The Predator (2018)

A Predator ship crash-lands on Earth. U.S. Army Ranger sniper Quinn McKenna and his team are attacked by the Predator while on a hostage retrieval mission. McKenna incapacitates the Predator and has parts of its armor sent off by mail to prove the existence of extraterrestrial life. Government agent Will Traeger has McKenna captured and held for examination. Traeger also takes the Predator to a lab for experimentation and observation, recruiting evolutionary biologist Casey Bracket to study it, who discovers that the Predator’s genetic makeup contains human DNA. The Predator awakens, breaks out of its restraints and kills the lab workers and armed guards, but spares Bracket, the only unarmed person, before escaping. McKenna is bussed off with a group of other government captives, including former Marines “Nebraska” Williams, Coyle, Baxley, Lynch, and Army helicopter pilot Nettles. Witnessing the Predator’s escape from the lab, they hijack the bus. Taking Bracket with them, they head over to McKenna’s estranged wife, Emily, where he expects to find the Predator armor he mailed off. However, Rory, McKenna’s autistic son, has gone trick-or-treating in the armor in hopes of avoiding detection from bullies.

McKenna and the others find his son in time to stop a pair of Predator Hounds from ambushing the boy. McKenna blows one up by shooting a grenade into its mouth; Nebraska unintentionally lobotomizes the other dog after shooting it in the head. The Predator chases them into a nearby school, and they start to give the Predator’s armor back when another larger, more powerful Predator arrives and engages the first in combat. The group flees, and the second Predator kills the first before setting out to retrieve the lost technology. Bracket concludes that the Predators are attempting to improve themselves with the DNA of humans and, presumably, other planets’ inhabitants. She mentions that the larger Predator generates an exoskeleton that renders him resistant to damage, even from weapons of Predator technology. The team flees to an abandoned barn, but Traeger finds and captures them, and shares his theory that the Predators anticipate that climate change will end their ability to retrieve human DNA for further hybridization, and as such are scrambling to retrieve samples before it is too late.