I've just now written about it in the "leaked script" topic, but I think this deserves its own thread. Hear me out on this one.
Most of you here have a problem with the idea of an autistic kid deciphering Predator language and flying their ship. But everything about this is misunderstood.
Anyone gifted with intelligence above their peers is weird, awkward and unaccepted. Especially with kids. This kid in the movie may not be literally autistic, just gifted and more intelligent than his peers in a way that makes him disliked among other kids. Nothing far fetched about it, anyone who shows superiority is disliked in the eyes of the group. A common human reaction.
OK, so now we have a highly intelligent kid deciphering alien language and flying their ship. Still a problem, right?
But you're missing an important fact, and that's that the kid got his hands on a piece of equipment nobody else has. If this kid could do it, an average adult could do it, especially scientists, if ONLY they got their hands on this. Predators self destruct when they know they're done to destroy any evidence of them precisely because of this, they know it could be deciphered. That piece of equipment is so important that it's the main plot of the movie. So the kid just has to be as intelligent as an adult in order to decipher the language. And keep in mind the kid probably won't learn the entire Predator language, just enough to figure out what options the device he's holding has. It's probably going to be a lot of trial and error learning curve, so there's a lot of cool scenes to be explored there.
English is not my native language, and I remember as a kid when I could barely read and write, playing around on the computer all day, I learned a lot of specific words like "cancel, next, continue, install" etc, because those words often repeated. If you see a pattern on an alien device and click it enough times, you'll figure out what it means.
"oh but this is alien language, not human language, it shouldn't be that easy" ... says who? Just because it's alien doesn't mean it's difficult, if we accept the evolution of their language occurred in a similar fashion to ours. Concepts, ideas and symbols don't have to be unrecognizable in alien language. Or it just so happens the Predators have a fairly simple language. Nothing unbelievable there.
As for the kid flying their spaceship...The purpose of all technology is to make difficult tasks easy. The more advanced the technology is, the easier it is for the end user. I've used this example in that topic, an average child, and I've seen children who are 4 years old, navigate through your smartphone, open up Youtube and pick their favorite cartoon without even learning to read and write first. Or grab a drone and fly it. Technology as developed as Predator's could literally mean they have a "fly here, land, open doors" buttons easily understood for anyone.
I hope if you've read this you can see all this is not that far fetched at all, and for a movie about an alien who hunts humans, it's just plausible enough to fit into the world already created.
Not to mention that Predator's arm wrist computer seems to connect with the helmet an it's basically automatic. The kid doesn't even have to learn much, it could tap into his brain and do the translation for him.
Bottom line, all this is perfectly plausible for a Predator movie and can be executed in very interesting ways. But even if it sucks, we know for sure we'll see the Predator kill and rip spines out, so we're covered.
