After bouts of dormancy and some pretty questionable installments, the Predator series seems to be experiencing a minor renaissance under the watch of filmmaker Dan Trachtenberg. In just a few short years, he’s put together 2022’s Prey, which featured one of the franchise’s alien super-hunters landing in the French-colonized Americas in the early 1700s. This year has already seen his pretty sturdy animated Predator: Hunter of Hunters, a triptych of loosely connected run-ins across history. And now there’s Predator: Badlands, a bouncy, almost road movie-ish escapade featuring, for the first time, a Predator as the protagonist instead of the deadly threat.
But they’re not called “Predators” anymore; now they’re “Yautja.” Our main Yautja is Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), and on his homeworld of Yautja Prime his very strict (call it Yautja Orthodox) father considers him a weakling — the runt. Dek’s brother Kwei tries to help mold him into a real warrior, but in the process of defending him from the old man, Dear Old Dad murders Kwei. Dek escapes in his brother’s ship, which sends him to a pretty hostile planet called Gedda, upon which he crash lands, intending to test his Predator-hood by capturing and killing a notorious indigenous monster called the Kalisk. He also finds a nasty ecosystem of deadly flora and fauna, as well as a badly damaged, legless synthetic named Thia (Elle Fanning), with whom he reluctantly teams up. Meanwhile, Thia’s synthetic “sister” Tessa (also Fanning) is also bouncing around as the head of a Weyland-Yutani (yep, those guys) expeditionary force also intent on capturing the Kalisk as a bioweapon.
Lots of Badlands lands closer to James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy than you might expect from a Predator entry, with Dek and Thia (as well as a little lizard thing nicknamed Bud) making up a small but charming group of (sometimes literally) broken misfits just trying to self-actualize. More similarities include Thia’s relationship with Tessa, which can’t help but reflect Guardians’ sisters Gamorra and Nebula. If you look for them, the similarities go on and on. Thankfully, it’s all pretty effective, and Fanning in particular makes a good meal out of the dual role, with Thia being more of a flibbertigibbet next to Tessa’s icy resolve.
On the sci-fi action side of things, Gedda’s population of nasty monsters and killer plants makes for a lot of goopy possibility. There’s a deluge of chopping and slicing of critters and giant toothy mouths, most of it captured in long-ish takes that are legible enough but also often suffer from some janky handheld. Trachtenberg has proven to have a very graphic sensibility, and it’s deployed pretty perfectly here, his images juiced with a bit of slo-mo here and some splash pages there. (While we’re already making comparisons, it’s not infrequently a little Snyder-esque.) Some viewers — even those who aren’t pure gorehounds — might be upset that Badlands‘ violence is relatively bloodless (most of the humanoid redshirts are synthetics, which strategically cuts down on the red stuff), but for a PG-13 movie, the brutality remains plenty heavy enough. Less successful is that a lot of the creature VFX leave a good deal to be desired, although clearly the production is stretching a tight budget here, so that is ultimately forgivable. More impressive are the bold Yautja makeup effects, and even more so, the legless Thia, which is achieved via a combination of clever editing and excellent compositing.
And speaking of that Yautja moniker: mileages will certainly vary about whether it’s silly to give the predators a proper name for a change. In truth, that should be the least of the worries that is part and parcel with foregrounding one of them in his own movie, because Badlands gets pretty close to completely demystifying a character(s) that has endured for decades despite a lot of inconsistent creative decisions. On the other hand, the vision here is so novel compared to the rest of the franchise’s films that it’s hard to care too much when all is said and done. The risk paid off.
DIRECTOR: Dan Trachtenberg; CAST: Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi , Mike Homik, Reuben De Jong; DISTRIBUTOR: 20th Century Studios; IN THEATERS: November 7; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 47 min.
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