Movie Review – Predator: Badlands
Principal Cast : Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, Rueben de Jong, Mike Homik, Rohinal Narayan, Cameron Brown, Alison Wright.
Synopsis: A young Predator outcast from his clan finds an unlikely ally on his journey in search of the ultimate adversary.
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The train is most definitely back on the tracks at 20th Century Studios, folks. Dan Trachtenberg has more than delivered on what I asked for in my review of Predator: Killer of Killers, showcasing a command of this particular IP that was sorely lacking prior to the release of 2022’s equally thrilling Prey. Predator: Badlands is a third home run from Trachtenberg and the Disney adjunct, bringing further expansion of the Predator franchise while eagerly, and very cleverly, linking both this property and the Alien franchise – currently without a film or television series on the immediate horizon following the releases of Alien: Romulus and Alien: Earth over the last few years. I really had a blast with this one, thanks largely to its incredible visual effects, spectacular New Zealand location photography, and a tight script populated by solid, engaging characters.
Predator: Badlands centres on Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a young Yautja cast out from his clan who crash-lands on the deadly alien world of Genna and vows to prove his worth by targeting the planet’s most formidable creature. Along the way he forms an unlikely partnership with Thia (Elle Fanning), a damaged Weyland-Yutani android whose survival instincts and knowledge of the hostile terrain become vital to their journey. As they traverse the perilous badlands, Dek’s quest for honour forces him to confront his own beliefs about strength and allegiance while facing the relentless threats that define this brutal world, with both characters discovering unexpected depths to their uneasy alliance.
Okay, so while the basic plot of Badlands isn’t particularly unique, and the overarching story plays with familiar sci-fi tropes using slick timing and precision, Trachtenberg’s direction of Patrick Aison’s screenplay is dynamic, thrilling, and a completely encompassing rollercoaster of reveals, twists (some of which work better than others), and continued world-building that largely lands. Considering the central character doesn’t even speak in an earthly language, relying entirely on subtitles, and the emotional core of the film exists between an all-too-bubbly android and a seven-foot-tall creature from your worst nightmares, Badlands had every chance of being a swing-and-a-miss. Instead, it lands as solidly as one of the Yautja’s shoulder-mounted laser blasts. The use of Elle Fanning’s Thia as our proxy into this world is a clever narrative device to fuse the Alien and Predator properties, and her earnest, emotionally open performance carries the dramatic weight the film demands.
There’s something vaguely 300-esque about the Predator species here, a culture built entirely around survival of the fittest, and the early treatment of Dek by his father, Njohrr, is clearly designed to give us a point of connection to Dek’s drive to capture the Kalisk, the enormous elephantine creature inhabiting Genna. It works a treat. A lot of people can relate to shitty parents, and Dek’s smaller stature, combined with the sacrifice of his brother, Kwei, resonates surprisingly well despite the species differential. Having to prove one’s worth to a parent might seem like a trite cinematic hook, and in a weaker film it would feel generic, but it remains an eternal human theme: the desire to live up to, or exceed, some unexplained potential or imposed expectation. As a result, Badlands maintains a solid emotional throughline. Aison’s script wrangles a very masculine edginess into the principal cast, effectively crafting a boy’s-own adventure quest film played out on one of the nastiest creature-infested planets this side of a Borg Cube.
Elle Fanning’s dual role as Thia – and her darker counterpart, Tessa – presents two sides of a neatly balanced coin, with corporate malevolence and mechanised innocence locked in philosophical opposition despite somewhat opaque motivations. Alison Wright’s take on Weyland-Yutani’s eternally creepy computer voice, MU/TH/UR, replacing Annemarie Griggs’ version from Romulus, is technologically eerie and unsettling, and the omnipresent sense of larger, unseen powers at work hangs over the entire film once the action shifts to Genna. And, in true Disney-owns-this-franchise style, Badlands introduces a young alien creature – Bud – designed to sell toys I would imagine, a Predator-ised Baby Yoda stand-in, and he has a few cool laugh-out-loud moments that are worth the price of admission alone.
Chief among Badlands’ strengths is its sheer rollercoaster pacing. The film is relentlessly engaging, rarely pausing for breath, which makes even its quieter moments feel oddly urgent, like delinquent kids waiting to dodge an oncoming train as a prank. Trachtenberg taps into the frenzy of Genna and the raw kineticism of Dek’s journey of discovery – he is a predator species, after all, and his first instinct is very much to kill everything he encounters. There’s a great deal of crowd-pleasing spectacle to behold in Badlands’ electrifying action, and I found myself internally clapping and cheering from my couch often enough to recapture the same giddy feeling I had as a kid watching the original Arnold Schwarzenegger-led Predator. I’ll admit that the occasional hint of actors against green screen crept in here and there – although that may well have been my television settings again – but the film’s fabulous natural landscapes and expansive vistas dominate, supported by Jeff Sutter’s crisp, muscular cinematography.
Predator: Badlands is a film with surprisingly few weaknesses. It’s immensely entertaining, loaded with callbacks, fan service, and confident mythmaking that pushes the franchise forward in a direction distinct from Trachtenberg’s previous entries. I never expected to find myself rooting for a Predator, and yet here we are. Dan Trachtenberg is batting a thousand: three successful and individually unique Predator films that are compelling, thrilling, and wholly engrossing. Badlands stands as a perfect summer blockbuster, delivering exactly the kind of rousing cinematic escape you hope for when the lights go down.
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