Predator

Dutch leads a crack team of mercenaries into the jungles of Central America on a CIA-sanctioned mission to rescue hostages from guerrilla forces. Along for the ride is his old contact Dillon, whose motivations turn out to be less than clean — this is a covert intelligence operation, not a rescue.

The team dismantles the guerrilla camp with brutal efficiency, but something is wrong. They find the flayed corpses of a previous special forces unit hanging from the trees. Before they can process it, something begins killing them — something that can bend light, disappear into the canopy, and track heat. It's hunting them, not for resources or territory, but for sport.

One by one the team falls, each death more spectacular than the last. Blain goes down to a plasma burst through the chest. Mac, Hawkins, Poncho. Even Dillon, who tries to hold the creature off alone, loses his arm and his life. The jungle that was already hostile terrain has become something they have no framework for.

Dutch alone survives long enough to understand the creature has a code — it won't kill unarmed prey. He sends the sole civilian survivor, Anna, to the extraction point and starts preparing. He covers himself in mud to kill his heat signature and rigs the jungle with primitive traps.

The final confrontation is elemental. Dutch's traps wound the creature, and they grapple in the mud. When the Predator is finally beaten, it laughs in alien clicks and activates a wrist-mounted self-destruct device. Dutch runs. The explosion takes out a square kilometer of jungle.

He is extracted alone. The film ends not in triumph but in exhaustion — the look on his face that of a man who survived something he will never be able to explain.