One of the humans in Predator: Killer of Killers, a battle-hardened Viking woman on a life-long quest for vengeance, calls the alien “Grendel.”
I liked that a lot, for carrying on the basic concept of Prey — the last installment in the Predator franchise, a live-action movie also directed by Dan Trachtenberg — predators coming to Earth at various points in history, to hunt an exceptional warrior. And Prey itself built on an idea from the end of Predator 2, which suggested that they’ve been visiting us for centuries.
Just the mention of “Grendel” sells the idea of humans faced with an over-powered alien monster and having no frame of reference for it.
I expected that the next chapter, which is set in the Edo period of Japan, they’d be calling it an oni or something. It’s good that they didn’t, because that would’ve been too obvious. It would’ve reduced the movie to a single basic premise — what if we repeated what you just saw, but this time in Japanese? — instead of letting the mostly-wordless chapter focus on its characters and their fairly simple and straightforward (and oddly pacifist?) story.
My first exposure to the character Grendel wasn’t actually in Beowulf, but in the John Gardner novel.1Which I don’t remember anything about, assuming I even finished it for English class, apart from the basic premise. I wonder now whether that had a huge impact on what I expect from stories: the belief that any story can be reimagined and reinterpreted from multiple viewpoints, introducing new sympathy for even the most straightforward personifications of evil. (I grew up in the age of cartoons and movies that made Godzilla a hero, after all).
Anyway, Predator: Killer of Killers clarified something for me about this franchise: the Predators are the bad guys.
I’ll let everybody take a moment to recover from that bombshell. But here’s what I mean:
I’m not 100% convinced that before Prey, I’d seen any of the “official” movies in the franchise in their entirety. I could give you a detailed plot synopsis of each one, but it’s always felt like I was picking them up through general nerd cultural diffusion instead of being really into the premise.
So it’s felt like the whole series and its various spinoffs have been all about reforming the movie monsters into this bad-ass race of alien warriors. They adhere to a strict code of honor, pitting themselves against only the most worthy of opponents, humans that are initially overpowered but eventually manage to prove themselves through a combination of wit, determination, and sheer force of will.
They ruthlessly murder whole crowds of hapless soldiers, for instance, but refuse to kill pregnant women. And the stories always seem to end either with a begrudging respect between the hero and the alien, or a sense that our heroes have proven themselves in much the same way that the aliens value: by defeating a worthy opponent.
That’s exactly what Killer of Killers seems to be for much of its runtime. In fact, it seems to exist purely as a celebration of that idea: match-ups between war-like aliens and the most noble warriors, throughout history. It was beautifully animated, with some extremely clever moments of fight choreography, and undeniably cool. But my overall takeaway was that it was ultimately shallow, mostly for taking itself far too seriously.2When the movie came out on Hulu, I read Neven Mrgan’s review on Letterboxd, which said that the storytelling at the beginning seems to be operating purely at the Young Adult level, which I think is entirely accurate.
So it was easy to miss that the story of our Viking warrior on a quest for vengeance — which is the first chapter, so I don’t consider it a huge spoiler — has a resolution that doesn’t quite fit in with that. From the beginning, it seems completely obvious where this story is going to go, and then it doesn’t do exactly what I’d expected. Not enough to completely surprise me, but still enough for a “huh.”
Then the second chapter has two sons of a power-obsessed warlord who’s trained them since childhood to be warriors, and the brothers split when one of them chooses not to fight.
The whole movie seems to be so focused on beautifully-rendered representations Things That Are Objectively Bad-Ass — Vikings, samurai and ninjas, hot rods and fighter planes in WWII, a bad guy with a cloak made from spines! — that it almost feels like a case of “What if Sucker Punch hadn’t been so aggressively stupid?” It felt like welcoming us back, saying “Yes, it is okay for you to think this stuff rocks hard, with no sense of guilt, because we too were teenagers at one point, and we get it.”
Which would’ve been perfectly fine, and had me going away thinking that this and Prey showed that the franchise was in perfect hands, by people who understood the appeal of Predator and how to execute on it. Apart from taking itself too seriously, my only real complaint was that the low frame rate — which I suspect was a stylistic choice, to make it seem more like an animated painting and less like 3D models on animation curves — made a lot of the fast-moving action extremely difficult to read.
But there was still a weird dissonance: this was supposed to be a movie about Great Match-Ups In History, right? So why did it keep feeling like all the bad-ass Predator tech made them seem so much less bad-ass?
They can turn invisible! They’ve got that cool heat-vision! They bleed green and have so many hooks and chains and hooks on chains! Finally the universe has found a worthy opponent for Arnold Schwarzenegger! So why does Killer of Killers so often make it seem like the whole “warriors with a strict code of honor” idea is bullshit? Why does it feel like they’re ludicrously overpowered, they’ve just come to Earth on a killing spree, and they’re basically useless without all their fancy alien gadgets?
I think if I were a Predator watching this movie, I’d start to have some serious second thoughts about the nobility of my quest. “Are we the baddies?” They feel less like the thrill of the hunt, or the guy who goes into the wilderness and emerges victorious against the noble and mighty bear, and more like those billionaires who hunt lions and gorillas with assault rifles and then pose with the carcasses as if they were something to be proud of, instead of inexcusably shameful.
And it’s almost like Killer of Killers seeded this exact idea, by showing one of its heroes straight-up brutally murdering a defenseless warrior.
Or, starting with a quote from the Predators about the nobility of the hunt, and then repeatedly showing us that there was nothing noble about it.
Or even the title, which is Killer of Killers and not, like, Hunter of Warriors.
In Prey, I’d thought that the movie showed us a field full of buffalo carcasses to contrast the Predator against the French fur trappers. One was at least battling worthy opponents, while the other was just engaging in indiscriminate slaughter. Now I think it might’ve been intended to show how they’re not that different, actually.
The upcoming Predator: Badlands, also directed and co-written by Trachtenberg, sounds from the premise like an Enemy Mine-style story in the Predator universe. I’m now wondering whether the end result will ask us to empathize with the Predator as a warrior, or if it’ll further the concept that “no these guys kind of suck, actually.”
Whatever the case, I appreciate that Killer of Killers reads so much like a “Who Would Win?” action movie pitting bad-ass warriors against each other, but ultimately, it turns these creatures back into movie monsters.
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