Back in the great old days, the standard Hollywood war movie employed a cast intended to reflect the geography and diversity of the nation, and not incidentally, to rally support for the conflict from its citizens. The studios filled their bomber crews and infantry platoons with representatives of the country's regions, enlisting identifiable Westerners and Southerners, all-American boys from various parts of the Midwest, and of course, a guy from Brooklyn. Along with the WASP majority, they also included an Italian, a Jew, sometimes an Eastern European, and after the integration of the services, an African American.

In our time, when audiences shun films about the two protracted and unpopular military actions in the Middle East, the industry resorts to a different approach, disguising the war movie in another uniform. Beneath its surface of science fiction and survival, and despite its debt to the original "Predator" (indicated by the pluralizing of the title), "Predators" actually repeats or revises some familiar material from the much older form, updating the Hollywood patterns to suit the taste and truths of a different era.

"Predators" opens with a half a dozen characters literally dropping out of the sky, plucked out of their lives and parachuted mysteriously into a foreign jungle; none of them knows what happened to them or how they traveled to this unfamiliar destination. Reflecting the contemporary process of globalization, they transcend the merely national diversity of the traditional war flick, and in fact resemble something like a United Nations version of the form. Most of them represent a number of different countries and conflicts, all of them as dirty and confused as the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.

The heavily armed cast includes a Russian soldier torn from a battle in Chechnya, an African irregular member of a death squad, a killer from a Mexican drug cartel, a Guatemalan sniper, a gunman for the Japanese mafia, and a mercenary involved in special operations in the Middle East. The only members of the group who arrive without heavy weapons and bandoliers of ammunition, an American doctor and a death row inmate, initially seem out of place but ultimately demonstrate their suitability for inclusion.

The mercenary (Adrien Brody) assumes something like command of the international crew, persuading them to follow him through the jungle while they try to figure out where they are and just what happened. They discover that they've been selected as game in a hunt conducted by alien beings on another planet for a particular reason - all of them are killers themselves, as much the predators of the title as the monsters who stalk them. The plot then settles into a series of pursuits, flights, fights, and horrible deaths as the group experiences a severe depletion in numbers and some rearrangements of their interrelationships.

The special ferocity and occasional creativity of the numerous confrontations between the hunters and the hunted provide much of the subject of this ridiculous enterprise. Some of the characters attain a kind of nobility, even redemption, when they sacrifice for the group.

Aside from the odd casting of Adrien Brody, fresh from his appearance in the moistly creepy "Splice," only a few members of the ensemble achieve any individuality. Danny Trejo, a Rob Zombie favorite, displays his famously ugly snarl for a sadly brief moment, and Laurence Fishburne, seemingly as out of place as Brody, turns up as a crazed survivor of many years on the planet, and just chews the hell out of the scenery.

The various discussions of their plight and the process of survival reveal the pasts of the people and the apparent reasons for their presence on the planet. Nobody, however, questions the impossible and utterly preposterous basis for their situation, and the movie provides no answers to such difficult problems as how some alien being could identify and select particular killers, render them unconscious, and transport them to another planet for sport. Their dilemma simply exists for the purpose of placing them all in danger and creating fear and suffering - as one character realizes, they actually must occupy some portion of Hell.