[COLUMN] Killer of Killers Understands that the Predators Are the Galaxy's Disgraced Dentists | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Predator: Killer of Killers, now streaming on Disney+. But it’s great, and you should watch it.

One of the best things about Predator: Killer of Killers, a new animated anthology from Dan Trachtenberg and Joshua Wassung, is that it understands the most fundamental truth about alien big game hunters at the heart of the Predator franchise: they are, at their core, full of crap.

Since John McTiernan’s Predator, an entire mythology has built up around the extraterrestrial poachers at the heart of the franchise, developed across sequels and tie-in media. Much has been made of the idea that the species – canonically known as “the Yautja” – has an “honor code.” Indeed, Killer of Killers even opens with an excerpt from “the Yautja Codex”, the first time the species name has been used in a movie.

There is a tendency to take such ideas at face value. Certainly, there are moments in the franchise that lend themselves to such a reading. The hunters tend not to kill defenseless or pregnant targets. At the end of Predator 2, they reward Lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover) for killing one of their own by gifting him a vintage pistol. In AvP: Alien vs. Predator, director Paul W.S. Anderson reimagines the Predator (Ian Whyte) as part of his trademark “Wife Guy Cinema”, supporting Alex Woods (Sanaa Lathan).

However, the idea that the Predators are an inherently honor-bound species has always been impossible to square with the actual text of the series as a whole. These are aliens that travel to Earth using advanced technology far beyond human capabilities, including cloaking devices, bombs and laser projectiles. They then stalk a quarry that not only has no warning that they are being hunted, but also have no frame of reference for what a Predator actually is.

When one of these hunters is inevitably defeated by their opponents, Predators do not face their karmic fate with dignity or integrity. The go-to move is to activate what amounts to a tactical nuclear warhead that seems likely to incinerate the individual who bested them. There is some handwave excuse that these aliens are trying to erase any evidence of their presence, but this approach seems counter-productive. If anything, random nuclear blasts tend to attract more attention.

Of course, there is survivorship bias in play here – the audience has only seen movies where the Predators are outwitted by the people they are hunting – but the alien gamesmen rarely cover themselves in glory. Despite a massive technical and tactical advantage, the Predator has a remarkably poor track record when it comes to their favorite pastime. However, what little we see of their culture suggests that these humiliations are not a rare occurrence.

AvP: Alien vs. Predator reveals that these creatures enjoy hunting the parasitic xenomorph, a highly dangerous and invasive species. Even in remote locations, these creatures are difficult to contain. Flashbacks reveal the Predators lost control of several breeding sites. At the end of the film, they bring an infected Predator on board their ship, without bothering to check whether he has an alien larva inside him, and they leave the dead body unattended, even knowing the xenomorph life cycle.

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem focuses on a Predator “cleaner” (also Whyte), whose job is to clean up after these sorts of messes, which would imply that these sorts of problems happen more often than one might expect. Incidentally, despite the fact that this Predator is sent to clean up a mess created by his predecessors, he still winds up killing, skinning and hanging humans, leaving evidence of his own presence even as he erases evidence of the earlier mission.

To be fair, this tracks with the human experience of “big game hunters.” As much as “the great white hunter” is a romantic archetype embodied by classic characters like Allan Quartermain, the reality is always much more pathetic. In reality, these sorts of hunters are likely to be disgraced dentists who pull out photos of their trophies to impress strangers in bars, whose clumsiness leads their prey to suffer “incredible cruelty” over extended periods.

There is a tendency to mythologize these figures, to treat the hunt as some epic adventure in which the hunter’s acumen is honed and ultimately validated. The targets of these “canned” hunts are often drugged and taken to strange an unfamiliar terrain to eliminate any possible advantage. Despite the way in which big game hunts are weighted to favor the hunter, some still die in the process. Some are killed by their prey, others by their fellow human beings.

Part of the beauty of Killer of Killers is that the film is built on this understanding of the Predator franchise. The movie is smart enough to know that, despite the obsession with “honor” in the mythology of the Yautja, these aliens are incredibly cynical and incredibly dishonorable when it suits them. Even within the film’s three short stories, “The Bullet” finds one of these creatures hunting propeller planes from inside a cloaked state-of-the-art warship. It’s like trying to swat a fly with a bazooka.

More than that, the film builds to a big reveal. The three protagonists from each of the short stories have each vanquished a Predator: Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy), Kenji Kamakami (Louis Ozawa) and John Torres (Rick Gonzales). However, these characters have not won their lives back. Much like any animal that kills a human, there is a sense that the Predators believe that these humans need to be “put down.” So the three characters are abducted, frozen and later thawed out to fight to the death.

There is nothing honorable about this. These three characters each accomplished an impossible task, vanquishing a technologically superior foe who existed outside their frame of reference, and their reward is to be thrown into an arena where – in the best-case scenario – one of the three is expected to kill the other two. Given this set-up, it is unlikely that the survivor of that battle royale would earn their freedom. It seems more likely they’d just be frozen until they were thrown into another match.

Much like the detonation of the tactical nuclear weapon at the end of Predator, this is not an act of honor. This is an act of spite. One of the smarter things about Dan Trachtenberg’s stewardship of the Predator franchise has been his reluctance to get too deep into lore, and so Killer of Killer leaves it to the viewer to figure out the context of what they are seeing. However, the public spectacle of this context feels like it has a social utility to the Predators. It is a declaration: nobody kills a Predator and gets away with it.

Killer of Killers does not get too deep in the weeds into Predator lore or backstory, a smart choice after Shane Black’s The Predators. It is unclear what larger Predator society actually looks like. It is unclear if Predators have a central government. While Prometheus, Covenant and Romulus have excavated the lore of the xenomorph, Requiem remains the only movie to ever show what appears to be the Predator homeworld. It’s a good choice, because this leaves a lot of negative space for the audience to unpack the franchise.

To be clear, this perceived dissonance between the mythology of the Predator species and what the films actually depict is not a flaw. Quite the opposite. The idea of the Predator species as some sort of monolithic entity bound together by some notion of honor and fair play is pretty one-dimensional. It is trite and cliché. There is no nuance to it, no complexity, no sophistication. In contrast, the conflict between that image of their culture and how they actually act is dramatically compelling.

Indeed, this internal contradiction is often the key to making an imagined culture feel more “real” and “lived in.” It is a large part of the appeal of the Klingons in Star Trek, a culture that cannot shut up about “honor”, but which has consistently been shown to be corrupt, cynical and decadent. Worf (Michael Dorn) does a better job living up to Klingon ideals than most actual Klingons, because he was adopted by humans and so grew up idealizing an abstract idea of Klingon culture.

In Deep Space Nine, Bashir (Alexander Siddig) is horrified by the idea of Klingons lurking in the aftermath of battle, ready to prey on any ships coming to aid enemy survivors. “Well, that doesn't sound very honorable to me,” Bashir opines. Worf replies, “In war, there is nothing more honorable than victory.” Later in the show, as Worf contemplates the state of the Klingon Empire, Ezri (Nicole DeBoer) challenges him, “Who was the last leader of the High Council that you respected?”

The best Star Trek aliens are the ones who operate with that dramatic tension between how they present themselves to outsiders and how they really behave. Vulcans claim to be devoid of emotion, but are often motivated by deep seated feelings that they cannot openly acknowledge. The best actors to play Vulcans in the franchise understand this tension: Leonard Nimoy, Mark Leonard, Gary Graham, Zachary Quinto. Subtext is good, it enriches these narratives and worlds while deepening characters.

Indeed, there is a tendency to read character dialogue as lore, ignoring subtext and embracing a suffocating literalism. In “Journey to Babel”, the Vulcan Ambassador Sarek (Leonard) opined that a rival delegation of Tellarites "do not argue for reasons. They simply argue.” That line tells the audience a lot about Sarek and his opinion of others; Sarek is great, but he’s also a bit of an asshole. However, because Sarek became a beloved character, his vaguely racist aside was subsequently earnestly embraced as the entire racial identity of the Tellarites.

The notion of the Predators as another science-fiction species motivated by some grand sense of honor is a tired cliché, the most predictable approach to the concept. Killer of Killers understands that part of what makes the concept so fun and so compelling is the gulf between the way that these creatures see themselves and the way that they actually behave. Predators don’t have to be cloaked for the audience to see right through them.