Predator: Badlands Review – A Predator Film In Name Only
It has been a few years now since we returned to the world of the Yautja with Prey, a film so well received that some fans even declared it better than the 1987 original. They were wrong of course, but it was still pretty good. When director Dan Trachtenberg was announced to return for more adventures in the Predator universe, fans rejoiced. Then the trailer for Predator: Badlands dropped… and the reaction was closer to “wait, what is this?” than “get to the chopper.”
The film opens with a sibling training bout between two young Yautja. Big brother Kwei wants to toughen up his little sibling Dek, the so-called runt of the clan. Their father is the kind of parent who probably grounded his kids for not skinning enough humans, and he orders Kwei to kill Dek for embarrassing the family. Naturally this goes badly. Kwei refuses, dad loses his temper, and chaos ensues. Just before dying, Kwei blasts Dek off in a ship bound for the hostile planet Genna, home to a beast known as the Kalisk, a monster so unkillable it makes the xenomorph look like a therapy lizard.
Once on Genna, Dek meets Thia, a synthetic android with a talent for conversation and a distinct lack of legs, thanks to an earlier run-in with the Kalisk. Together they form an odd couple, trekking across the planet’s wastelands in what quickly becomes a buddy-movie road trip. Genna itself is a theme park of death: razor grass that slices anything that moves, enormous rhino creatures, killer vines, bugs the size of compact cars, and the ever-looming threat of the Kalisk itself. It looks stunning though, like Lord of the Rings if Middle-earth were trying to eat Frodo.
There is a lot to enjoy here. Elle Fanning is charmingly weird as Thia, and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi does well as the pint-sized predator with daddy issues. The effects are slick, the action moves at a clip, and the film’s 97-minute runtime never drags. The problem is that none of it really feels like Predator. This is not a stealthy, horror-tinged thriller about humans being hunted by an unseen alien. It is a sci-fi fantasy adventure about a misunderstood space lizard learning life lessons. It is less “if it bleeds, we can kill it” and more “if we talk about our feelings, maybe we can heal.”
The shift in tone is wild. Badlands plays more like a Marvel spinoff than a descendant of the grim 1987 jungle nightmare. The humour is constant, the violence is strangely polite, and for the first time in the series we spend more time empathizing with a Predator than fearing one. If you were hoping for sweaty muscle men unloading machine guns into trees, prepare to be disappointed. If you were born after 2000 and prefer your aliens emotionally available, this might be your favorite of the bunch.
Do we really need to know about Yautja family squabbles? Probably not. Did we need to follow a Predator around like a lost puppy? Definitely not. Badlands demystifies one of cinema’s greatest monsters, and that is never a good idea. The Predator was terrifying because we did not know what it wanted. Now we know it just needed therapy.
That said, if you can switch off the nostalgia circuits in your brain, Predator: Badlands is a perfectly watchable slice of sci-fi action. It looks great, moves fast, and never takes itself too seriously. It is just not a Predator movie. If someone had shown a young adult novelist a picture of a Predator and said “write something about this guy,” the result would probably look a lot like this.
If it were about any other alien creature, I would have given it four out of five knives. But since it is pretending to be something it is not, I am taking one away.
