I never saw my first Predator movie until after the COVID-19 pandemic started.

When I found myself with more time at home during that worldwide crisis, I decided to start plowing through movies I had never seen before (and that’s a hobby for me that has continued ever since). Early on in that rush, I watched the 1987 Arnold Schwarzenegger action classic, Predator. I really liked, probably just shy of “loved”, it. It’s a tremendous joy of masculinity and biceps and blood (both red and green). 

Still, I had heard mixed things about the rest of the franchise, so aside from a watch of Alien Vs Predator, I did not dive into the rest of the series. It would not be until Dan Trachtenberg‘s Prey movie on Hulu that I would give another straight Predator movie a chance again. 

Prey was, of course, wonderful! I gave it four stars and it finished in my top 15 of 2022 (which was a pretty strong year, I thought). So when I found out that Trachtenberg had dropped a new Predator flick on DisneyPlus, I knew I had to give it a go.

Predator: Killer Of Killers is actually an anthology story that picks up where Prey left off: by taking the interstellar hunters and dropping them in various parts of Earth’s history.

In Killer Of Killers, we see the titular monsters take on a viking war maiden and her son, two brothers from feudal Japan, and a World War II era pilot and his superior officer. 

Each story is fully fleshed out and is given a respectable amount of time to tell its story, and after the third arc, we get a come-together story where we see three characters from across eleven hundred years of history meet each other on the Predator homeworld. And there they are faced with the ultimate challenge.

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Well the animation is phenomenal. This movie looks gorgeous, and the action is captured so damn well. It’s brutal and visceral and every speck of it was clearly designed with care. It’s all very kinetic, and you can follow what’s going on so brilliantly. Additionally, the characters have depth and personality in their animation. They feel like living, breathing actors even though they are actually just designs on a computer screen. 

There is one set piece during the first story arc in particular that I was wowed by, and it is a single-take action barrage when the characters invade the sanctum of their foe. Now, I know in my brain that doing a “one-take” with animation is not really any different than doing 50 cuts with animation. I get that, I do! But it just looks SO IMPRESSIVE. I was on the edge of my seat for that moment. 

+ I love the designs of all of the historical Predators going after our triad of heroes. It fleshes the beasties out as more individualistic than we have seen them before, and the creators really came up with some clever designs. You can really get a sense of the backstory of the Preds just based on how they look. 

Take the pilot Predator from the third anthologized story, for instance. He appears slightly older and maybe more worn than others we have ever seen. Maybe he’s retired himself from field hunting and has taken up using technology even more than other Predators have. This was what I thought when I saw him, and I felt like I “knew” him, even though this was all made up in my head. But the design was good enough to tell me this story without the screenplay having to do it!

– As much as this movie “suffers” from anything, it suffers from the problem that faces all anthology stories: some of the movie is simply more enjoyable than other parts of it. Here, I liked the viking and the Japanese stories more than the last two. The last two stories are completely and utterly serviceable, but they feel undercut by the greatness that comes before them. 

This is almost going to be an Up disguised as a Down here, but I really, REALLY enjoyed the first two parts of the story, “Shield” and “Sword”. “Bullet” and the culmination story were both really good, but they honestly kept this flick from scoring as high of a mark as I was initially thinking. Of course, I was initially thinking “Movie Of The Year So Far, 2025”. So that’s really high praise. I just thought it slowed down just a bit in the back half.

But yeah… those first two tales? Dynamite stuff. This is, like, the worst “Down” ever. “Here’s the problem: parts of this movie were TOO GOOD”. Ha! But it is what it is. 

Okay, here is a mini sub-Down just to fortify things: I do wish this had been live action. As glorious as the animation was, think how great this could have looked with more realism.

– I’m not well-versed in Predator lore, so this may be a Down for my own lack of knowledge, but is it canon that Predators can “speak”, even if in their own language? When the warlord Predator shows up and starts talking, I was really thrown, and it kind of ruins the mystique of the hunters.

Like I said… this may be on me, but from the handful of Predator movies I’ve seen before, I certainly don’t think I recall their ever having a language beyond monstrous noises and an absolutely unsettling cackle, of course. I liked it better that way! It adds some great curiosity to them if they created this wildly advanced scientific culture, but can only really grunt and growl at each other. 

OVERALL

Someone get Dan Trachtenberg and force him to do historical Predator movies until he dies or until further notice. Between this and Prey, he has done absolutely breath-taking work. I may not historically be a huge Predator franchise guy, but based on his two entries so far, I’m definitely seated for everything he does with the alien badasses going forward. 

★★★★ Out Of 5