Ant’s Rant: Predators — The Prequel and Sequel Comics

If you’ve been read­ing my reviews, you may have caught my review for Preda­tors. You can see that I loved Preda­tors. I also hap­pen to love comics, go fig­ure. Boy was I ever shocked to dis­cover the two have been mar­ried and now there’s a comic adap­ta­tion of the movie, as well as a pre­quel series and a sequel one-shot by Dark Horse. WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD!

I bought the pre­quel comics when they were released, before the  movie was released. It basi­cally exists to give a back story to some of the char­ac­ters (namely Noland and Royce) as well as explain the man that set the traps we see in the movie and detail his death (his name’s Drake). It was a decent series to com­ple­ment the movie. Not the great­est, since it’s really not that good if you have no inten­tion of see­ing the movie or read­ing it’s adap­ta­tion. Then again, this is Dark Horse. They’re really not known for the world’s finest comics. I mean, these guys made Bat­man Vs Preda­tor and Preda­tor Vs Super­man and ALIENS VS PREDATORS VS TERMINATORS!

First I’ll get into the pre­quel. Each issue (there’s 4) is bro­ken into two sto­ries, one for Drake and one for Royce (Adrian Brody’s char­ac­ter). Drake’s story is  basi­cally that of a Navy SEAL sta­tioned in Afghanistan find­ing him­self on another world being hunted by Preda­tors. Drake meets Noland (played by Lawrence Fish­burne in the movie) who’s been sur­viv­ing on the hunter planet basi­cally as a vet­eran for a long time. They have their dif­fer­ences so Drake parts ways with Noland shortly after to hunt the Preda­tors him­self, using some Preda­tor tech­nol­ogy he stole from Noland on his way out. He sets a bunch of traps using the jun­gle as his tools and weaponry, but even­tu­ally the Preda­tors get the best of him and we find his dead body and all of his traps later in the movie. The other story is Royce’s, but we already know what hap­pens to him on the hunter’s planet if we’ve seen the movie. The rest is just his back story.

What I like about the pre­quel comic is that we do get some more story out of this movie, and we get to see some Preda­tor tech­nol­ogy from Preda­tor 2 that was totally left out of the film (Smart Disc and Combi-Stick Spear). What I don’t like is that there are some con­tra­dic­tions with the film, as though the artists and writ­ers didn’t fully com­pre­hend the film before mak­ing this series. They did a good job with this, but it just doesn’t stand up as a stand-alone series. Then again, I don’t think it’s sup­posed to.

See that beauty? That’s Mr. Black (yes that’s his offi­cial name), aka The Berserker Preda­tor from the film. He’s not in the comic, since he doesn’t really sur­vive the film, and this is the sequel to said film in comic form. That is the first thing I dis­like about this comic.

The story of this one-shot is that Royce and Isabelle sur­vived in the movie, and they have to find some way to get off the planet and go home. It offers some nice char­ac­ter devel­op­ment between the two as the only human sur­vivors. It has some decent action sequences as well. How­ever, that’s about all I can say is good about it. Aside from Mr. Black on the cover, there’s another thing that just irked me about this. It appears that Goro from Mor­tal Kom­bat is now a Preda­tor in this book! That’s right, they have to kill a 4-armed Super-Predator! I have no objec­tions to there being two dif­fer­ent twos of Preda­tors in the series (big guys and lit­tle guys), but when you start giv­ing them extra limbs, that is just down­right stretch­ing and farfetched!

Another thing that both­ered me about this book is the end­ing. The film’s end­ing was a let­down, under­stand­ably since nobody made it back to Earth. The same goes for this book. The char­ac­ters find them­selves in the same sit­u­a­tion in the end as they did in the begin­ning. The story itself really had no devel­op­ment, it was just the char­ac­ters them­selves that did.

Finally, there’s a huge con­tra­dic­tion in the story that is a deal breaker for me. In the end of the film, the Preda­tors are drop­ping more boxes and more humans. In the begin­ning of this book, there’s no humans being dropped off. What hap­pened to those peo­ple? Did all of their para­chutes get stuck like the one man in the film? Were they all wiped out in sec­onds upon land­ing? Where were they and why was there no men­tion of them?

Here’s the ver­dict on these comics: the pre­quels are worth read­ing if you have seen or plan to see the movie or read the adap­ta­tion. The sequel isn’t worth read­ing. I LOVED the movie and I can’t even say I’m happy to have read this sequel. I’d rather just wait for the sequel film to release and take that as my con­tin­u­a­tion of the story, rather than accept this. This was just made for peo­ple who really needed more from the film’s unsat­is­fy­ing end­ing, and only left you even more unsatisfied.

Ant

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