[COLUMN] In Predator: Killer of Killers, Violence is a Universal Language | by Darren Mooney

Note: This piece contains a full discussion of the plot of the animated anthology film Predator: Killer of Killers, which is streaming on Disney+ now. I had a really good time with it, and it’s well worth watching if you enjoyed Prey.

Part of the charm of Predator: Killer of Killers is the extent to which the film embraces its medium, an animated film with a very strong sense of visual storytelling.

As with Prey, director Dan Trachtenberg’s previous entry in the franchise, Killer of Killers is built around a fairly straightforward high concept. It is a set of three vignettes set at different points in human history, featuring three characters who survive an encounter with an alien hunter, culminating in their abduction and their forced participation in a tournament of champions for the amusement of these malicious extraterrestrials.

There is an inherent purity to a Predator film that is built around a set of short adventures that amount to “Predator versus Vikings”, “Predator versus samurai” and “Predator versus the United States Air Force.” In the best possible sense, these are exactly the kinds of pitches that could easily have been spawned from the imagination of a bunch of giddy teenagers in the backseat of a car on the way to karate practice in the late 1980s.

“The Shield” follows the “Valkyrie of the Northern Seas” and “Stormbringer Shieldmaiden” Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy), as she sets out with her son Anders (Damien Haas) to avenge her father Einer (Doug Cockle). “The Sword” features disgraced Japanese warrior Kawakami (Louis Ozawa) sneaking back into his family fortress. “The Bullet” finds young John J. Torres (Rick Gonzalez) serving on the aircraft carrier Ranger during the Battle of the Atlantic, eager to take flight.

These three stories shift not only across times and cultures, but also between genres. “The Sword” owes a great deal to classic samurai films, culminating in a classic Kurosawa sword slash. In contrast, “The Bullet” feels like it owes a lot more to Steven Spielberg, steeped in American iconography from hotrods to cornfields that features a protagonist who is embarking on a classic coming-of-age narrative against the backdrop of the Second World War. There’s little repetition in these sections, which is refreshing.

While each of these three shorts – each running about twenty minutes, culminating in a framing story that runs another twenty minutes – could likely have been fleshed out and extended into a feature film, there is a certain purity and efficiency to the film as it exists. These three stories are surprisingly clean. These adventures get in, establish stakes and character, deliver action set pieces and build to a confrontation with a Predator. There is very little fat.

Befitting this approach, Killer of Killers leans on visual storytelling over verbal exposition. Characters are defined by action, and the core themes of these stories are articulated as much through visuals as through dialogue. This is not a surprise. Prey was also an economic film when it came to dialogue. Trachtenberg considered filming the movie in Commanche rather than English, and the protagonist Naru (Amber Midthunder) spends a lot of the film by herself with nobody to talk to.

Trachtenberg is very good at explaining the logic of his stories to audiences by showing rather than by telling. He broke with No Escape, a short film set in the world of the Portal video game franchise, in which the protagonist (Danielle Rayne) demonstrates the logic of the portal gun and finds continuous novel ways of employing the technology. Trachtenberg communicates the mechanics to the audience, and trusts their ability to follow along without ever stating them explicitly in dialogue.

Killer of Killers feels in step with this approach to narrative. “The Sword” is notable for the near absence of dialogue. The short opens with a voiceover from Kawakami articulating a thematically relevant proverb - “the leaves of a tree grow side by side, brother; yet when they fall, they fall alone” – and closes with a short conversation, but is otherwise completely free of dialogue. It is a really stunning and ambitious piece of work, particularly in the context of the Predator franchise.

Due to their compressed runtimes, these three stories are not particularly complex. There are not a lot of characters. There is not an excessive amount of worldbuilding. There is little room for the clutter of lore or fanservice. Instead, each of these chapters plays like a parable or a metaphor. There is a certain elegance to their simplicity. Each of these segments is about something, but about something clear enough that Trachtenberg can communicate it almost wordlessly.

For example, “The Shield” and “The Sword” suggest that their heroes are not so different from the extraterrestrial big game hunters that they come to confront. There is an implication that both Ursa and Kawakami carry a predator of some kind inside them. Reflecting on the death of her father, Ursa tells her son, “That day, something was born inside of me. A monster! With claws around my heart, breathing fire into my soul. There is only one way to kill it.”

This line of dialogue earns a visual callback in “The Sword.” While sneaking through his old home, Kawakami notices a beautiful portrait of his father on the wall, the father who set his own sons against one another. At that moment, the alien attacker tears through the portrait, its claw seeming to burst out of the old man’s mouth. It seems that Ursa is not the only person who carries such a monster around inside herself.

While Killer of Killers makes it clear that Torres is less jaundiced and cynical than either Ursa or Kawakami, the film’s treatment of its third protagonist remains in conversation with the idea of the beast inside the human being. There is an obvious inversion at play; Torres works below deck on the Ranger in the figurative belly of the beast and is swallowed by a monster in the arena so that he winds up in the literal belly of the beast.

Killer of Killers often tells its story through action. Ursa spends most of “The Shield” trying to hunt down a Krivich warlord named Zoran (Andrew Morgado), who forced her to murder her own father and in doing so turned her into a monster. This quest has completely consumed Ursa, to the point that she has lost sight of anything else. She takes her own son on this quest, and forces him to make the same promise that she made to her father. If she dies, she instructs Anders, “Avenge me.”

At the climax of “The Shield”, Ursa wrestles with a hunter beneath an ice cap. The creature has a cannon on its arm. As it prepares to fire at Ursa, she raises her shield, turning the monster’s power back on itself. The blast is so strong that it sends the creature flying backwards through the water, impaling its head on an anchor. The hunter is defeated by its own appetite for violence. Ursa reaches the surface and discovers that Anders has been mortally wounded.

The central theme of the story has already been expressed in the fight between Ursa and the Predator. The urge for violence – the need to vanquish an opponent no matter the cost – can lead to self-inflicted wounds. This idea is rendered literal as the alien’s weapon leads to its own destruction, but it is expressed metaphorically through Ursa’s loss. Ursa’s quest to avenge her father has led to the death of her beloved son. Rather than stating this bluntly through dialogue, the film communicates it through visuals. “Mother, did you kill the monster?” Anders asks, underscoring the dramatic irony.

It is not simply that Killer of Killers expresses its ideas and themes through visuals. The film repeatedly draws attention to the limits of language. In the final stretch of the film, Ursa, Kawakami and Torres are abducted by these extraterrestrial big game hunters and thrown into a cell together. Ursa speaks Old Norse. Kawakami speaks Japanese. While Torres learned some Japanese “in basic”, it is just enough to illustrate that verbal communication is impossible between the three.

This seems deliberate. The Predators provide each of their captives with a collar that can translate from the aliens’ native tongue into the recipient’s native language; Ursa hears the announcement in Old Norse, while Kawakami processes it in Japanese and Torres receives it in English. It would be very easy for these collars to translate from one human language to another, so Killer of Killers seems to imply that this is a deliberate choice on the part of the monsters.

Towards the climax of the film, as the aliens pit the three characters against one another, Kawakami tries to reason with Ursa. “Don’t fight her,” Kawakami instructs Torres. Torres acknowledges the instruction and responds by lunging right at Ursa. It turns out that he wasn’t able to parse what Kawakami had told him. “You said fight her!” Torres protests. The characters have to learn to communicate with one another without recourse to dialogue and exposition.

Even the hyper-advanced alien species are prone to miscommunication. When the three humans arrive in the arena, each is presented with a gift – “a weapon of their tribe.” Ursa is furnished with a shield and an axe. Kawakami receives a sword. However, despite not serving in the infantry, Torres is issued with a pistol that he has no idea how to use. “This isn’t even from my century,” he protests. It seems that he received the gun because his plane was called “the Bullet.”

There is a sense – increasingly prevalent in contemporary pop culture – that verbal communication can be difficult and deceptive. In this “post-truth” age, it can be hard to parse intent from words and even more difficult to trust that meaning when it can be deciphered. Killer of Killers embraces its animated format to suggest that meaning is more clearly derived from images and actions than from exposition and action. It’s a very clever, very animated take on the language of action cinema.