The film begins with a mysterious spacecraft entering the Earth's atmosphere. On the coast of Guatemala, a US Army Special Forces unit, led by Major Alan "Dutch" Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), is ordered by General Phillips (R. G. Armstrong) to rescue a cabinet minister. Dutch is informed they will be on their own. Former teammember and current CIA agent Major George Dillon (Carl Weathers) joins the team and they travel by helicopters to their destination within the jungle.
They are dropped behind the border where they find a crashed helicopter as well as traces of rebels being followed by U.S. soldiers. This unusual circumstance is noted by the team. They soon discover the slain U.S. soldiers hanging from a tree, all of them skinned and mutilated. Dutch reads the dog tags of one of the victims and realizes it to be his friend, Lieutenant James Hopper, a Green Beret squad leader stationed in Fort Bragg, and questions Dillon as to why Hopper's unit was in the jungle. Evidence from the pitched battle puzzles the team.
They find the guerrilla post, including multiple rebels and Soviet military advisers. The team attacks and destroys the base with little effort and with no casualties on their part, but the prisoners were marked as members of the CIA and assassinated in advance. Dutch puts together the intelligence items gleaned from his team members immediately following the attack, learning that not only was the "cabinet minister" story false, but the slain U.S. soldiers they'd discovered had been ordered to attack the base before disappearing. Dutch angrily confronts Dillon who states that Dutch and his team are "expendable assets". With a female prisoner, Anna, (Elpidia Carrillo) in their custody, the whole group proceeds to their Rendezvous point for extraction near the border. As they move through the jungle, they are unknowingly stalked by an unseen creature who views the group in infra-red and records certain phrases they speak.
The group halts when its tracker Billy (Sonny Landham) is disturbed by a mysterious presence hiding within the trees. When Anna attempts to escape, Hawkins (Shane Black) chases her but is killed by the stalking creature.
Blain (Jesse Ventura) is killed moments later while searching for Hawkins' body. When Sergeant "Mac" Eliot (Bill Duke) rushes to assist his fallen comrade, he sees what appears to be a large, transparent creature with flashing eyes. Eliot starts screaming and immediately opens fire and is joined by the remaining members of the unit. In what is known as a "mad minute", all members of the team saturate the jungle with bullets. They stop firing and to their shock, are unable to find any bodies. The team cannot locate Hawkins' body but takes Blain's body with them. What they did not know, but is realized by Anna, was that they had only managed to wound the creature slightly in the leg, leaving a small puddle of glowing green blood on a jungle frond.
That night they decide to set up a "night defensive position" with claymore mines, flares and trip wires. Later the flares go off and Eliot wrestles with what he believes to be the creature that killed his friend, but upon using a flashlight to examine his kill, sees that what he has actually been fighting is a wild boar. The team finds it funny at first, but stop laughing when they realize that the creature used the convenient distraction to come into the camp and make off with Blain's body. Now the remaining team members begin to realize they are dealing with a powerful alien creature. When questioned at daylight, Anna recalls a local legend of villagers disappearing in particularly hot years, much like this one, until their mutilated bodies are discovered. She says that the village women refer to whatever killed them as the "Demon who makes Trophies of Men." Dutch decides to lay a trap for the creature knowing now that they are all being hunted. After the various traps are set, Dutch walks out into the clearing to get the creature to move and expose itself. Suddenly a huge thing trips a net trap, but the creature struggles free, shooting in all directions and causing a dead fall log to swing down and seriously injure Poncho (Richard Chaves).
Mac and Dillon pursue the Predator claiming that they want "payback" for their lost comrades, only to find the creature waiting for them as they are killed by its advanced weaponry and tricked by its playback of phrases like "over here" in their voices. Dutch, Billy, Pancho, and Anna struggle through the jungle towards the extraction point. At a huge log bridge, Billy stays behind to make a suicide-stand against the Predator, which buys the survivors some time. The creature kills Billy easily and catches up with the rest and kills Poncho and slightly wounds Dutch. Realizing that the Predator will not kill an unarmed person as it would be "unsporting", Dutch refuses to give Anna a gun and tells her to flee towards the extraction location.
Although wounded, and with the creature catching up, Dutch escapes by sliding off of a cliff and dropping into a huge river eventually going over a large waterfall and crawling out through the mud at the water's edge. The Predator continues his pursuit, landing in the water seconds behind Dutch. Covered in mud, Dutch finally sees the creature when the advanced technology that warped visible light is damaged and waits for his own death. But the creature doesn't appear to see him. Once the creature leaves, Dutch realizes the creature couldn't see him because he was covered in mud. The mud blocked the heat from his body and made him invisible to infrared vision. The creature goes to where he had left Mac's, Dillon's and Billy's, bodies so that he could prepare his human trophies. Meanwhile Dutch, lacking firearms, prepares to fight the creature by creating a variety of primitive weapons, including bow and arrows, and two M203 grenades he has left, converting the shells into improvised explosive arrows. As Dutch arms himself for battle, the Predator cleans the skulls of his victims to display as trophies. The scene is set for the final showdown between the two.
After nightfall, Dutch starts a large fire and lets out an intense war cry and awaits the creature's arrival. Dutch surprises the creature using a modified explosive-tipped arrow once again making the creature visible and the creature fires his plasma caster energy weapon all over the jungle trying to flush Dutch out into the open. Dutch gets his two spears he had made and follows a trail of the creatures blood, but that is exactly what the predator wanted him to do. The creature circled around Dutch to find him in a little hole. Dutch makes a run for it but ends up falling in a river, washing away his mud disguise. The creature corners Dutch. The two face each other and the creature decides to remove his high-tech weapons in favor of more sporting hand to hand combat. The creature casts off its firearms and its mask, showing its true face and a fight follows where, because of the huge difference in size, Dutch seems to be getting the worse of the fight. But, Dutch tricks the alien into following him into a booby trap, springing a huge log which crushes the Predator.
The creature, now mortally wounded and covered in its own glowing blood, activates a self-destruct device attached to its wrist and begins to mimic a maniacal laugh patterned after Billy's voice which the creature had copied. Dutch immediately runs for cover as the creature self-destructs and a massive explosion ignites the jungle. As dawn breaks the rescue helicopter with General Phillips and Anna arrives on the scene (which shortly before had been hidden by a mushroom cloud) and encounters Dutch standing alone on the scorched plain. Flying back to safety, Dutch stares at the jungle in mournful silence.
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