Even remorseless alien killing machines with hideous faces and slathering maws have daddy issues. I’m not being facetious: this was, to my surprise, the key emotional thread in Dan Trachtenberg’s new Predator movie, which adds a soft touch to a series not exactly known for exploring formative emotional experiences. The aliens in question—the Yautja—are best remembered for terrorizing Arnold Schwarzenegger in John McTiernan’s jungle-set ’80s classic, and have since clung to the zeitgeist like mud to a blanket.
It ain’t easy to pump fresh blood into a dusty old franchise, but Trachtenberg has now pulled it off not once but twice. His unexpectedly excellent 2022 installment Prey rivals the original as the best Predator movie, with a striking setting—the Comanche Nation circa the 1700s—and a young Native American protagonist with plenty to prove, not least because she’s a woman stuck in an ancient patriarchy. Predator: Badlands plays a similar hand, in that its Yautja protagonist, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatang), is likewise underestimated—this time for being the family runt, written off by his clan.
Trachtenberg (who also helmed the animated anthology film Predator: Killer of Killers) can hardly ignore the ferocious nature of the Yautja, aka Predators, nor the fact that they speak in their own guttural tongue, making Badlands in part a foreign (extraterrestrial?) language film. So he softens it in a few ways, making it more palatable for mainstream audiences and studio bean counters. The first is a masterstroke: a dramatic, family-focused prologue that creates empathy for the protagonist and gives him a moral purpose.
Dek’s brother Kwei (Mike Homik, voiced by Stefan Grube) is ordered by their father Njohrr (Reuben De Jong) to kill him but defies the command, resulting in his execution in front of Dek. The protagonist’s vow to hunt and kill a beast known as the “Kalisk,” on a planet dubbed the “death planet” (do they put that on the brochure?) now carries extra gravitas; we want him to succeed, if only to spite the old man. Realigning audience sympathies is key to freeing pre-established characters from the shackles of villainy; for another memorable example, consult the way Cobra Kai reframes The Karate Kid’s original villain as a victim and underdog.
Trachtenberg’s other major softener is the addition of an English-speaking companion for Dek: a damaged android named Thia (Elle Fanning), connected to the Weyland-Yutani megacorporation, whom he reluctantly teams up with after she promises to lead him to the Kalisk’s lair. There’s also the worrying introduction of a big-eyed creature named Bud, which looks as if it fell off a toy factory assembly line—a sort of cuddly Gollum—but thankfully the cute lil thing isn’t given too much prominence.
Whereas Prey feels like one long, flowing action scene, Badlands is more jumbled and mismatched, with corporate plot elements complicating an otherwise lean slay-the-dragon narrative. Still, it comes together well, with a brisk pace and a clean visual structure, avoiding crash-bang editing and bling overload. Cinematographer Jeff Cutter has an eye for textual details, capturing the creatures, fauna, landscape etcetera of the so-called “death planet,” which, despite the ominous name, is an appealing place to visit cinematically speaking.
Badlands feels like the best kind of worldbuilding. In addition to adding more characters, creatures, and physical entities, it fleshes out not just lore and histories, but extends moral perspectives and frameworks. I can’t say I would’ve cared if Dek had died, that hideous mug face down in the mud; nor can I say I really wanted him to succeed. Wouldn’t that mean killing another creature—the Kalisk—that might also have unresolved daddy issues? The fact that this film gets us pondering such questions is a clear win for Trachtenberg.
