10 Reasons Why The Predator Is Better Than You Think

In a world full of rehashes and reboots that are preoccupied with hitting the same story beats as their predecessors, The Predator charts a course entirely its own and spends the entire runtime violently catapulting the franchise forward.

From the opening sequence, the film is distinctly in uncharted territory and it never stops progressing from there. For years, drafts of Predator scrips have had humans acquiring Predator-tech and using it to fight back, but this has always been cut out of fear that it would be too ridiculous. The Predator does this in the first five minutes.

Also notable is the film's structure. Whereas every other installment in the franchise has essentially just copied the original's structure, The Predator does things radically different. Because it's playing in a larger sandbox, it doesn't have to hold off on the Predator action until the third act. Instead, we get full-on Predator action within minutes. And rather than adhering to the thriller/horror blueprint, it becomes more-or-less a buddy-road-trip film.

It is a film that is never content to simply rest on the laurels of previous films, and is instead constantly pushing things forward for the franchise as a whole.