We haven’t learned too much about Shane Black’s The Predator since it was first announced over three years ago, but with the film’s 2018 release date rapidly approaching, more details are beginning to leak out about the movie — including our best description yet of the plot.
Thomas Jane, one of the stars of the film, recently gave an interview to Den of Geek where he gave his own loose (and heavily profane) description of the sequel’s story:
“We play these veterans from like Afghanistan, Iraq war or whatever. But we’re all f—king crazy so we go to the VA hospital to get our meds. We’re all like shellshocked, PTSD… soldiers. We’re at the VA hospital and we’re in group therapy and of course, somebody flips out… this is backstory, I don’t think we really see this… somebody flips out and we all get arrested and get thrown onto the bus to go down to the hospital and they throw this other guy on the bus too. And he’s a guy they’ve actually marked to kill him because he’s seen a UFO, he’s seen the Predator ships come down so they lock him up and throw him in with us lunatics. They’re going to take that bus, drive it down to a ditch and shoot us all just to get rid of this one guy. But, of course, we take the bus over and we’re all like, ‘f—k that man, let’s go kill these f—king Predators ourselves,’ and we’re just crazy enough to believe that this guy really did see a UFO and there’s these aliens out there. So that’s kinda cool!”
Jane rambles a bit here, but it sounds like a group of PTSD suffering veterans become caught up in a conspiracy to silence one veteran who witnessed the Predator aliens, and the group decides to go rogue and deal with the alien threat themselves. The themes of government distrust and mentally unstable yet noble soldiers both make the film sound very 1980s, which is pretty appropriate given that it is hoping to capture the spirit of the 1987 original, in which director Black was a co-star.
Along with Jane, the film features an ensemble cast of Olivia Munn, Boyd Holbrook, Trevante Rhodes, Keegan-Michael Key, Sterling K. Brown, Jacob Tremblay, Yvonne Strahovski, Alfie Allen, Edward James Olmos, and Jake Busey, who plays the son of his father Gary Busey’s character from Predator 2. It’s set to premiere on August 3 of next year.
