“I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him?
–Friedrich Nietzsche
“There’s something out there waiting for us… and it ain’t no man”
If you strip Predator down to its core, beneath the layers of mud, blood, and 80s action bravado, what emerges is a tale as old as time—survival, a story of predator versus prey, the hunter and the hunted. However, each blow for blow, trap, and kill actually ends up revealing a cinematic arena where primal instincts clash with existential philosophy. Yes, Predator is more than just explosions and one-liners. It’s a philosophical battleground that pits Nietzschean concepts of the Übermensch against René Girard’s idea of sacred violence. Lets take a look through the infrared, across the jungle-scape, and see how philosophy hides in the heart of this action classic.
“If it bleeds we can kill it.”
Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch, or the “Overman”, is a being that transcends conventional morality to create values of their own. In the post-“God is dead” era—if theoretically there was one—objective morality has died with Him. And so now man must rise to the occasion or fall prey to subjective degradation and nihilism. The solution is something like the Übermensch. The film explores, or perhaps critiques the idea, seeing what might happen when you drop a team of commandos into a godless jungle and face off against a godless extraterrestrial Übermensch. The predator fits into this mold, operating with a moral compass that revolves around strength, honor, and dominance. Unlike humans who are bound by societal rules and ethics, the predator hunts without apology, driven by its own ethos: the strongest survive, the weak fall.
The predator doesn’t kill indiscriminately, however; it chooses worthy adversaries. It spares the unarmed, the injured, and even non-threatening life forms, adhering to a self-imposed code of honor. For Nietzsche, the Übermensch thrives by rejecting the herd mentality and asserting their will. The predator’s entire existence is a manifestation of this philosophy—it is a creature beyond good and evil, living by its own rules in a violent world it seeks to dominate by way of violence.
Dutch, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, becomes the foil, the mirror image critique of this Nietzschean ideal. Dutch in the end represents the worthy adversary. Initially armed with modern weaponry the predator meets them on their level also using weaponry and technology. However, as his squad is picked off one by one, these elements are stripped away. In the end the predator and Dutch go primal, wielding mud and traps, confronting each other in a raw, instinctual, and resourceful way. In doing so, Dutch mirrors the predator’s ethos, stepping into the realm of the Übermensch.
“No, leave it! He didn’t kill you because you weren’t armed! No sport.”
If Nietzsche provides the predator’s playbook, René Girard explains the ritual. In Violence and the Sacred, Girard explores how violence, when ritualized, becomes a sacred act—a way to channel destructive energy and reaffirm social hierarchies. The predator’s hunt is not random carnage; it’s a ceremony.
The creature’s ritualistic behavior—skinning its kills, collecting trophies, and its meticulous adherence to a “fair” fight—echoes Girard’s ideas about violence as a structured and symbolic act. The predator doesn’t just hunt to survive; it hunts to affirm its superiority and to engage in what can only be described as a sacred rite of passage. Its final act, removing its weapons and fighting Dutch hand-to-hand, underscores this: for the predator, the hunt is meaningless without honor (some sacred idea behind the hunt).
The (earthly) jungle itself also becomes a kind of sacred ground, a proving ground where the boundary between hunter and hunted blurs. Girard might argue that this ritual violence serves as a catharsis, a way for the predator to confront its own nature while reaffirming its dominance.
“You’re one…ugly motherfucker.”
When Dutch and the predator finally face off in hand to hand (claw?) combat, the battle becomes less about survival and more about honor, strength, and the raw confrontation of being. This is where Nietzsche and Girard meet. Nietzsches Übermensch and Girard’s sacred violence intertwine to create a story that’s as much about existential triumph as it is about bloody survival. The predator seeks meaning in its hunt, while Dutch, seeks to not become it’s greatest skull trophy.
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Conclusion
Predator isn’t just a testosterone-fueled action flick (though it is very much that as well). It’s a meditation, a critique on human nature, a critique on the Nietzschian ideal to evolve beyond human nature and to transcend the boundaries of predator and prey. Whether through Nietzsche’s Übermensch or Girard’s sacred rituals, the film invites us to consider moral ambiguity and the conflict man is faced with when having to grapple with subjective values and virtues.
Nietzsche is famous for saying, “Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster.” This becomes a perfect companion quote to the final existential exchange between the predator and Dutch. Dutch looks down at the creature, now dying, coughing up neon green blood, asks, “What the hell are you?” and the creature mimics back asking, “What.. the hell… are *you*?”
Reading List
Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Violence and the Sacred by René Girard
