Oh the homages annoyed the living hell out of me, half of the damn movie was a homage!
In my opinion, I think anyone who knows the difference between a good sequel and a bad knows that the maximum number of homages that you might be able to get away with in a sequel is one. I thought Rodriguez knew this, especially after AvP:R which was a horrible homage trainwreck disaster.
I will list the things that I remember:
- Music, almost entire soundtrack (not a big deal, but not really new either.)
- Nikolai using the minigun.
- "What the hell are you?" Royce
- Hanzo/Falconer fight (the beginning, Billy all day)
- "Kill me, I'm here!" Royce
- "If it comes to that, I'll do us both." Isabelle. From Aliens, WTF?
- Backstory of Dutch's team and Predator 1 + Royce in mud (homage, but also a genuine addition to the story, kind of cool I think.)
+ Forgot "The enemy of my enemy..." Royce, AvP homage for the fail!
Another thing that had me cringing was the falling into the water scene, it just looked so much like Arnold's falling scene in Predator.
That's all I can remember, but holy cow. Dear screenplay writers, if you would like your movie to be taken seriously, do not use more than one homage to a previous film. Please, for the love of god. I feel that removing all of this crap and replacing with original things would have done nothing but help the movie. I really enjoyed the "I'm alive" saying that Noland and Royce used, very fitting to the film and the Predator theme in general.