The Predator franchise hunts for a wild team-up adventure, and finds it
Sometimes, the deeper a film franchise explores its lore, the more the lack of mystery renders new entries as overwritten, overexplained, and uninteresting (see Maleficent, Star Wars, Halloween, Alien, etc.). Every bit of old and new intellectual property is vulnerable to this type of universe-building, since there’s a lot of money to be made in juicing a franchise for all its worth. Not all of lore-exploring is bad, however. There are many exceptions, and after 2018’s disappointing Shane Black vehicle, The Predator, the Predator franchise has been successfully growing its cinematic universe since 2022 under the helm of writer/director Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane, Prey, Predator: Killer of Killers). Predator: Badlands is the most adventurous and (intentionally) funny entry in the series, and it’s also the most distinct departure from the adult-oriented, extremely violent nature of its predecessors. Badlands stretches the tonal scope of what a Predator movie can include and feel like. With 2022’s Prey maintaining the franchise’s grittiness and simple setups (albeit taking place on the Great Plains in the early 1700s), and this year’s animated Predator: Killer of Killers expanding the Predator narrative pallet in inventive and ultra-gory ways, Badlands is an additional and promising franchise track: a character-oriented Star Wars-esque adventure.
Predator: Badlands tells the story of Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a young Yautja warrior (the Predator species), who traverses a deadly creature-infested planet, Genna, to hunt down a formidable beast called the Kalisk. An outcast for being considered a weakling on his home planet, Dek aims to bring back the Kalisk’s skull to earn his cloak and be accepted into his family clan. On his hunt, Dek finds and teams up with a synthetic being, Thia (Elle Fanning), who is on a research mission for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (yes, from the Alien franchise). Fanning and Schuster-Koloamatangi are both terrific, verbally jousting and slowly developing an emotional camaraderie underneath their respective layers of makeup and special effects.
When I say that Genna is “creature-infested,” I mean it at a level beyond Pandora in Avatar or Skull Island in King Kong. A never-ending pecking order of creatures, predators and prey, seem to make up every square inch of the planet’s surface: alien insects, large and small beasts, avian monsters, and even dangerous foliage. The sound effects are also incredible, accompanying the visuals with a thick soundscape of fauna chirps, mandible clicks, and monster roars, punctuated with a booming chant-filled score by Sarah Schachner (Prey). Also joining Dek and Thia is an ape-like creature, which Thia nicknames Bud, who looks like an updated version of Blarp from 1998’s Lost in Space. Bud is Badland’s version of Star Wars’s Grogu, a similarly small, cute creature whose wordless behavior elicits most of the film’s laughs. The variety of creatures purposefully includes a noticeably high level of cartoonish cuteness so that Badlands can 1) entertain audiences with colorful visuals and one action set piece after another while 2) keeping the film rated PG-13, since cartoonish-looking aliens having their purple entrails ripped out is less traumatizing for kids than realistic human bloodshed.
By giving Badland’s Predator protagonist a name and backstory, Trachtenberg is wisely setting up a character who audiences can connect with, cheer for, and get excited about following on further adventures. The latest three Predator films are building out the universe effectively, not to simply answer all conceivable questions and fill in the backstories and lore, but to increase the number of avenues in which filmmakers can tell Predator-related stories. Even if Badlands is noticeably reminiscent of the Mandalorian series, or lacks the violent machismo of the original 1987 Predator film, that doesn’t take away from the new film’s pure sense of fun and thrilling adventure. I hope that we get more films like Prey, like Predator: Killer of Killers, and like Predator: Badlands. It’s exciting to think about the tonal expanse that Trachtenberg has established, the risks and paths he and other filmmakers can take with it, and the many more unique creatures we’ll get to see disemboweled.
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Predator: Badlands opens in theaters on Friday, November 7th.
