With buckets of blood and a brand new round of crude jokes, 2018's The Predator is, if
nothing else, a predator movie, building on the lore established in the previous five
movies while expanding on the franchise in its own way.
It all comes together in a lightning quick climax, so we're going to slow it down and
take a look at what actually happened at the end of The Predator.
Turn on your heat vision, because we're getting into some major spoilers.
Traitor
The Predator jumps into the plot from the very first scene, which sees Boyd Holbrook's
Quinn McKenna on an assassination mission in Mexico, when he's interrupted by a crashing
spaceship.
As the movie progresses, it's revealed that the alien who crash landed on top of Quinn
didn't come to Earth to top off his collection of people spines, as Predators tend to do.
He's actually a traitor who was trying to save humanity from an invasion by the predators
by bringing a gift to help humans fight back.
Good for him!
Unfortunately, he's killed by an upgraded predator, but his mysterious gift lived on
until the ending of the movie.
Memory map
Even though Traeger knows that there's something really important on the predator's crashed
ship, he has a problem: he doesn't know how to get there.
Fortunately, Quinn's son, Rory, knows everything.
With his apparent photographic memory, he's a living trapper keeper of all he sees.
At some point while messing around with the alien gadgets in his basement, he must have
come across some kind of record of the flight path the ship made when it crashed.
So what does he do?
He starts drawing a map that leads directly to the alien ship while he's being held prisoner
by the exact men who want to find the ship.
Traeger and his goons head there to ransack the ship, with Quinn and his loons in hot
pursuit to get Rory back.
But there's someone else heading there, too.
Someone...predatory.
The game begins
If there's one thing The Predator gets right, it's giving the alien plenty of people to
dismember.
That's what these movies are all about, after all.
After crashing the party at the downed spaceship, the predator has all the humans in the palm
of his hand.
All he has to do is start shooting.
And then… he gives them all a head start before he chases them?
What?
Actually, this one makes sense.
He's a predator, after all.
The thrill of the kill is in the hunt, not massacring a group of people who can't fight
back.
Now that he did what he came to do - destroying that mysterious "gift" on the ship - he's
ready for some R&R.
Who doesn't like to kick back after a stressful business trip?
So he evens the odds by giving the humans a head start, then gets down to his favorite
hobby: murder.
"Oh boy, here I go killing again."
One true warrior
As the predator explains the rules of the game to all the confused humans, he name drops
McKenna as the "one true warrior" who is his main target.
Naturally, being an actual, adult warrior, Quinn assumes the predator is talking about
him.
He leads his group into the woods, where they concoct a plan to ambush the psychotic monster.
Things go south almost immediately.
One by one, they all get taken out, and the predator makes a beeline for Quinn… then
shoves him aside and grabs Rory, revealing the boy to be the one true warrior.
In the aftermath, Casey repeats her earlier line about people on the autism spectrum being
the next step in the evolutionary chain.
When the predators upgrade themselves with human DNA, they want Rory's chromosomes coursing
through their veins.
Escape pod
Before he started hunting everyone at the end, the ultra predator blew up the ship that
the traitor predator had been using to bring humanity their special gift.
But as the final scene explains, the traitor was extremely thorough in making sure that
package made it to the right people.
In case he got caught, he left a failsafe in place that caused the gift to eject from
the ship in an escape pod.
After Quinn defeated the predator, the government apparently went into damage control and swept
the area to clean up the fallout.
Remember, they've known about predators for decades - they're not about to let the secret
get out now.
In their search, they came across the escape pod containing the secret weapon, ensuring
the continued existence of humanity when the predators launch their attack.
New suit
So what was in that pod?
What was the mysterious gift that will save mankind?
Short answer - a super duper robot suit.
After a few seconds of dramatic tension, the pod opens and pops out an arm band.
One of the lab guys gets it on his arm, and presto change-o, he's engulfed in a high tech
predator suit.
What can one fancy exoskeleton do against an army of predators?
Who knows!
But Quinn immediately claims the suit for himself, potentially setting up a sequel.
Whether that sequel will ever happen most likely depends on how The Predator does at
the box office, so for now we'll all have to wait.
But hey, at least he got a new suit!
Who doesn't love that?
"Buy new suits.