‘Predator: Badlands’ Review

The original is perfect. The new one is a pretty good creature feature.

Elle Fanning and (under the CGI) Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi in Predator: Badlands. (Courtesy 20th Century Studios)

ONCE I WAS TRYING TO EXPLAIN my theory of a “perfect” movie and how it differed from “the best” movies. The Godfather, Citizen Kane, There Will Be Blood: These are all movies that are in discussion for “the best” movies. But a perfect movie doesn’t necessarily need to be as good as these all-time classics to still be, well, “perfect.” If it accomplishes the thing it set out to do and does so in an entertaining manner all at a very high, efficient level, well, that’s a perfect movie.

The specific example I offered up was Predator.

Now, John McTiernan’s Predator is not necessarily the best movie ever made. Hell, it’s probably not even the best John McTiernan movie ever made; after all, this is the guy who made Die Hard and The Hunt for Red October.¹ But it is an absolutely perfect movie, a high-concept action-thriller with a star at the peak of his powers in Arnold Schwarzenegger delivering deadly one-liners, an absolutely stellar supporting cast, a script that indelibly sketches out every supporting character with just a few lines of dialogue and a handful of wardrobe choices, and a killer villain serving as the focal point for a half-dozen killer set pieces. The thing moves on rails. It is, in a word, perfect.

And one way its perfection reveals itself is that that 20th Century Fox/20th Century Studios has been trying to turn the thing into a viable franchise consistently for the nearly forty years the film has existed. These efforts have universally failed to catch on. They weren’t all terrible—Predator 2 in particular has a certain amount of charm as a sort of urban decay crime movie in the mold of New Jack City rather than a sci-fi-horror-action film—but none of them has sparked the imagination in the same way the original did.

Dan Trachtenberg, however, seems to have cracked the code. His 2022 film Prey, about a Predator hunt taking place in the midst of a Comanche tribe and a bunch of French-Canadian fur trappers impressed critics and did solid numbers for Hulu, where it debuted. That led 20th Century Studios to greenlight two Predator projects for this year: the straight-to-Hulu animated anthology film Predator: Killer of Killers about a trio of humans who survived a hunt and the theatrically bound Predator: Badlands, which is the first of these films to offer up a Predator movie from the point of view of the Yautja, the name of the hunting-obsessed species at the heart of the series.

And while Predator: Badlands is far from a perfect movie, it is a perfectly pleasing creature feature that revels in the absurdity of putting the universe’s greatest killing machine on a planet designed to kill invaders and then watching him figure out how to survive with the help of a mouthy Weyland-Yutani Synthetic serving as his guide.²

A veritable planet of death. (Courtesy 20th Century Studios)

Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is a young Yautja hunter and the runt of his clan. Dek’s father hates him for his weakness and wants his older brother, Kwei (Mike Homik), to cull him. When the brother refuses, the father kills him, but not before Kwei can send Dek to Genna, the “death planet,” where he will hunt the deadliest game of all. No, not man, though he does wind up going toe to toe with man’s creation in his own image, a Synth killer called Tessa (Elle Fanning). Tessa is the identical “sister” of Thia (also played by Fanning), who aids Dek in his quest to slay the dreaded Kalisk so he can reunite Thia’s torso with her legs.

Predator: Badlands is dorkily funny in a nerd-snort, Tina Fey-in-30 Rock sort of way. Thia chatters on and on about the Yautja and the creatures of this “death planet”; Thia and Dek encounter an adorably murderous armadillo of sorts along the way; and simply everything on this planet is trying to kill Dek. At one point, the hungry Dek picks up a juicy-looking grub for a quick protein snack only for the little bugger to start developing hives and explode a few moments later. Pterodactyl-looking birds drop stones from the sky near Dek in order to inspire poison-dart-shooting plants to go off and paralyze the young warrior in the hopes he will be a tasty, immobilized snack. Even the grass cuts like glass. Death planet indeed.

Look, again, this isn’t the original Predator; it’s almost an entirely different genre of movie, more CGI-heavy creature feature like the King Kong and Godzilla series of “monsterverse” movies. There’s certainly a weightlessness to the action sequences that has plagued the series from Predators (2010) onward. And I continue to be slightly put off by Trachtenberg’s whole conception of the Predator series, which boils down to “disrespected underdogs are actually really great and we need to be nicer to them, you guys.” (For more on my annoyance with this, read my review of Prey.)

That said, the goofiness of Dek and his newfound clan and the inventiveness of the myriad ways in which the planet they find themselves on want to kill them is simply too entertaining to dismiss out of hand. Yes, it’s occasionally a little silly, even a little cheesy. And no, it doesn’t have much use for subtext. At one point Thia even tells her sister, Tessa, “We can be more than what they ask of us,” which is the running theme of Trachtenberg’s triptych.

But who needs subtlety when you’re offered up grub grenades on a murder planet?

1. Two more examples of perfect movies, by the way. I don’t think it’s crazy to suggest that McTiernan at the peak of his powers—the six-movie stretch spanning from Predator (1987) to The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)—was, basically, a perfect director. Medicine Man (which I don’t really care for) and Last Action Hero (which I do, though will allow this is a controversial opinion) muddy the waters a bit.

2. Yes, this movie at least tacitly accepts the canon of the Alien v. Predator films, which posited a merged universe in which the Weyland-Yutani Corporation of the Alien movies is, at a minimum, aware of the Yautja. I imagine this will all tie in to Hulu’s Alien: Earth series at some point.