Thirty-one years since Arnold Schwarzenegger first faced down a lethal alien creature hunting him and his comrades through the jungles of Central America, the Predator franchise is being brought up-to-date by one of the people who suffered at the hands of that original extra-terrestrial. This time, though, Shane Black is in charge, and the Predators do what he says. Black, who acted in the 1987 original, is now co-writer and director for “The Predator,” which aims to bring a whole new dimension to the story.

In this year’s “The Predator”, a former Army Ranger and Special Forces soldier (Boyd Holbrook’s Quinn McKenna) has an encounter with a mysterious alien – which he later learns is a Predator – while on a mercenary mission in Mexico. He sends some of the creature’s technology back to the US, where his son Rory (Jacob Tremblay) figures out the unearthly language used to control it. This, in turn, exposes him to a serious threat from the Predators. Confined for psychiatric evaluation by the government as a way to keep him from revealing what he’s seen, Quinn escapes with a group of fellow former soldiers, dubbed “the loonies,” and heads out to save his son, discovering a much greater conspiracy at work.