Works in this franchise with their own pages:
Fridge Brilliance
- Notice that the Predator kills Hawkins first (the radio equipment technical expert), and Blain second. The Predator knew what it was doing. By eliminating Hawkins first, the Predator is wiping out the team's communications guy, essentially sabotaging them and leaving them stranded in the jungle. By eliminating Blain second, the Predator is getting rid of the biggest gun, literally and figuratively.
- The Predator clearly respects (or fears?) Old Painless, because if you pay attention, Blain is essentially the only character killed from a distance.
- That and the fact that he has a minigun on him, and so the Predator doesn't want to get anywhere close to him. While the other soldiers are killed at close range, Blain, on the other hand, is hit first with a stunning blow, and then with the killing blow that blows out his chest: both attacks are fired from a safe distance.
- When the Predator is fatally injured and Dutch asks what the hell it is, it spits back the same phrase. The Predator is an intelligent creature and does not do anything without reason. It is essentially telling Dutch what it is in the only way that matters to the creature's culture: it's a warrior, same as him.
- The Predator never makes any attempt to attack Anna. Dutch deduces that this is because she is the only one of them unarmed. While that is definitely a likely factor, another to consider is that the Predator is a professional hunter. It knows that killing females can damage a species' population.
- Why does Billy throw away his rifle when doing his Delaying Action last stand? If he used a rifle, the Predator would use his own cannon and end the fight quickly. By using a knife, he limits the Predator to using a melee weapon. This allows him to delay the Predator and buy the others more time.
- Billy is able to tell the Predator is near when he looks right at it. One might chalk this up to him being a Magical Native American, but he's special forces. They're taught to recognize camouflage, especially when the target is completely still. And perhaps his ancestors, being Dakota Sioux, were hunted by the Predators and passed down their own stories. After all, they came from a hot climate themselves.
- The first few scenes of the film take great pains to establish that Dutch and his men are going into a hot zone in an unspecified, but very volatile, country. Once the guerilla camp is taken out we don't hear another word about any hostiles despite Dillon's insistence that they're still out there. There's a more than zero chance that the Jungle Hunter has been wading through their numbers for days and that's why the jungle is so...safe otherwise.
Fridge Logic
- While Dillon knows the true nature of the mission, Dutch and all of his commandos expect that they are rescuing hostages. The extraction point is a long distance away from the enemy camp to be escorting potentially malnourished and/or wounded hostages through the jungle.
Fridge Horror
- The Predator is on safari. It's the exact same thing we humans have done to animals for hundreds of years.
- And as later films would reveal, it's arguably not even the most dangerous thing out there that humanity doesn't know about yet.
- Anna's fate will likely be less than pleasant. The film treats going to the chopper as a happy ending, but this is happening in 80s Central America. She will likely go right back to being a prisoner, who will be squeezed by the local CIA proxies for every bit of information about the rebels. That's why Dillon brought her back in the first place.
- We know from the sequel that Keyes and the OWLF got a hold of her for some time. Whether that's any better is up to the viewer.
- As utterly irrelevant to the main plot as it is, Dillon did take a second to tell Dutch that they just stopped a major Soviet backed invasion into a neighboring country. Who knows how much damage those rebels could've done if they commandos didn't take the mission?
