While Dan Trachtenberg has now directed three movies in the Predator series, Predator: Badlands is the first one that you’ll be able to see on the big screen. That’s because the COVID pandemic relegated his brilliant Prey to streaming on Hulu three years ago, and his animated anthology film Predator: Killer of Killers found the same fate this past summer. I find Badlands to be not as strong a piece of work as those predecessors, but its visuals do merit the screens of your multiplex.
This is the first time in the series that the film specifically refers to the Predators as the Yautja. The main character is Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), who is ostracized from his clan for being the smallest and weakest of his brothers. He vows to prove his worth by traveling to the planet Genna and bringing back the head of a Kalisk, a huge animal that regenerates itself even when its head is chopped off and has killed every Yautja that has tried to hunt it. The rest of Genna is no picnic, either, as within a few minutes of landing, Dek is attacked by the nearby plant life.
The movie gives us a bounty of cryptozoology and cryptobotany: insect larvae that explode like dynamite when threatened, lizards that spit acid in their enemies’ faces, flowers that shoot poisoned needles, grass that cuts like shards of glass. It’s all presented with a great deal less fuss than the fabulous creatures of Avatar or Fantastic Beasts, within a 100-minute running time that leaves no space for those blockbusters’ dead air. Cleverly, when Dek prepares for his ultimate assault on his enemy, he finds ways to turn the wildlife against them.
That enemy is not the Kalisk so much as the Weyland-Yutani corporation, which is trying to colonize Genna with a population of robots. These include Thia (Elle Fanning), who has been torn in half by the Kalisk but offers to help Dek in his quest in exchange for his help in reattaching her legs and reuniting her with her fellow robot Tessa (also Fanning). As Thia, Fanning is rather gleefully annoying as a wisecracking sidekick who knows more about the planet than Dek and peppers him with questions about how he chews food and how his weapons work. Alongside our grim and humorless protagonist, it’s good to have Thia’s petty delight in telling him that she wouldn’t do the thing that he’s about to do. We’re building up to a crossover with the Alien series that I see no way of avoiding. At least there’s a cute callback when Tessa fights Dek and the Kalisk by operating an exosuit that looks like a much bigger version of the one Ripley used in Aliens.
That said, I’m rather hurting for more character material to chew over. Neither Thia’s clash with Tessa over their purpose on Genna nor Dek’s questions about his own warlike Yautja culture where they’re big on killing the weak are enough grist for the intellectual mill here. Maybe the filmmakers left those for a future installment, along with what exactly the female Yautja do and Amber Midthunder’s Naru from Prey, who appeared briefly in Killer of Killers but is absent here. Regardless, Trachtenberg has done some yeoman work taking a series that had been dead in the water since the 1990s and making it viable again. Hollywood will find work for a filmmaker who can do that.
Predator: Badlands
Starring Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi. Directed by Dan Trachtenberg. Written by Patrick Aison. Rated PG-13.
