2025 | PG-13 | starring Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi | directed by Dan Trachtenberg | 1 hr 47 mins | In Yautja with subtitles | 3 1/2 out of 5
Director Dan Trachtenberg has been working overtime to bring the Predator franchise back to life, first with the Hulu hit Prey and this year with the terrific, animated anthology Predator: Killer of Killers and now with Predator: Badlands. The latest live-action Predator film to hit the big screen and the last since Shane Black’s The Predator almost destroyed the franchise in 2018. For me, these movies have all played less as direct sequels or prequels to Predator 1 and 2, but a kaleidoscope exploration of the Predator lore. For me, Prey and Badlands don’t necessarily work as well by themselves but do work together as a view of different slices that flesh out the universe of the series.
They work for me. That said, I also get the detractors of these movies. That humanizing the predator or focusing on runt or first-kill stories reduces the power of the character. I’m the first to say that the fun of Predator is the slow reveal of what the heck this monster in the jungle is and that its creation was built around that slow reveal. That fun is not something you can franchise or replicate once you unmask its final form in that film’s finale. So what else do you do with this character? Movies have decided to explore their homeworld hunting practices and keep it alive with a tie to Ridley Scott’s Alien franchise, hinted at in Predator 2, explored in the comics and given an abortion of a life in Paul W. S. Anderon’s terrible Alien vs Predator.
Killer of Killers is the best version of these characters we’ve seen since the original film. Predator; Badlands takes the opposite approach, turning the story onto a runt-of-the-litter predator named Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) as the protagonist, who seeks to meet his father and clan’s approval by venturing to one of those hostile alien planets where the landscape of flora and fauna is out to kill them and fight one of the most dangerous beasts in the galaxy. He’s doing so to get his Cloaking device so the movie immediately pulls that tool out of the Predator toolkit and nerfs him. Along the journey he encounters a Waylan-Yutani synth named Thia (Elle Fanning, absolutely delightful) who also encountered the beast and lost her legs in the process.
Starting with what works, as with Trachtenberg’s commitment to keep Prey spoken entirely in the period-accurate language of the Comanche nation characters, Badlands presents us with the challenge of a movie spoken entirely in the clicks and grunts of the alien Yautja language. It’s the kind of trust in the audience’s attention span that reminded me of Pixar’s Wall-E and its silent robot hero – and it won’t be the first time Badlands reminded me of a Pixar movie, in a good way. The movie does a good job of building out the threats of this alien world, the plants that swell and blow poison darts at us, the fields of glass shards, the massive tree-dwelling tentacle monsters. It’s a lot of fun world-building.
The movie keeps these set pieces as long as it can stand them before introducing Thia and from there creates a mis-matched buddy-cop story where the silent hunter is balanced out with the chatty, emotional female that Dek, quite fitting, literally has to carry on his back. Thia as a character also recalls prime-Pixar storytelling in the way that none of their characters had it easy, they always had some impairment that made the journey to their goal a bit more difficult at every turn. Thia’s resistance to a lot of the planet’s dangers is hampered by mobility, being just a torso with arms. Dek is the muscle but more reactionary. Trachtenberg has a satisfying third act cooked up for all of these characters that pays off everyone’s strengths and weaknesses. Predator: Badlands has a cleverly put-together clockwork of a script built on a powers and traps that keep raising the stakes.
All this talk about buddy-cops and Pixar storytelling is probably making the die-hard Predator fan cringe. I get it. That’s one of my bigger issues with the movie. Too often it seems like watching the story of any hunter that goes out on his own to prove himself than something that is unique to the Predator character. When you could just drop Arnold Schwarzenegger into this protagonist role and get almost the same exact story, something isn’t fundamentally working. I’d expect to see an alien protagonist behave in an alien way and not just a human with an alien skinsuit. The movie explains this way by Dek being a “runt” who was betrayed by his father and, thus, is more inclined to abandon those ways. Even so, just being the runt doesn’t make him human, nor does it require him to go on a typical human hero’s journey. Without giving it away, this is why I found the film’s ultimate ending kind of a rip-off and not at all what I’d want to see in a Predator. Again, use this character to make something originally, don’t just slap the typical protagonist journey on him and call it a day.
I was very entertained by Predator: Badlands. Elle Fanning is terrific in it (even if her dialog can drain on the viewer), it looks terrific in terms of building out an alien world. Some of the action scenes are a lot of fun. I like that Trachtenberg is using each movie to explore a different aspect of this species culture. It’s a textbook well-written script too with a lot of imagination to it. However, this is a better movie than it is a Predator sequel. Everything that is potentially challenging, original and dare we say masculine about the Predator gets beaten and molded into something more akin to a cookie-cutter mainstream blockbuster. Your mileage may vary.