Between the wise-cracking sidekick, the adorable non-verbal pet, and the protagonist who undergoes personal growth and forms a surrogate family, Predator: Badlands often resembles the pilot of a vintage Saturday-morning cartoon — but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. With film after film portraying the Yautja (the alien race of the Predators) as stoic, ruthless hunter-killers, director Dan Trachtenberg switches up the game by focusing on an underdog.
Trachtenberg previously flipped the script with one of the series’ best entries, Prey, so he’s already established himself as a genre filmmaker who subverts expectations. But anyone thinking that a kinder, gentler Predator (to say nothing of a dreaded PG-13 rating) means that Badlands can’t be thrilling or entertaining may find themselves pleasantly surprised.
We begin on the planet Yautja Prime, where Predator-in-training Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) wants desperately to earn his invisibility cloak, the symbol of a Predator coming of age as a fierce hunter. His father Njohur thinks that Dek is a runt and an embarrassment; when dad tells his older son Kwei (Michael Homick) to kill his baby brother, Kwei instead fights back, sacrificing his life so that Dek can get away.
Dek sets out to impress his father and avenge his brother by capturing an “unkillable” beast, found on a wildly inhospitable planet where both flora and fauna conspire to destroy anyone who doesn’t know their way around. And while Dek immediately seems doomed, he’s rescued by Thia (Elle Fanning), a robot who has been separated from both her comrades and her lower torso — she tells Dek she’ll help him find his quarry if he can reunite her with her legs. (Thia is a “synthetic” created by Wayland-Yutani, the evil corporation from the Alien movies, and that company’s presence on another planet is never good news.)
After Dek and Thia are rescued from another rampaging monster by a small but powerful creature who tags along with them, we see Dek learn the difference between being a lone wolf and an alpha wolf; the latter, Thia explains, isn’t necessarily the greatest hunter, but he always looks out for the pack. And Dek will need that pack as he realizes that he and the team from Wayland-Yutani (including Tessa, a decidedly unfriendly android also played by Fanning) are pursuing the same trophy.
Prey screenwriter Patrick Aison skillfully turns a Predator into a good guy without twisting himself into Wicked-style “everything you know about the Yautja is wrong” knots. For Dek to make friends and collaborate with others goes against the very code of his race, the same code that made him a target of his ruthless father. But even with all these dysfunctional family dynamics at play, the tone remains witty, thanks to Thia’s non-stop chattering about the planet’s many perils as well as other salient factoids. (Between this and The Great, Fanning is turning into one of this generation’s great players of arch comedy.)
As for the action that is part and parcel of the Predator proceedings, there are a few hand-to-hand combat scenes that suffer from not enough light and too many edits, but most of the big set pieces work; editors Stefan Grube and David Trachtenberg keep the motion fluid, allowing us to take in the scale of the giant monsters while also following Dek as he pieces together ways to make the planet’s perils work in his favor.
If studios insist on rehashing their own IP rather than gamble on new and untried material, both Prey and Predator: Badlands offer a valuable guide to keeping the familiar from feeling played out. The pack demands it.
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Screenwriter: Patrick Aison; story by Patrick Aison and Dan Trachtenberg; based on the characters created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas
Cast: Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi
Producers: John Davis, Brent O’Connor, Marc Toberoff, Dan Trachtenberg, Ben Rosenblatt
Executive producers: Lawrence Gordon, James E. Thomas, John C. Thomas, Stefan Grube
Cinematographer: Jeff Cutter
Production design: Ra Vincent
Editing: Stefan Grube, David Trachtenberg
Music: Sarah Schachner and Benjamin Wallfisch
Sound design: Moksha Bruno, sound coordinator
Production companies: 20th Century Studios, Lawrence Gordon, Davis Entertainment, Toberoff Entertainment
In English
107 minutes
