takes to turn into one of the best sci-fi classics ever.
Predator 2 (1990)
Years later, in 1997, the city of Los Angeles was suffering from the twin problems of a sweltering heatwave and heated street war between the Jamaican and Columbian drug gangs. Meanwhile, a Predator was watching over the scene as lieutenant Michael R. Harrigan enters the scene of the crime to rescue two wounded officers. Detectives Leona Cantrell and Danny Archuleta had been waiting for Harrigan’s assistance.
And as was expected, Harrigan did a great job by forcing the Colombian gangsters to withdraw into a building nearby, but the building soon got rocked by several explosions. Harrigan and his team went inside the building, but to their utter shock and horror, they found that Colombians has been mysteriously slaughtered. Harrigan follows the only survivor of the massacre to the roof but was forced to shoot him in self-defense and couldn’t get time to question him. Harrigan then notices the silhouette of a large transparent humanoid figure but dismissed the vision as an optical illusion caused by the heat and his acrophobia or fear of heights.
When Harrigan returned to his precinct, his superiors grilled him for disobeying direct orders, and he was later introduced to Special Agent Peter Keyes, played by Gary Busey. Busey’s character was included in the film after Arnie declined a role in Predator 2. Peter Keyes was leading a federal task force that was in charge of investigating the cartels of Los Angeles. Keyes warns Harrigan to stay out of the former’s way. Furthermore, Harrigan meets the lone ranger or Bill Paxton’s Jerry Lambert. Lambert’s character was essentially that of a cocky officer and served as the comic relief.
That night the Jamaican gangsters break into the house of the Colombian drug lord Ramon Vega and assassinate him while he was having a little fun with a good lady. However, the Jamaicans get slain by the Predator who had been following them. He slew everyone in the most brutal of fashions but spared the unarmed girlfriend of Vega. Harrigan and his team were asked not to enter the building, but they arrived at the scene anyway.
They found one of Predator’s weapons that were stuck in an A.C. Keyes starts to appear more and more suspicious as time passes, and he asks Harrigan and his team to stay out of the way and the investigation lest they wanted themselves dead. However, Harrigan and Danny decide to investigate on their own the weapon that they had found and arrange for a meeting later at the apartment.
However, the Predator kills Danny on his arrival, but Danny had managed to retrieve the weapon. Harrigan gets devastated at this and vows to slay whoever killed Danny. He continues his investigation and meets the city’s chief pathologist, who informs him that the weapon was comprised of an entirely alien element, something that didn’t have its existence on Earth. He then met with the Jamaican drug lord King Willie, who told him that the attacks were an act of an otherworldly being. This further confused Harrigan, who left the place just before the Predator attacked and beheaded King Willie himself.
Meanwhile, Leona then suspected that the murderer was toying around with Harrigan. She and Lambert headed out to uncover leads that pointed towards a Los Angeles slaughterhouse. However, in the subway, the Predator struck again. The subway scene is considered by many as the greatest kill sequence in film history and was a directorial marvel. Two cops stuck inside a train with some goons, a group of ordinary passengers carrying guns and pistols, and a murderous alien. It also made Bill Paxton one of the two guys to have been killed by the three great monsters of film, namely, the Predator, the xenomorph, and the Terminator.
When all his bullets get finished, he uses a good old ball to hit the Predator, but of course, to no avail. The Predator overpowers Leona but leaves her alive because she was pregnant. Harrigan arrives at the scene and then pursued the Predator, following the creature to the surface and the throughout the town, but later, Harrigan got captured by Keyes’s men.
Keyes reveals what the Predator really stands for and the fact that he and his team have been trying to capture the alien for a long time now, in fact, ever seen the first one attack Dutch and his team. They had learned its modus operandi and were equipped with clothing that could insulate them and keep the thermal radiation of the body inside, hence taking away the Predator’s powers to see them. Furthermore, they planned to study it, so they were equipped with liquid nitrogen to freeze the Predator.
The operation started in the slaughterhouse, which turned into a slaughterhouse of Keyes and his men. However, Harrigan managed to flee from custody and confront the Predator on his own. The battle reaches the rooftop, where Harrigan slices the Predator’s arm with his disc blade. A one-armed stuntman named R. David Smith plays the Predator for this one. He was hanging from a 13 story high building with a special rig called the descender. Smith had only one shot at getting down and falling into someone’s bathroom. It is in this scene that we see the advanced med-kit or the Medicom of the Yautja. It comes with a burner for melting a blue solvent, spatulas, needles, an emergency mask, a shrapnel extractor. He uses these to heal his arm wound and the various bullet wounds.
Although the tedious process heals him, it seems to be a reasonably painful process because he constantly groans in pain. Finally, they reach a tunnel, where he reached the Predator’s mother ship. Harrigan was clearly not a match for the hulking Predator in the ensuing battle, but he still managed to kill the Predator. To his surprise, several other Predators approached Harrigan; he naturally presumed that his fate was now sealed. But they instead only took away their fallen warrior, and the elder Predator presented Harrigan with a revolver as a reward for his courage and bravery.
Predators (2010)
An ex U.S. Special Operations Forces veteran who turned into a mercenary, Royce found himself parachuting in an unknown jungle. Upon reaching the surface, he found others who arrived in the same manner. Among the others are Isabelle, who was a sniper of the Israel Defense Forces, Stans was a death row inmate from San Quentin State Prison, Nikolai was a Russian commando from the Spetsnaz Alpha Group, Hanzo was a Yakuza Inagawa-kai enforcer, Mombasa was a Revolutionary United Front death squad soldier, Cuchillo was a cartel enforcer, Ronald Noland was a United States Army Air Cavalry soldier, and he was the only one to have some knowledge about the place because he had been there for quite some time, and lastly, Edwin was general physician, whose presence was strange because he was nowhere as skilled as the other men and one woman, who were trained and skilled killers.
The group followed Royce, and they all came across a mysterious temple-like monument that had a plant loaded with neurotoxins that Edwin later collected in his scalpel. They also found empty cages and traps that had once been set by a former or deceased Green Beret. Later, after looking at the sky, they realize that they are no more on Earth. The team of strangers soon gets attacked by the Predator Tracker’s Hell Hounds. The hell hounds are ankylosaur-like pets of the Yautjas, but they also look like a blend of dogs and reptiles. Just like a hunting dog, the hell hounds track prey but don’t kill them.
Tracker was responsible for the death of Mombasa. Royce deduced that they all were on an alien planet that served as a game preserve. Soon, Cuchillo gets killed and the Predators use his body to lure the other humans, but they knew better. The party then followed the tracks to a place where they find a captive Predator. Soon the Super Predators named Falconer, Tracker, and their leader Berserker attacked the humans. It is now that Isabelle realizes that these aliens were nothing but the Predators, one of whom had wreaked havoc in the Guatemalan jungles in 1987. Interestingly enough, the film uses only the original Predator film as the reference point. Also, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny Glover were supposed to make cameos in this film, but their roles were edited out of the final script.
The group now meets with Ronald Noland, who had survived ten seasons of hunting on the planet by hiding, scavenging, and hence surviving from the Predators and also their victims. Noland explains to the team that the Predators have been bringing the fiercest and most dangerous warriors of different worlds to the planet in order to hunt them down with the intention of honing their own hunting skills.
He also reveals that the captive Predator and the Super Predators had a blood feud. Royce then devises a plan to free the captive Predator in the hope that he would help them to get back on Earth in the Predator mother ship. However, Noland tries to kill everyone else by smoking and suffocating them. Years of captivity had turned him crazy and he wanted to kill them so that he could take their weapons and take on the Predators. However, Noland gets killed by Tracker, who also helps release the group. Nikolai saves one of Tracker’s prey, but this agitates Tracker, and he shoots Nikolai with his plasma caster and teased Nikolai while he crawled.
But Nikolai took out his claymore mines and ignited them. The explosion killed both of them. The rest of them get spotted by Berserker. But Stans distracted it while the others fled. However, Stans himself gets killed. Hanzo stayed behind to fight the Falconer. While Hanzo wielded a katana, Falconer chose his extendable wrist blade. After an exciting and high-octane battle, Hanzo managed to fatally wound Falconer and killed him. However, the injuries that Hanzo sustained during the length of the fight became the cause of his death.
Royce, Edwin, and Isabelle were the only ones who survived, and they headed to the Captive Predator to execute Royce’s plan. However, Isabelle and Edwin get captured by the Berserker. Meanwhile, Royce freed the Captive Predator. The Captive Predator agreed to Royce’s deal and hacked the predator Ship to set a course for Earth. But Berserker arrived, and the two of them got into a fierce battle. However, Berserker managed to overpower the Super Predator and later self-destructed the ship. Meanwhile, Edwin reveals that he’s a psychopathic killer and paralyzes Isabelle, but she sunk his scalpel into him and paralyzed him. This time, Royce used Edwin as bait and set grenades around him. Isabelle shot the Predator with her rifle while Royce decapitated Berserker. Now that the threat was over, they observed new parachutes coming down from the sky.
The Predator (2018)
A Predator ship crash-landed on Earth when U.S. Army Ranger sniper Quinn McKenna and a team led by him got attacked by a Predator. It was the Fugitive Predator’s spaceship that was being attacked by a Predator Mother Ship. He opened a wormhole that opened in Earth’s orbit and flew through it to escape the attacks. It crash-landed in the jungles of Mexico, but the Fugitive Predator managed to escape the explosion by exiting in a pod. The men were on a hostage rescue mission when the mishap took place.
The Predator then appeared on the trees but was largely invisible due to his cloak. The Fugitive then killed one of McKenna’s team members, but McKenna unknowingly fired at the Fugitive with his own wrist gauntlet and knocked him down. He then retrieved the wrist gauntlet and bio-helmet and sent them by mail to his house. He did so to prove that extraterrestrial life did, in fact, exist. However, a government agent named Will Traeger gets McKenna captured and produces him for questioning.
Traeger also captures the fallen Predator and takes him to a lab for observation and experimentation. Evolutionary biologist Casey Bracket was assigned to research the alien hunter. She reveals that the Predator contains human DNA but doesn’t know how, the answer to which she was supposed to find. The Fugitive Predator then awoke from its slumber only to kill all armed personnel present in the lab but spared Bracket because she was unarmed.
McKenna is sent out with a group of captives that includes a former Marine named Nebraska. As the Captive Predator escapes from the lab, they get the window of opportunity to take over the bus that they were traveling in. They traveled to McKenna’s house in the hopes of finding the Captive Predator’s armor but all that they found was that Rory, McKenna’s autistic son, had left the house for trick-or-treating wearing the armor. They began to look for Rory and saved him from two Predator hounds.
At the same time, the Fugitive Predator chased them into a school, where they returned the armor to the Predator. However, a much stronger and larger Predator attacked the Fugitive Predator. He was the Ultimate Predator or the Assassin Predator and was the archenemy of the Fugitive Predator. He was the result of immense hybridization, and his DNA was created by splicing the DNA of various creatures from different planets, while the base DNA was that of a Yautja, which gave him enhanced abilities.
He was sent on Earth to kill the Fugitive Predator and succeeded in his mission by smashing the Fugitive’s head with a single punch before tearing away his head and spine from his body. The group uses this opportunity to flee into a barn, but Traeger finds them there and captures them. Traeger also took Rory to the Predator ship after he saw him drawing its picture. The group soon went after Traeger with the help of a lobotomized Predator Hound. The Ultimate Predator then explained through translation software his intents and the fact that he would give them a head start before he starts to hunt them down.
However, bodies started to pile up when the Predator attempted dismantling the ship so that Yautja technology didn’t fall into the wrong hands. The Ultimate Predator then attempted to fly away with Rory because he thought that the child’s autism was more of a unique ability than a disability, and by extension, an advancement in the human evolutionary process. But Nebraska sacrifices himself in order to stop the ship, and the survivors kill the Ultimate Predator with his own weapons. In the end, they realize that the Fugitive Predator had come to Earth to give humans a device called the Predator killer. He did so to ensure that humans had an equal opportunity of fighting the hulking monsters.
Alien vs. Predator (2004)
The Razorback Point Whaling Station in the Antarctic had a Yautja pyramid buried some 2000 feet under the surface. Charles Bishop Weyland, the head of the wealthy MNC Weyland Corporation, found the temple hidden beneath the ice and wanted to claim it for his organization. To check it out, he organized a team that included mercenaries, drillers, linguistic experts, archeologists, and a guide named Lex. Meanwhile, a Predator ship approached the pyramid and shot a beam of energy aimed at the ancient and buried structure.
It had created a tunnel that led straight to the pyramid. When Weyland and his team arrive, they get surprised to see the tunnel, which wasn’t there a few days ago. We wonder if the drillers would still get paid! Weyland’s team soon go through the tunnel and descend down to the pyramid that looked like a sacrificial chamber with several human skeletons and signs of civilization. However, all the skeletons mysteriously had their rib cages ruptured. Meanwhile, three Predators named, Scar, Chopper, and Celtic arrived at the pyramid and began their massacre. They had come to Earth to get the status of a blooded Yautja by killing a Xenomorph.
However, the team unwittingly activates the structure, an act that raised a trapped Xenomorph Queen from her stasis. She immediately started producing eggs, and the resultant facehuggers erupted from the eggs only to attach themselves to the nearby humans and impregnate them with chest busters. The chest busters soon did their whole bursting out thing and tore opened the chests of several humans, only to quickly evolve into fully evolved Xenomorphs. Conflict soon erupted between the Yautjas, the Xenomorphs, and the humans, which resulted in several deaths on all three sides.
After discovering that their weapons are missing, Chopper, along with his brothers, goes after humans. Chopper was preparing to kill Lex, but Grid, the Xenomorph, ambushed him from behind. Grid then impaled Chopper and lifted him into the air before biting Chopper’s head off. When Celtic saw his younger brother being attacked by the Xenomorph Drone Grid, he charged at it. In a bloody and gruesomely long battle, Celtic managed to subdue the alien for a moment with his net gun, but Grid managed to free itself out of it just when Celtic was about to finish off Grid with his dagger.
Meanwhile, Weyland sacrifices himself to give Lex and the archeologist Sebastian time to escape Scar. He went after Sebastian and Lex but met a facehugger and a Xenomorph drone instead. He slew both of them and removed his helmet to mark himself with the Xenomorph blood, but before he could put it back in place, another facehugger impregnated him. When Scar revived from the facehugger’s assault, he caught up to Lex. She returned him his weapon, and they started working together. Soon, only Lex and Scar were left to fight the Antarctic Queen.
Scar made Lex a weapon out of a dead Xenomorph. Scar and Lex managed to hook the Antarctic Queen to chains and pushed it over the cliff and into the water. However, Scar succumbed to the injuries that he had suffered during the battle. Post his death, a Yautja Mother Ship appeared and took away Scar’s corpse with honor and respect. However, once inside the ship, a Predalien Chest-buster came out, and it later went on to wreak havoc along with many other Xenomorphs on the town of Gunnison.
While this one is good in parts, it feels lesser as a whole. The film could have done better in terms of the story and use of the Predators. It’s a rather murky and vague dive into the depths of freezing Antarctic waters. The cast gets killed too soon, but we cant complain much because it provided us with a damned Predalien.
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)
Following the events of the 2004 film, a chest buster erupted from Scar’s corpse and became the first Predalien seen on screen. The Predalien went straight to the Scout Ship that was attached to the Mother Ship. The chest buster molted at an accelerated rate and soon matured into an adult Predalien. It soon began massacring the crew, but one of the Predators named Bull managed to send a distress signal and alerted his kind about the Earth Predalien. Another Predator named Wolf received the signal from Bull’s scout ship and came to Earth to finish off the abomination.
The Scout Ship crashed in the town of Gunnison and began hunting the homeless people living close to the sewers. Wolf reached Earth and was in hot pursuit of the Predalien. Due to the crash, Earth Predalien escaped with several Xenomorph facehuggers. The facehuggers then implanted embryos in several humans, the first being a father and son duo. After that, the facehuggers attacked the people living in sewers.
But soon, Wolf arrived at the spot and took upon himself the job of killing the Xenomorphs and the abomination that was the Predalien. His other objective was to remove any trace of the Predator technology and the existence of Xenomorphs. he used a bluish acidic substance to dissolve any evidence and then exploded the scout ship. Wolf set up laser net traps for face-huggers and entraps them.
However, the Earth Predalien attacks Wolf with its tail. This causes Wolf to misfire, which causes an explosion that collapses the sewer and breaks a hole on the surface streets. The chaos gave the Xenomorphs time to escape into the streets, but Wolf used his power punch glove to strike through the rubble and pursued them. He chased one of the Xenomorphs and reached a powerplant where his plasma caster misfired because of the electromagnetic interference. This created a blackout in the entire city, which resulted in the authorities taking cognizance of the situation. Wolf managed to slay five Xenomorphs, but the battle-damaged his plasma caster.
So he merged this one with the other plasma caster and turned it into a makeshift plasma pistol. Finally, Wolf reached the town hospital where he discovered that the Xenomorphs were trying to make a Hive. Later, the earth Predalien and Wolf got into a battle on a rooftop. He then reached the roof and fights the Scar Predalien in hand-to-hand combat with his bare hand as he had either lost his weapons or managed to have them destroyed.
Wolf then removed all his gear and bio-helmet and once again went after Scar Predlien, tearing its inner jaw and impaling its head with his wrist blades. But the Predalien stuck its tail into him, which led to a standoff between the two great beasts. However, the U.S. government sent a Lockheed Martin F-22 Raptor loaded with a nuke, which was the end of Wolf and Scar Predalien. Wolf’s plasma caster was later seized by Colonel Stevens, who presented it to Miss Yutani, leaving the ground for a possible Predator intervention.
Requiem is by far the weakest film of the franchise, but that doesn’t mean it’s essentially a bad film. All we are saying is that it could have been better and will forever remain as a lost opportunity. The main antagonist of the film, the Earth Predalien, could have worked without the hordes of Xenomorphs because come on, it was a mix of two of the fiercest hunters of the galaxy.
Future of the Franchise
The new Predator installment is going to be called Skull. Yeah, just that! And, it couldn’t be more apt. It’s going to be set in the distant past and would have a female protagonist. It has been confirmed that Shane Black has stepped down as the director. Although the 2007 film and Requiem had endings with possibilities for continuation, the new film will not be a reboot or a continuation of the previous films. Who knows, we may even get to see the story of Raphael Adolini! However, there’s no new information on the casting or even a release date. But it is expected to hit the theatres sometime in 2022. Let us know in the comments if you are excited about Skul, aka Predator 5!