Copyright The Ringer
In 1987’s Predator, the titular alien looms over the entire film—yet its screen time is relatively limited. For the better part of the movie’s first hour, the Predator doesn’t even appear, at least not in its natural form: There are glimpses of its obscured body, camouflaged by a cloaking device, along with point of view shots from its perspective as it uses thermal vision to stalk its prey. It isn’t until the film’s final act that the audience gets a proper chance to see this mysterious warrior in action, as Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch Schaefer confronts the Predator after the alien has picked off the rest of Dutch’s team of commandos one by one. At the end of the film, Dutch kills the Predator, but the creature’s origins and motivations are never explained. Predator launched a multimedia franchise that has grown over the past 38 years to include novels, video games, comic books, and crossover movies. On Friday, the seventh mainline film of the series, Predator: Badlands, was released in theaters—and the movie is a testament to how far the Predator franchise has come. The Predator emerged in pop culture as a nameless villain whose alien species—the Yautja—was also unnamed In Badlands, the hunter becomes the hero: The film features a Predator as protagonist for the first time in the franchise’s history. Badlands follows a diminutive Yautja warrior named Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), the outcast and runt of his clan, as he hunts a legendary, “unkillable” beast. While the original Predator began with a familiar action-adventure setup before incorporating horror and sci-fi elements, Badlands leans all the way into the realm of science fiction from the jump. It takes its story far from Earth to a treacherous alien planet called Genna, and it doesn’t feature a single human character. Badlands is director Dan Trachtenberg’s latest—and most ambitious—attempt to expand and evolve the Predator universe. The film is Trachtenberg’s third Predator project, following 2022’s Prey and the animated movie Predator: Killer of Killers, the latter of which was released on Hulu this past June. In both of those movies, Trachtenberg leaned into the franchise’s roots as part of a much-needed reset after two lackluster theatrical releases in the previous decade (2010’s Predators and 2018’s The Predator). As the filmmaker recently told IGN, “Prey was very much a back-to-basics exercise and Killer of Killers really doubled down on that traditional Predator story where you meet human characters and they're hunted one by one.” Prey centers on a young Comanche woman named Naru (Amber Midthunder) as she hunts a Predator in 1719, a setup that—just like the original film’s—boils down to a story of survival in which two warriors are hunting each other. Meanwhile, Killer of Killers is an anthology-style narrative that follows three protagonists from three different time periods who survive encounters with a Predator before they’re all brought together to fight in a gladiatorial arena on an alien world. But with Badlands, Trachtenberg pushes the boundaries of the franchise as he employs a new, exciting approach. Much like James Cameron’s Terminator 2: Judgement Day, Badlands takes a classic movie villain and flips the archetype on its head. However, it’s a much greater challenge to transform a vicious, unintelligible alien into a hero than it is to do the same with a humanoid Terminator (who’s played by Schwarzenegger, no less). Badlands makes a concerted effort to further establish a culture for the Yautja, beginning with a fully constructed language developed by linguist Britton Watkins. It used to be that you could never understand a Predator beyond its love for the hunt. Now, the audience has the chance to learn how these alien warriors think, feel, and communicate. And Badlands also combines practical effects with VFX to turn Dek into a more emotive, lifelike being, with Schuster-Koloamatangi wearing a practical suit and Weta FX animating his alien face through motion capture. Badlands is sneakily the Predator franchise’s third crossover with the Alien film series, and the first since 2007’s disastrous Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. It avoids the pitfall of simply mashing up the franchises’ two iconic creatures—which happened quite literally in the case of Requiem and its inclusion of the Yautja-Xenomorph hybrid known as … the PredAlien. Instead, Badlands ignores the Alien franchise’s central figure altogether and borrows only the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Ever in search of deadly aliens to weaponize, Weyland-Yutani happens to be on Genna hunting the same apex predator Dek is after, the Kalisk. The inclusion of Weyland-Yutani makes for a much more subtle crossover that adds a savvy bit of world-building to Badlands without serving as a distraction. It also provides a path to forming the unlikely dynamic duo at the heart of the film, as Dek reluctantly teams up with a damaged Weyland-Yutani synth named Thia (Elle Fanning) to locate the Kalisk. In a pairing inspired by Chewbacca carrying C-3PO in The Empire Strikes Back, Dek wears Thia like a backpack as they traverse the deadly terrains of Genna. Fanning delivers a delightful dual performance as she plays the kind, bubbly Thia along with her menacing sister synth, Tessa, who leads the militaristic group of Weyland-Yutani synths that seek to exploit the Kalisk’s lethal potential. At its core, Badlands has a simple, familiar premise. It’s an underdog story, like Prey, that centers on an underestimated hero who’s determined to prove their worth against all odds. But it makes the most of that setup, yielding another fun entry in the franchise, which Trachtenberg has invigorated with each subsequent release after decades of flops and missed creative opportunities. Although Prey, Killer of Killers, and Badlands are stand-alone films, they all leave room for possible sequels. Killer of Killers is the clearest attempt at developing an interconnected Predator cinematic universe, via a post-credits scene featuring glimpses of Prey’s Naru, Predator 2’s Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover), and Predator’s Dutch. The trio of heroes are all in cryosleep, held captive by the Yautja and stored alongside the other champions who defeated a Predator. Trachtenberg has expressed interest in working on more Predator projects, but at the moment it isn’t clear what’s in store for the franchise.
