Director – Dan Trachtenberg, Co-Director – Josh Wasssung, Screenplay – Micho Robert Rutare, Story – Micho Robert Rutare & Dan Trachtenberg, Producers – John Davis, Ben Rosenblatt, Marc Toberoff & Dan Trachtenberg, Music – Benjamin Wallfisch, Animation – Steamroller Studio (Supervisors – Tomi Lofqvist, Josiah Massingall & Chad Shattuck) & The Third Floor, Production Design – Amee Carter & Joel Chang. Production Company – Davis Entertainment Company/Toberoff Entertainment.
Voices
The Shield:- Lindsay LaVanchy (Ursa), Damian Haas (Anders), Andrew Morgado (Chief Zoran), Doug Cockle (Einar), Lauren Holt (Freya), Chermai Leigh (Young Ursa). The Sword:- Louis Ozawa (Kenji & Kiyoshi). The Bullet:- Rick Gonzalez (John Torres), Michael Biehn (Vandy), Felis Solis (Torres’s Dad), Britton Watkins (Warlord Predator)
Plot
The Shield:- The year 841. The Viking warrior woman Ursa leads a ferocious trail of destruction as she seeks vengeance against Chief Zoran for the murder of her father. Immediately after she invades Zoran’s stronghold and kills him, she must face a Predator. The Sword:- Japan, 1609. Brothers Kenji and Kiyoshi are pitted against one another to succeed their father the warlord. Into the midst of the conflict comes a Predator. The Bullet:- In 1941, John Torres enlists with the US Air Force to be able to fight. After a plane returns with an alien object embedded in it, Torres deduces that there is something in the sky that is destroying their aircraft. Boarding his broken-down plane, he sets out to confront the alien craft. He, along with Ursa and Kenji, find they have been abducted to be placed in the arena on the Predator homeworld.
The Predator series is now in its fourth decade. Which is not something one would have predicted when watching the original Predator (1987) back in theatres in 1987. The series’ course has been uneven. There was the okay first sequel Predator 2 (1990). Then someone had the bright idea to combine the Predator and Alien series because the copyright for both was held by 20th Century Fox, resulting in the much disliked AVP: Aliens vs Predator (2004) and AVPR: Aliens vs Predator Requiem (2007). Sporadic other efforts were made with Predators (2010) and Shane Black’s The Predator (2018).
By the 2020s, Predator has entered the realm of IP filmmaking where any past success will be remade, sequelised, turned into a tv series, have sequelia spun off around supporting characters – you name it. Enter Dan Trachenberg who had previously made another not bad sequel in another franchise with 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016). Trachtenberg’s sequel Prey (2022) was well regarded and seen as revitalising the franchise, placing a Predator up against Native Americans. Trachtenberg now returns with Predator: Killer of Killers, an animated anthology, which is released five months before his live-action sequel Predator: Badlands (2025) and apparently introduces elements that will feature in that film.
Ever since The Wachowskis oversaw The Animatrix (2003) where they went to Japan to hire a series of anime directors to create a parallel work set in The Matrix universe, Going Anime has been seen as a legitimate way for a film, tv or videogame franchise to diversify the IP. A number of popular franchises – Blade Runner, The Terminator series and most recently The Lord of the Rings – have taken this route this in recent years. Killer of Killers isn’t quite a full Gone Anime in that the animation is produced by US not Japanese companies, but the principle is still the same.
The Predator goes animated
My problem with the Predator series is the problem I have with a lot of sequels – it is the ongoing generation of more product from a work that was never originally conceived as a series. Well, it may have been – I won’t be so presumptive as to speak on behalf of the original intentions of Jim and John Thomas – but storywise it gives the impression it never was. And so every single film since then has just ended up being a regurgitation on the same basic scenario – alien predator armed with assorted weapons turns up on Earth and fights various people hand-to-hand. There has been some search for novelty – series crossovers with the Alien films, Archie comics and so on, or else introducing different types of predators and new weaponry and, as with Prey and here, taking the fight to different historical eras. However, we are still stuck with the same basic plot every time – predator and humans duke it out, humans invariably win despite being mismatched in the fight.
Killer of Killers extends the basics of Prey in having the conflict occur in three different historical eras – the time of the Vikings, feudal Japan and the Pacific theatre during World War II. It is still three stories for the price of one about people taking on the Predator in combat. That said, Killer of Killers does mix it up and try to stretch the basics somewhat more than usual. The third episode The Bullet far more imaginatively abandons hand-to-hand combat for a fight that takes place in the sky as Torres sets out to find a Predator craft. This is followed by an unnamed fourth segment that places the main characters from the previous segments into the arena on the Predator homeworld – the same basic plot as Planet Hulk (2010).
Killer of Killers also figures it is giving the fans what they want. Dialogue has often been stripped away to a minimum and pared back to allow a maximum of action. Freed of the constraints of live-action, Dan Trachtenberg is able to get brutal and bloody – Ursa conducts a majorly blood-drenched path into Zoran’s stronghold at the start of The Shield, filled with severed limbs and heads everywhere.
I don’t know – I strain to find interest in a film series that seems to be repeating the same basics over and over. The action was okay but I am not much of a fan of action moves delivered in animation – they seem to lack the same visceral impact. It was also that I felt that some of the plotting was conducted without a whole lot of historical research. For example, the entirety of the plot arc The Bullet is based around Torres having to man up and learn how to do mechanics on the plane he flies into combat, whereas in the reality of World War II combat this is something he would have been performed by a ground crew. The sequence also has mid-air scenes that majorly stretch plausibility such as Torres having to exit his plane out onto the wing to conduct repairs while leaving it pilotless, or of pilots seemingly able to have mid-air conversations between cockpits.
