Took me a minute to finally get around to watching this. It's fine I guess, but not for me. I thought most of the interesting character-related elements were trampled on by virtually endless action sequences. We've seen that before in Predator and elsewhere. Took a long time for the plot to feel compelling to me, but then there were only about twenty minutes left at that point. For what it is, it's well made. As a Predator movie? Eh. It feels like an R-rated Marvel movie without any Deadpool jokes. Predator & Predator 2 always felt like such solid monster movies to me in the sense that they were fulfilling certain genre conventions, and sure Killer of Killers has titular monsters featured, but it feels like a loud big budget Disney movie telling a bunch of superhero origin stories than anything else. It's not scary, didn't have any intention to be, and that appears to be the MO of Badlands from the trailer I've seen, so now I'll be skeptical going into that. However, I'm vaguely intrigued about how much of a trainwreck Alvarez's Alien vs. Trachtenberg's Predator could end up being if Disney wants to take their turn at giving it a go. My schadenfreude counter is clicking.
One sincere nitpick I had was the predator dialogue. Not really sure where all the sibilance comes from considering they have no tongues and the voice acting sounds like people using tongues to make S sounds. There was already a verbal language established at the end of Predator 2 that sounded unique, but I guess it would be too unoriginal to try to expand on that! I don't know, man. Some of the mystique surrounding lore in the Alien and Predator movies...it's starting to feel like that moment in a Scooby Doo where they pull the mask off the villain only to reveal it was just the janitor or whatever, except the reveals here are...yeah. I'd have more to say on a different board.
Actually no I have another nitpick, the film score felt so anonymous they could've just stuck with whatever Marvel score they temp'd this with and saved some cash. It wouldn't have changed anything about the moments where they drop in motifs from the original film that felt shoehorned in to add a familiar texture that was nonexistent.
The animation itself, I got used to it after a while but I wouldn't say I would look forward to seeing it again. I think the philosophy of the animation being used to create a bunch of insanely elaborate, over-the-top set pieces was ironically pretty boring. If everything in the movie is an over-the-top sensory overload, then nothing actually is, and in turn it becomes pretty easy to fall asleep when it's the 8th Predator movie you've seen. Free the AvP anime!
