The trailer for Shane Black’s The Predator, the fourth film in the Predator series, is like a solid remake of the misbegotten Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. For the second time since AvP 2, a hybrid Predator is unleashed on an unsuspecting suburban town, but this time, it’s not a bunch of teenagers with sports equipment who fight an unmatched alien killer. It’s just some really bad dudes, just as it should be, like a throwback to the original Predator from 1987.
On Thursday, 20th Century Fox released the trailer for The Predator, hours after the film’s ensemble cast teased the iconic heat vision filter on social media. In the trailer, a young boy receives a mysterious package of Predator equipment. While playing with his “toys,” he accidentally brings a Predator ship to Earth, where a hunter seeking “hybridization” with the human species promptly tears shit up. Naturally, the government reacts, hastily recruiting an assassin (Boyd Holbrook) to form a task force to take down the alien threat.
The history of the Predator franchise has taken the alien (and helpless humans who fight them) from the jungles of Central America to the sprawling urban landscapes of Los Angeles. But only once has a Predator ever been unleashed in suburbia, which happened in 2007’s Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. It’s a neat idea — a lethal wrecking ball let loose in the most fragile of settings — but being that it was AvP 2, it was bad. Now, here comes The Predator, course-correcting what was an awesome idea and actually making it exciting.
I thought my school was full of aliens, too.
Extra special for The Predator is that it’s loaded with many familiar faces. Boyd Holbrook, who played Donald Pierce in Logan, is the central star of the film opposite ex-nerd icon Olivia Munn, who plays a scientist. Keegan-Michael Key also steps in in his first major action role, along with Sterling K. Brown (Black Panther), Yvonne Strahovski (Mass Effect), Alfie Allen (Game of Thrones), Thomas Jane (The Punisher), and General Adama himself, Edward James Olmos.
The Predator will hit theaters on September 14.
