Predator: Badlands

dir: Dan Trachtenberg

2025

This should absolutely not work, and yet somehow it does.

Taking a Predator, and making it the protagonist of a movie seems like insanity. And yet, they go even further, and make it a buddy movie with a synthetic android (Elle Fanning), as they help each other in ways that they couldn’t achieve on their own.

Yes, since I mention synthetics, and I’m about to mention the Weyland Yutani corporation, this does sound worryingly like an Aliens Versus Predator crossover yet again, but it’s not really full throttle. It’s just that the Weyland Yutani stuff is meant to prepare us for a future where corporations are somehow even more evil.

And it also means that, as with every synthetic ever depicted in these films (except for Bishop in Aliens), they always betray the living to serve inhuman ends.

So we know, despite how sunny Thia (Fanning) seems to always be, there’s something coming down the line. Her further job, other than to explain everything, is to gently trick the young Yautja (that’s what the Predators call themselves: I guess it would be weird if they called themselves predators like “hey, Predator, how’s it hanging?”) into being less of an arsehole. In effect, she’s humanising him.

This film is certainly an argument for nurture over nature, in that while the Yautja have been depicted in all the films they’ve been involved in as dudes who live only to kill stuff, and take trophies, in a hyper-aggressive warrior culture in which they have to kill everything around them or risk feeling insecure, it’s never made a whole lot of sense. To somewhat mangle a phrase from Reservoir Dogs, if everyone around you is a kill crazy psychopath, it seems like it would be hard to get shit done. A society, or a civilisation where the only merit is in hunting stuff across the universe, otherwise the people around you kill you for being weak, well, how do you develop and maintain space ships that travel faster than light? Who cleans the bins? Who does the boring logistics stuff? Who looks after the little Yautja when they’re in their in crèches, handing them their first weapons and bandaging their first owies?

Of course I’ve overthought it, thanks for reminding me. Anyway, the simplistic easy take is that Yautja culture, kinda like contemporary MAGA / manosphere / white supremacist culture is fucking insane, and inherently toxic, most of all to its own people. Thia, because she’s programmed that way, finds ways into manipulating Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) into abandoning a lot of his programming, because it suits her (or its) purposes. Along the way it also makes Dek less of a kill crazy lunatic, and more of a decent, kinder, gentler killer of killers.

It can’t have been easy for Dek. In the film’s beginning his own brother has been sent to kill him by their father, who thinks Dek should die just because he’s not as large as the regular Yautja. Of course by human standards he’s like NBA height, but imposing our standards on other cultures is insensitive and wrong. Surely, a culture where a father wants his own son dead, and kills his other son just to prove a point, is self-annihilating, and insane, but like I said, these things make no sense in real life or in fiction, but we generally don’t mind as long as it’s entertaining.

And it is entertaining, at least to me. I had an absolute ball watching this flick, and I am nothing if not a miserable grinch much of the time when it comes to movies. Sure, one of the most salient criticisms one could make of this flick is that it takes two characters, or types of characters, from two different franchises, and wedges them into a third franchise that itself is somewhat familiar (in that this flick distinctively feels like a bit of a Marvel flick, I won’t say which three because that would be too obvious). And, yes, there were some moments where I was wondering why this main guy, in many ways indistinguishable from a Klingon, using Klingon-type weapons and speaking a language that sounded very Klingon, obsessed with honour and killing and all that stuff, was doing outside of a Star Trek tv show or movie. But then I would remember, it’s not about the destination, or the genre trappings: it’s about the friends we make along the way.

The main dude is fixated on going to a so-called death planet and killing the nastiest killer on that planet, a beast they call the Kalisk. If Dek kills the beast, and brings back its skull, then presumably his father will not want to kill him anymore, because he killed some unkillable beast. It may be something of a surprise that this evil death planet is New Zealand, where this was filmed, and where the actor playing Dek is from.

I mean, yes, New Zealand, or Aotearoa as the local indigenous population call it, is an otherworldly realm, though it’s certainly not filled with flora and fauna that want to kill any trespassers (as opposed to the locals). I do admire the lengths the makers went to in order to craft a number of vicious species that aren’t variations on stacks of ‘alien’ type stuff we’ve seen before or mild variations on creatures we have on our hallowed holographic planet. That’s some impressive design work. Some of them bastards are just the worst.

When I mentioned earlier that Elle Fanning, who is great in this, surprisingly great, plays a main role, I neglected to mention the funniest aspect of that, being that she’s a synth that’s been cut in half. She is seeking her other half in order to reconnect to it, which leads to the funniest sequence towards the end of the film where her legs saunter around inside a base attacking other synths in order to achieve her goals and transcend her lowly position in life. There are sequences where the top half and the bottom half are fighting different soldiers separately and together, and it’s pretty funny (at least to me).

And yet beyond that she also plays dual roles, being Thia, the legless and emotionally manipulative synthetic, and her ‘sister’ Tessa, who is more corporate and thus more evil. In order to play the ‘evil’ one, Fanning just has to completely supress her natural ebullience and act like she imagines middle management in any corporations act: with nothing but cold self-interest, and with an utter disregard for anyone or anything else’s wellbeing.

Dek’s simple-minded determination to just kill a creature ends up becoming more complicated the more he starts to see a universe where instead of just being a lone wolf killer, he can use other people/beings/tools in order to kill even more creatures. Nah, even though he keeps calling Thia “tool” instead of her name, everything she says wears away at what he believes, until eventually she has him eating out of the palm of her hand.

Her most powerful anecdote is where she explains how wolves, and wolf packs behave back on Earth (as if there are still wolves on the planet, by the time these shenanigans are taking place). That the alphas in the pack aren’t the ones that do all the killing, but are the ones that protect the other pack members from other dangers, blows Dek’s tiny little mind. All he is used to is bros screaming about being peak alphas and apex predators, instead of anyone being the best at looking out for other members of their tribe, and protecting the weak, instead of culling them.

This shift in his thinking prepares him for the final onslaught at the end, whereby he uses everything he’s learned on this death planet about the deadly flora and fauna in order to conquer his corporate enemies, meaning, he kills or destroys bunches of them with a little help from his friends.

It’s a joy to behold. This is a fun, action flick that’s also, completely at odds with all the other flicks, and even the recent decidedly weird Alien Earth series, which is genuinely brutal. Let us not forget the defining image from the original flick was of a Predator ripping the spine and skull of some poor bastard out of his body. This flick is PG-13, no humans were harmed in the making of this movie, in fact I don’t think there’s a single human character in any of it. Only synths and CGI creatures of the death planet are harmed, and a couple of Yautja, but they had it coming.

I would almost resent the way it’s clearly set up for a sequel at the end, were it not for the killer hilarious last line, which had me laughing out loud, which is exceedingly rare for a man of my refinement and good taste, I’ll have you know.

Dan Trachtenberg has done remarkably well with his last three Predator related outings: Prey from a few years ago was phenomenal, the animated Killer of Killers early this year was really strong, and I enjoyed the heck out of this too. All three of them have the same lynchpin, but they’re three extraordinarily different stories told in vastly different ways, and I am here for it.

8 times Dek is trapped in an Oedipal tragedy not of his own making out of 10

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“I can survive on my own. But who would want to survive on their own?” - Predator: Badlands