Isabelle was an Israel Defense Forces sniper in Predators, played by Alice Braga. She knew of a 1987 debriefing about a creature that hunted a special-operations team in Guatemala, and years later she was taken from Alvaro Otti's camp in Guatemala, some time after her spotter, Isaac Archuletta, was killed there. Dropped onto the Game Preserve Planet, she stayed with the wounded Edwin when the others moved on, and was paralyzed by him before her shot helped Royce kill the Berserker. After months stuck on the preserve, she flew a Predator ship back to Earth alone.
Biography
St. Mary Magdalene And Sniper School
The animated short Moments of Extraction, made for the Predators Blu-ray, opens Isabelle's story at St. Mary Magdalene School for Girls. In her own narration she describes a quiet, still child whom the nuns feared and whom her classmates treated as if she were invisible. That stillness followed her into military service with the IDF, where it led to her selection for sniper school, and her instructors treated it as a gift. She excelled there, and after graduating she was assigned to covert operations, the start of a career that took her far beyond Israel.
Black Operations And Afghanistan
In the short, Isabelle carried out questionable assignments at home and abroad, including operations in Somalia and Afghanistan. Along the way she heard stories of hunters that stalked and killed people, and she came to believe that her work as a black-ops sniper had condemned her to hell. Her one hope was that hell would not hold the soulless killers from those stories. The short ends after an assassination in Kandahar, as a hunter appears in the bare room where she is packing up her rifle. She looks much younger there and wears different gear than in the film, so the Kandahar job reads best as an earlier mission.
Archuletta And The Bomb Site
In the film, Isabelle knew of a classified 1987 debriefing about a special-operations team hunted in the Guatemalan jungle, whose lone survivor, Dutch, had beaten an invisible creature, the Jungle Hunter, by hiding his heat under mud. The Dark Horse comic Predators: Beating the Bullet, Paul Tobin's 2010 adaptation told from her point of view, adds that she read the report and went to Guatemala years later with her spotter, Isaac Archuletta, on a mission against a group of rebels. She quietly expanded it into a search for whatever had really happened there.
Isabelle and Archuletta found the place where the creature had killed itself with a powerful explosive, its self-destruct device, and the bomb site proved to her that the report had at least some basis in fact. She felt watched in the jungle, and Archuletta thought she was imagining it. Then the rebels caught him. Isabelle called him the best spotter she had ever known, and blamed herself for sending him out to look for invisible things. She watched through her scope as one of them shot him in the head, and she did not pull the trigger, because against at least twenty of them she could not have escaped alive.
The Raid On Alvaro Otti's Camp
Predators: Beating the Bullet opens some time after Archuletta's death, in the Peten jungle of Guatemala, where Isabelle's team had tracked the ex-Kaibil soldier Alvaro Otti for four days. Otti had joined the Lord's Resistance Army and turned to trafficking drugs and women. Isabelle and her teammates shot his guards with their sniper rifles and found a truck full of captive women, but more soldiers arrived and opened fire. She ran into the jungle, and when two men chased her, she left her jacket on a branch and screamed as a decoy, then shot both of them with her pistol.
She hurried back to help her teammates Bollo and Abe, telling herself that she could not let these men down the way she had let down Archuletta. The camp was full of bodies, and the freed women were huddled against a hut. Bollo stood in front of her with a bloody wound through his chest, then fell. Isabelle turned her pistol on someone she could not see, and screamed as she was taken. Her next memory was falling through open sky with a parachute on her back, and this time, unlike her decoy, she screamed for real.
Waking In Freefall
After she was taken, Isabelle woke in freefall over an unknown jungle, and her chute opened on its own. In the film she found Royce, the cartel enforcer Cuchillo, and the Spetsnaz soldier Nikolai together and covered them with her rifle before the group talked her into lowering it. She said she had never seen this jungle, though she had seen most of them, that it was too hot for the time of year, and that the topography was wrong for Asia or Africa. Royce identified her as IDF, and she confirmed it.
Meeting The Others In The Jungle
When Royce walked off alone, Isabelle stayed with the group. She broke up a fight between the death-row inmate Stans and the RUF soldier Mombasa by saying they had bigger problems, and she tried to plan a way to cut the doctor Edwin out of a tree before Royce simply shot the branch. When Royce headed for high ground, she told him that they needed to stick together, and he answered that the others could follow him. Later she asked his name, and he refused to give it, saying that he worked better on his own.
Royce identified each member of the group by background, from the Spetsnaz Alpha Group and Los Zetas to the RUF, the Yakuza, and the FBI's Most Wanted, and said that Edwin did not belong. Isabelle in turn guessed that Royce was ex-military, black ops, and probably a mercenary, and he did not deny it. When they came across empty crates, she noted that something had been dropped here the same way they had. She asked what Royce meant when he said they had been chosen, but the group walked into a trap before he could answer.
The Dead Soldier And The Alien Sky
The group triggered a dead man's trap, and Isabelle called for help as she nearly fell into a pit before Royce pulled her up. Through her scope she was the first to find the body of the soldier who had set it, a member of the United States Special Forces who was supposed to be deployed in Afghanistan. Royce reasoned that the man had been hunting something far bigger than a person. Soon afterwards the group reached a ridge and saw several planets hanging in the sky, the proof that they were no longer on Earth.
The Hounds And Cuchillo's Trap
Spiked alien hounds then attacked, and Isabelle ran to help Edwin, who had no weapon. Out of rifle ammunition, she fired her pistol at a charging hound to no effect and then turned it on herself rather than be torn apart. Before she fired, a whistle called the hounds back, and Isabelle realized that they had been recalled, the work of their handler, the Tracker Predator. Royce concluded that the planet was a game preserve, and that the hounds had been sent to flush out the humans and test them.
Then the group heard Cuchillo calling for help from a clearing. Mombasa recognized the tactic of wounding one man so that he would cry out and lure the others into a trap. The others agreed to leave him, but Isabelle said she could not, and Royce told her that it was on her. She fired from cover, ending what she thought was Cuchillo's suffering, only to hear the same call for help again. The voice was a hunter mimicking him, and Isabelle backed away from the clearing badly shaken.
The Hunters' Camp And The River
Royce led the group along the hounds' tracks to a hunters' camp, where they found a smaller Predator strung up as a captive, one of the hunters held at the camp by the larger Super Predators. Stans remarked that they were not the only things being hunted, and Isabelle reacted to the captive as though she recognized it. Moments after she noticed that Royce had left them, the hunters struck, and Mombasa was killed in the attack. The survivors escaped by jumping from a cliff into the river below.
On the bank the group accused Royce of leading them into a death camp and hiding while the hunters struck, and Isabelle said that a man was dead because of it. Royce answered that they now knew there was more than one hunter, that the hunters used projectile and energy weapons and a cloaking device, and that they were bigger and stronger but also heavier. He said the way she had looked at the captive showed that she knew what it was, and she told the group about the 1987 Guatemala debriefing. Royce used her account to plan a defensive perimeter that would draw the hunters into overlapping fields of fire.
The Ambush And Noland
When the hunters did not take the bait, Royce sent Edwin out into the open. A large alien beast from the cages chased the doctor back to the group, and Isabelle fired her sniper rifle as it fell. Royce complimented the shot, but Isabelle said that she had missed. The shooter was Noland, an Air Cavalry soldier dressed in scavenged hunter gear, who had survived on the preserve for what he thought was ten seasons. He led the group to his hideout inside an abandoned drill.
Noland told them that there were two different types of hunters, that the larger ones hunted the smaller ones in some kind of blood feud, and that the hunters always came back in threes after one of them was killed. When Royce asked about the ship near the hunters' camp, Noland said that he would not know how to fly it, and Royce decided that the captive Predator could. That night Isabelle told Royce how she had hidden and watched her spotter, Isaac, die. Before dawn Noland tried to kill the group with smoke to take their weapons, and Royce fired inside the hideout to call in the hunters and break the group out.
Paralyzed By Edwin's Neurotoxin
In the escape Nikolai and Stans were killed, and Hanzo stayed behind to face the Falconer Predator. As Isabelle, Royce, and Edwin ran on toward the ship, a hidden trap caught Edwin's leg, and Royce wanted to leave him as bait. Isabelle refused, saying that Edwin was one of them, and Royce told her that this was exactly what the hunters were counting on, that they wanted her to be human. She stayed with Edwin, and Royce went on alone and cut the captive Predator free in exchange for passage on the ship, while Isabelle and Edwin ended up at the hunters' camp.
When the ship lifted off, they assumed that Royce had made it. Edwin asked whether she would make the same choice again, and she said yes. She promised that when the time came she would kill them both quickly, but Edwin answered that it would not be quick, because he had cut her with a scalpel coated in a neurotoxin from one of the many plants on the planet. He told her that it was not fatal and that she would be able to experience everything.
As she lay helpless, Edwin admitted that he was a murderer and a freak at home, but normal among the monsters, and that he wanted to stay. Then Royce walked back into the camp and said that he had missed his ride. Edwin claimed that something in the jungle had paralyzed Isabelle, and Royce told her that she had been so busy taking care of others that she had forgotten to look out for herself. When Edwin then called him a good man after all, Royce, who had already seen through him, turned the poisoned scalpel on him.
Fight Against The Berserker
Royce rigged the paralyzed Edwin with grenades as a trap for the Berserker Predator, then fought it in the camp with fire and mud. When the hunter beat him down and was about to finish him, Isabelle, who had recovered enough to lift her rifle, shot it. It answered by hitting her in the shoulder, but her shot gave Royce the chance to recover, cut it down, and behead it. The ship Royce had given up had already been destroyed by the Berserker soon after it lifted off.
Stuck On The Planet
Soon after the fight, more parachutes opened over the jungle, and Royce and Isabelle watched the next group of prey drop from the sky. Of the eight people dropped at the start of the hunt, the two of them were the only ones still alive. All three of the larger hunters that had stalked their group were dead, but the new arrivals showed that the preserve was still being stocked. With no ship, they stayed in the hunters' camp, and Royce said that they would find another way off the planet.
Two Months On The Preserve
The sequel comic Predators: Preserve the Game, written by David Lapham and released by Dark Horse in July 2010, picked up two months after the film. Isabelle was living in a hollow in the jungle, while Royce had stayed away from her for weeks. At dawn she was finishing off a horned, tusked animal when Royce stumbled up and collapsed in front of her with an infected wound. She dressed it with a bandage of leaves and complained that he had come back only to die at her door.
When Royce said that he was becoming an animal like Noland and would die alone, she answered that they were all each other had on the planet, and they spent the night together. That same night an armored Predator walked out of the trees, dropped a bundle at their feet, and cloaked away without fighting. Inside was a set of Predator armor sized for Royce, which he took as a sign that the hunters had chosen him as their champion.
Killing The Four-Armed Predator
Moments later a ship beamed down a huge Four-Armed Predator that turned invisible. Royce planned to lead it to a waterfall ravine, but Isabelle called him a user who loved the hunt, and he shot back about the partner she had let die. The creature attacked before they were ready, and Royce, now in the armor, grabbed Isabelle and leapt off a cliff, letting the suit absorb the landing. At a waterfall she sealed his chest wound with the armor's first-aid gear. Because the suit's shoulder cannon was wired to Royce's nervous system, they rigged it into a rifle that Isabelle could fire from a ledge while he stood below as bait.
Royce marked the creature's vital points with cannon fire, and Isabelle hit it in the head with repeated shots until it fell. The comic ended one week later, with the two of them bandaged and watching another Predator ship cross the night sky. When she asked why he wanted to go back, he deflected by asking whether she was trying to ruin his reputation. As the ship dropped supply pods, he told her that they would reach home together or die on that rock together, a promise the later story of her return to Earth did not keep.
Flying Home To Earth
Isabelle's escape was told years later in four tapes added to Predator: Hunting Grounds, in which she recounted the preserve to an agent of the OWLF. She said that she and Royce had killed the aliens hunting them and grown close while they recovered, and she believed they might have left together if the hunters had not marked Royce as a champion and given him armor tailored for a human. To her, it was like the gods telling him that his belief that people secretly enjoyed hunting men had been right all along, and she said that was when she lost him.
Royce used the armor's cloak to find a landing site with a dropship and a smaller skiff. Isabelle expected them to take the skiff together, but he said that he wanted to meet the hunters face to face, and no argument changed his mind. Before he left he used the armor's computer to unlock and ready both ships, and one responded to her as though she were a hunter. She worked out the controls by trial and error, found Earth in a planetary directory, and pressed buttons until the ship rumbled, then sat down and prayed.
Debriefed By The OWLF
She slept through most of the voyage, woke to see Earth, and picked a landing zone at random because she could not read the locations. Her craft came down in the Mexican jungle, where the task force recovered it. Sean Keyes debriefed her at a black site and noted that she had been declared absent without leave, and in a separate recording he called her one of the deadliest people on Earth at 1,200 meters. She told him she had spent about a year on another planet, that she had been on a mission and was hiding when she was taken, and that she remembered falling asleep and waking in freefall.
At the end of the debriefing she said that she wanted to go home and was not interested in working for America. Keyes gave her his card and described an international response team that could use her skills, and she said that she would think about it. In the game itself she fights alongside OWLF fireteams as a playable sniper, and IllFonic's announcement said that after joining the OWLF, "Izzy" had more confirmed Predator kills than any other human except Dutch. Her outfit carries armor and mask pieces taken from the hunters, along with a heavy sniper rifle.
Conflicting Pasts
The film and its tie-ins can be fitted into one timeline. Moments of Extraction shows her after an assassination in Kandahar and has been read as her abduction, but she looks much younger and wears different gear than in the film, so it reads best as an earlier mission in Afghanistan. Beating the Bullet puts her abduction in Guatemala, at Alvaro Otti's camp, and nothing in the film contradicts that. The Hunting Grounds tapes say only that she was on a mission and hiding when she was taken, without naming a country.
The film names her spotter Isaac, and the comic calls him Archuletta. Their stories match: in both the spotter was caught, Isabelle could have fired but would not have survived, and she hid and watched him die. He is most likely the same man, Isaac Archuletta, with the film giving his first name and the comic his surname. Two small differences remain. In the comic she keeps his death to herself, while in the film she tells Royce, and the comic places his death some time before her abduction rather than at the moment she was taken.
Personality & Traits
Isabelle was disciplined, observant, and guarded about her own past. She was the one member of the group who kept arguing for staying together, and the only one who tried to help Cuchillo and later refused to abandon Edwin. Royce read that as a weakness the hunters could use, and Edwin used it against her. She also carried heavy guilt, whether for the spotter she watched die or, in Moments of Extraction, for the killings she believed had earned her a place in hell, and in the adaptation she called her time on the planet a karmic debt for her sins.
She did not let Royce's coldness go unanswered. She accused him of using the group as bait, asked him what had made him so damaged, and refused his plan to booby-trap Edwin. In Preserve the Game she still called him a user, but she also told him that they were all each other had. Her account in Hunting Grounds shows how hard she found it to earn his trust, and how she saw the hunters' gift of armor as the moment she lost him to the hunt. At the end of her debriefing she said only that she would think about joining the fight.
Weapons & Equipment
Isabelle was an elite sniper who carried her rifle and sidearm through the whole hunt in the film. Her rifle was a Blaser R93 LRS2 fitted with an Elcan DigitalHunter scope, according to the Internet Movie Firearms Database, which notes that the script had called for a Heckler and Koch PSG1. Her sidearm was a Heckler and Koch HK45C with a compensator and an extended magazine, carried in a custom holster. She used the rifle against the hounds and to shoot the Berserker, and the pistol during the hounds' attack.
After the hunt Royce rigged a Predator shoulder cannon to fire by hand, and in Preserve the Game Isabelle used it against the Four-Armed Predator while Royce held its attention up close. In Beating the Bullet her main weapon on the ground was her pistol, which she used with decoys and patience to kill the men who chased her through the jungle. Predator: Hunting Grounds added her as a playable fireteam member in June 2021, with the NRV-E rifle as her signature weapon. In the same game she learned to fly a Predator ship from its symbols and by trial and error, and flew it back to Earth.
Behind The Scenes
Alice Braga played Isabelle in Predators, directed by Nimród Antal, produced by Robert Rodriguez, and released by 20th Century Fox in July 2010. Dark Horse published Paul Tobin's adaptation, pencilled by Victor Drujiniu, under the title Beating the Bullet, and its flashbacks to Isabelle's life before the hunt do not appear in the film. Moments of Extraction appeared on the film's Blu-ray with Braga voicing Isabelle, and shows her on an assignment in Kandahar. Marvel reprinted the adaptation in Predator: The Original Years Volume 2 in 2024.
Antal gave Braga a sniper manual used in the Army, and she told Shock Till You Drop that there was no boot camp. When filming began in Hawaii, a crew member she called her teacher showed her how snipers crawl and wait for hours, and she spent a whole day shooting to learn the rifle. Her prop rifle weighed 14 pounds, the heaviest gun on set, while the others carried knives and pistols, so she went to the gym and ran to build the strength to hold it steady on camera.
Braga said the cast bonded as a team in Hawaii and worked out together, and that Brody, naturally thin, pushed himself to get stronger for his first action lead. In Austin, Texas, she described hard outdoor work in very cold weather. As the only woman in the main cast, she called the men "my boys" and said they protected her, while noting that in Hawaii the only women on the crew were her and the script supervisor. She also told Gizmodo that, as a small, short woman, she had never expected to run around punching and shooting on screen.
IllFonic brought Isabelle into Predator: Hunting Grounds on June 29, 2021, as the paid Isabelle Fireteam DLC Pack, released alongside the game's Headquarters map. The PlayStation Blog announcement said that Braga had lent her voice to the character and that the pack included early access to the NRV-E sniper rifle, which the game called the ultimate sniper rifle. A later update added the four Isabelle tapes, unlocked by reaching a high player level, that tell how she left the preserve and came home.
Merchandise
Diamond Select Toys released an Isabelle Minimate in Predator Minimates Series 4, packed in a two-pack with a Predator Hound from Predators. The assortment was announced in January 2017 and reached shops in the summer of that year, with each two-pack sold on a full-color blister card. The figure stands about 2 inches tall, with 14 points of articulation and interchangeable parts. It has brown hair, a red scarf, a grey shirt, a black belt, green pants, and black shoes, and it came with a holstered pistol and a larger gun.
Famous Quotes
- "I've never seen this jungle. And I've seen most."
- "We don't have a name for them."
- "He used mud to block his. That's how he beat it."
- "What happened to you? What made you so fucked up?"
- "So, I hid. I watched him die. I wish I pulled that trigger."
- "It's because we are predators. Just like them. We're the monsters of our own world."
- "Enemy of my enemy." / "That doesn't make it a friend."
- "This isn't right. He's one of us!"
- "I'm Royce." / "Nice to meet you, Royce. I'm Isabelle."
Conclusion
Isabelle was an Israeli sniper who carried out black operations in places such as Afghanistan and knew of the 1987 Guatemala debriefing. Years later she went to Guatemala with her spotter, Isaac Archuletta, watched him die at the hands of rebels, and some time later was taken from Alvaro Otti's camp. On the Game Preserve Planet she stayed with Edwin, was paralyzed by him, and then shot the Berserker to save Royce. After months stuck on the preserve with Royce, she flew a Predator ship home alone and was debriefed by the OWLF.
Appearances
- Predators (2010)
- Predators: Beating the Bullet by Paul Tobin and Victor Drujiniu (Dark Horse Comics, 2010)
- Predators: Preserve the Game by David Lapham (Dark Horse Comics, 2010)
- Moments of Extraction (2010), an animated short on the Predators Blu-ray
- Predator: Hunting Grounds (2020), playable from the Isabelle Fireteam DLC Pack in 2021, with four Isabelle tapes
Tag Categories: Predator Universe Characters | Predator Lore | Predator Hunt Survivors
