Copyright Polygon
We always knew Predator: Badlands was going to be a crossover movie. The first trailer confirmed that Elle Fanning was playing a Synthetic, a robot manufactured by the evil Weyland-Yutani corporation from the Alien franchise. This makes Dan Trachtenberg’s new science-fiction epic a spiritual sequel of sorts to the Alien vs. Predator series. But what the trailers didn’t reveal was just how heavily Badlands would lean into Alien territory — albeit without actually featuring any Xenomorphs. To be clear, this is not a bad thing. I love the Alien movies even more than I enjoy the Predator ones, and I think Badlands is a pretty solid flick. (It’s way better than Paul W. S. Anderson’s Alien vs. Predator.) Still, it’s always worth knowing what you’re getting into before you buy a ticket. [Ed. note: Full spoilers ahead for the plot of Predator: Badlands.] Here’s the thing those trailers didn’t tell you: Predator: Badlands is absolutely chock-full of synths. Not only do we get Fanning as Thia (a bisected robot who offers to help the film’s Predator protagonist in exchange for his help in finding her legs), she also plays a second synth, named Tessa. And that’s not all. Weyland-Yutani sends an entire fleet of Synthetics (all played by the same actor, Cameron Brown) to the deadly planet where most of the movie takes place. There are actually more Synthetics in Trachtenberg’s new movie than in most Alien installments, an impressive feat for a film titled Predator: Badlands. It’s possible the director made this choice because you can violently murder a couple dozen robots onscreen and still get a PG-13 rating. Either way, I’m not complaining. I always enjoy watching synths get torn apart onscreen, regardless of whether it's a Xenomorph or a Yautja (the Predators’ name for their species) or even a human doing the killing. The other reason Predator: Badlands feels like an Alien movie has everything to do with its fictional location. The planet Genna, which our Yautja hero Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) travels to in an ill-conceived attempt to prove his toughness, is teeming with deadly alien life, ranging from acid-spitting eel-like creatures to something best described as a tree-monster with a giant mouth. Many of these terrifying beasts would fit right in on Alien: Earth, which expanded the franchise’s extraterrestrial terrors beyond the iconic Xenomorph to include giant acid-belching bugs and a hyper-intelligent eyeball monster — two beings that would likely thrive on Genna. I’ve seen other critics compare Predator: Badlands to Scavengers Reign, an animated sci-fi series set on a planet where evolution runs wild, and everything is constantly either eating something else or being eaten. That’s a great way to describe Genna, which is also teeming with vicious alien life. It also solidifies the Alien connection, since Scavengers Reign borrows liberally from Ridley Scott’s original 1979 movie with its story of doomed contract workers hired to fly a corporate spaceship through uncharted outer space. Any way you slice it, Predator: Badlands feels like an Alien movie. Just don’t expect to see any Xenomorphs battling Yautja in Badlands. We’ll have to wait for a proper Alien vs. Predator sequel for that. Predator: Badlands is in theaters now.
