Director Dan Trachtenberg takes his third crack at Yautja lore with Predator: Badlands, and this time the protagonist is the galaxy’s most notorious trophy hunter himself. It’s a pretty wild shift in perspective for the franchise, but one that Trachtenberg pulls off with surprising emotional depth and elegant simplicity.
From Prey to Predator
After Prey and Predator: Killer of Killers received Hulu-only releases, the Yautja are finally back on the big screen. Badlands follows Dek, a little brother and runt of the litter, as he’s exiled from his clan to the deadliest planet in the galaxy to earn his stripes—well, his stripes and a cloaking device. It’s a rite-of-passage storyline that should sound familiar, which is exactly why it works so well for this movie and the radical point-of-view change it’s attempting.
Being seven movies deep into a franchise with its share of twists, turns, and failures, deciding where to shift focus is a near-impossible task. Trachtenberg’s answer is elegantly simple: “You know, just being a little brother can be hard.”
Textbook Filmmaking Done Right
Dan Trachtenberg’s track record shows he knows how to build a good movie. His films feature clean, simple storylines, but he stages sequences well, blocks scenes efficiently, and places the camera in all the right places to extract maximum impact from those simple premises. Badlands is yet another example of doing all the small things right.
Little, personal details get established early—like why Dek’s missing a fang and what that means to him and his brother—that come back to play important roles later. It’s simple but effective filmmaking, textbook even.
Most importantly, there’s always a relatable emotional core to Trachtenberg’s work. That’s what made Prey and Killer of Killers such novel entries in the Predator canon. Amber Midthunder’s Naru and Killer of Killers‘ cast of poor frozen bastards from across time all had proper emotional reasons to fight and survive. Dek in Badlands is no different.
An Unlikely Duo
The other half of the protagonist pairing is Dek’s new Weyland Yutani synth pal, Thia. Elle Fanning is programmed to be an ‘aww shucks’ kind of synthetic who ultimately learns as much from Dek as he does from her. She’s got hard-coded good nature that takes her on a similar emotional journey as her new Yautja bestie, possessing a wholesome quality unseen outside some quieter, family-based moments in Trachtenberg’s other Predator entries.
By the movie’s end, Thia delivers some of the most charming and creative ass-kicking in the whole story, and Fanning really pulls it off.
But the ass-kicking that had me chuckling and giddy? That was all Dek’s. There’s a moment in the final act that had me saying “yes, that. THAT is the Predator.” Granted, it came a little late in the runtime, but it’s definitely there. The fighting mixes clever use of surroundings with brutal head-stomping—which, by the way, is how I’d describe the action in all the best parts of Predator as a franchise.
PG-13 But Still Brutal
That they’re on a distant alien planet is really the only reason this movie is PG-13. As the first non-R-rated Yautja hunt, Badlands still goes pretty hard. The biggest difference is that it’s all alien gore splashing around. If it were people—like in Prey and Killer of Killers—the brutality with which Dek goes about his business would earn an easy R rating.
Aesthetically, the creature design is solid. The alien death planet is populated with ravenous flora and fauna that, while comparing unfavorably to Avatar‘s creatures, are better than most. There’s something engaging about Dek and Thia encountering one deadly thing after another, learning a quick important fact about each, then killing and eating them. Nothing dies the same way. All those vine things we see him fighting in the trailer? Not a single one gets a repeat dispatching.
Unexpected Cuteness
To be fair, there’s also a certain amount of (hold onto your shoulder cannons here) cuteness in this movie. It makes sense and moves the story along, so it’s not cuteness just to sell toys or shill a Disneyland ride—but it is ironically an alien idea in a Predator movie.
Some of it works, some doesn’t. Dek is such an earnest young Yautja. The kid tries to make a joke. It’s one of the moments that doesn’t really land, but it plays as that overly literal style of humor you get from characters like the Terminator—programmed a certain way and slowly learning differently. Even though the joke didn’t fully work, I appreciate the effort.
Once you open the door to the Yautja having a language, they can immediately start telling you who they are. From there it’s no surprise that Dek is unique among his clan—a little different from the rest—which is fine because how boring would it be if they were all the same?
You Need the Familiar to Get Away With the New
Trachtenberg and screenwriters Patrick Aison and Brian Duffield take great pains to portray Dek as eager to prove himself and passionate about the Yautja way of life, but also worried about his place in it. Actor Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi manages subtlety that makes Dek downright relatable.
He’s not any less strong, violent, or gore-averse than any Predator on screen so far. He’s out for vengeance. He loves stabbing prey in the head and bathing in viscera. But he’s also mad, smart, capable, and underestimated. It’s the same story we saw with Naru from Prey. They even repurposed a line of dialogue from Prey to drive that point home, making Dek’s story very familiar, surrounded by equally familiar imagery from Yautja ships and weapons to Alien franchise easter eggs.
But that’s exactly what’s needed to shift the POV. You need the familiar to get away with the new.
Expanding the Lore
One of those new things is the Yautja Codex, which we got our first peek at in Killer of Killers. Badlands gives us another look at these Biblical commandments guiding the entire hunter culture. Even though there was divided reaction to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch and Danny Glover’s Harrigan showing up in a post-release post-credit Killer of Killers scene (which set records for the furthest post-credits a post-credit scene has ever landed), I like what Trachtenberg and his team are doing.
There’s something to be said for not revealing too much of your monster—the “don’t show the shark” rule of filmmaking. But as much as the last three entries have added to lore, there’s still plenty we don’t know about the Yautja. Trachtenberg isn’t only interested in breaking new ground. Badlands makes great use of everything Predators have done to be interesting in the 40 years since that original ugly mother fucker first blew up a jungle and all the special ops badasses in it.
The Natural Progression
The thing Badlands understands better than anything is that there are only so many ways you can do “oh no, what are these giant things trying to kill us?” before that well runs dry. After all, there are literally decades worth of movies that failed to live up to the first one.
Dan Trachtenberg cracked the code with Prey by giving the protagonist something to prove. Killer of Killers took it further by digging into Predator culture. The natural progression is putting a Yautja in the protagonist’s seat with a chip on his shoulder. These three movies are almost an equation: Prey multiplied by Killer of Killers equals Badlands.
The Verdict
Predator: Badlands earns an 8/10. Dan Trachtenberg is heading in an interesting direction with this franchise and gets bonus points for that. The Predator as a mysterious murder monster is getting backstory filled in, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Badlands, in shifting perspective to a Yautja main character, actually highlights what’s been great about this franchise in its better moments. Dek and Thia are an unexpectedly fun pairing that bring new energy to the franchise and an altogether different kind of hunt.
It might not be pulling the skull and spine out of us and screaming in bloody victory, but it gets close. And sometimes, close is good enough—especially when you’re charting new territory with a 40-year-old franchise about intergalactic trophy hunters.
Trachtenberg has proven once again that the best way to reinvigorate a beloved property isn’t to abandon what made it work—it’s to find the human (or in this case, Yautja) heart beating underneath all that violence and gore. Dek may be a Predator, but he’s also just a kid trying to prove himself. And that’s something we can all relate to, even if we don’t have mandibles and a shoulder cannon.
Rating: 8/10
Predator: Badlands is in theaters now.
