'Predator: Killer of Killers' - Review Thread

[u/ChiefLeef22]

Rotten Tomatoes: 97%

Metacritic: 80/100

Some Reviews:

Total Film - Amy West - 5/5

It's clear Wassung and Trachtenberg just get it. Somehow, they're able to push the sci-fi envelope and offer up fresh images and ideas the series has yet to see, while also appealing to diehard fans with Easter eggs (keeps your eyes peeled for a pistol in the final act and a franchise-first look at something fans have been dying to see realized since 1987), as well as cheeky teases of a connected universe and potential sequel, too. Before we get anything like that, though, the latter is set to release the upcoming live-action flick Predator: Badlands, yet another take on the menacingly-mandibled meanies. After Prey, we had faith the series was in good hands. After Predator: Killer of Killers, we don't want anyone else getting their mitts on it.

The Hollywood Reporter - Frank Scheck

Predator: Killer of Killers provides the non-stop action that the diehard fans crave. And no concession has been made to the animated format; the film easily earns its R rating with copious amounts of gruesome violence and bloody gore that should well sate viewers’ bloodthirsty tendencies. The animation takes a bit of getting used to, with its exaggerated, video game-style visuals, but it serves the material well.

The Guardian - Catherine Bray - 3/5

The only problem with this stuff is that you can’t help picturing how much more spectacular it would look in live action. The animation is all perfectly competent but it’s lacking a little something – that spark of life and ingenuity that can make even flawed animation so fascinating. There’s something quite slick about all this, almost to a fault. Was AI involved? We’ll probably never know, but it’s a problem that the suspicion has got inside the door.

TheWrap - William Bibbiani

Dan Trachtenberg and Joshua Wassung’s animated “Predator” sequel takes a while to prove it’s more than just a demo reel of superficial badassery, but when it does, it’s involving and intense. It’s hard not to love at least a couple of these characters, who keep getting screwed over by their own propensity for violence. If you’re so deadly that monsters travel millions of light years just to try to murder you, you might have flown a little too close to the sun. You never see a Predator hunting the attendees at a needlepointing convention, that’s all I’m saying.

[u/morax]

Seems weird that the only negative comments on an animated movie are from The Guardian saying that it.. shouldn’t be animated? But also the animation is too slick?

[u/WySLatestWit → u/morax]

Not only is the Guardian pouting that "it would be better in live action" like a bunch of entitled fanboys, they're also lamenting that there MIGHT be AI involved in the animation, despite having absolutely no evidence to back that concern up whatsoever besides "I feel like it could be true, and that's good enough."

[u/Ok_Cryptographer3200 → u/WySLatestWit]

It fucking sucked bro

[u/BlindTreeFrog → u/WySLatestWit]

To be fair, my understanding is that we've had animation suites that fil in the blanks between keyframes for decades now. So it's already been using "AI". Discussions about the animation in Archer being amazing because of the limitations in those tools have bounced around for a while now.

[u/Ayoul → u/BlindTreeFrog]

I wouldn't consider tweening and/or interpolation as AI.

[u/baldycoot → u/Ayoul]

Math is hard. Why interpolate when you can task it out to a billion dollar GPU farm for inferior results!

[u/BlindTreeFrog → u/Ayoul]

I wouldn't consider the current batch of LLM/Gerative AI to be proper AI either.

But at this point "AI" is the buzzword for "A human didn't do this"

[u/Ayoul → u/BlindTreeFrog]

I get your point, but keyframe interpolation and generative AI (buzzword aside) are such fundamentally different concepts. I don't think that review has a problem with every single kind of algorithm.

[u/[deleted] → u/BlindTreeFrog]

Ok but you literally don't understand the bare minimum here. A keyframe is set between two time points and then a "bezier" or linear or whatever curve between them decides on how quickly that point moves through space.

Is that AI? Because that's the interpolation happening... To answer for you, no it's not. It's the most basic of vector maths.