Predator: Badlands

Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator: Badlands opens with a shimmer of heat and the familiar rasp of alien breathing, an unmistakable callback to 1987’s Predator, when the creature was less a character than a specter. But this time, that shimmer doesn’t precede an ambush. It’s a rite of passage. The once-unseen hunter is now our hero, and what follows is the strangest mutation yet in a franchise built on violence, fear, and feral masculinity.

Where Prey found power in restraint, nstripping the series back to survival instinct and mythic struggle, Badlands doubles down on world-building and empathy. Its young Yautja protagonist, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), isn’t the implacable killer we’ve come to expect but an insecure, exiled son desperate to prove himself to a domineering father. After his brother refused to kill him during a ceremonial duel and is thus murdered by their father, Dek is branded a disgrace and sent on a lone quest to slay the Kalisk, an unkillable beast that stalks the “death planet” Genna. The premise sounds appropriately primal, but Trachtenberg and returning Prey screenwriter Patrick Aison recast it in the language of a hero’s journey, earnest, and surprisingly sentimental.

That recalibration works for a while. Dek’s exile carries real weight, and Genna itself, rendered through Wētā Workshop’s rich, tactile effects, teems with sickly beauty, razor-grass plains, acid-mouthed worms, and beasts that regenerate before our eyes. But once the Weyland-Yutani Corporation enters the mix, Badlands begins to drift toward something safer and oddly familiar. The corporation’s outpost introduces Thia (Elle Fanning), a dismembered synthetic who quickly becomes Dek’s translator, sidekick, and, for better and worse, the film’s mouthpiece.

Fanning is committed, and her delivery is lively, but the character is written like she wandered in from a different movie altogether, one pitched squarely at a much younger crowd. Thia is a constant chatterbox, quipping, analyzing, and explaining nearly every phenomenon Dek encounters, as if worried the audience might miss a beat. Her upbeat attitude and endless commentary might have worked as a sharp contrast to Dek’s stoicism, but as the film goes on, her nonstop talk becomes grating. What begins as comic relief soon slides into distraction. Every time the movie inches toward tension or awe, Thia punctures it with a wisecrack or trivia dump. The effect isn’t just tonal whiplash; it undercuts the mood of mystery that once made Predator so chilling.

That tonal mismatch points to Badlands’ larger identity crisis. This is the first Predator film to chase a younger audience, complete with cute creature sidekicks, bloodless combat, and a PG-13 rating that ensures even the most gruesome kills result in little more than sparks and dust. The approach makes commercial sense, turning the Yautja into a marketable antihero is a franchise manager’s dream, but it feels antithetical to what made these movies so potent in the first place. For nearly four decades, Predator and Alien have lived and died by their adult sensibilities: hard R-rated violence, sweaty intensity, a pulpy undercurrent of dread. Badlands replaces that texture with something toyetic, clean, polished, and ultimately safe.

That’s not to say the film lacks craft or invention. Trachtenberg remains one of the most capable directors working in blockbuster sci-fi. His action sequences are crisp, his compositions clear, and his use of scale consistently impressive. The climactic battle between Dek and the Kalisk, staged amid a volcanic storm, might be one of the franchise’s most visually dazzling moments. And Schuster-Koloamatangi gives Dek genuine presence beneath layers of latex and CGI; his expressive physicality turns the character into something almost mythic.

But the film’s polish also highlights what’s missing. For all its color and motion, Badlands rarely feels dangerous. The Predator used to embody the unknown, an apex hunter whose power lay in its mystery. Here, Dek is thoroughly demystified, complete with a childhood trauma arc and a growing fondness for his oddball friends. His transformation from monster to misunderstood hero is well-intentioned, even endearing at times, but it smooths the series’ once-barbed edges into something sleek and digestible.

By the time the credits roll, with a tease that not-so-subtly nods toward an Alien vs. Predator revival, the film feels less like a horror-action milestone and more like a pilot for an animated spin-off. The sense of danger, of genuine adult peril, has been traded for accessibility and franchise potential. For longtime fans, that trade may feel like a betrayal; for newcomers, it might simply be too polished to leave a mark.

In the end, Predator: Badlands is an impressively made, occasionally thrilling reimagining that forgets what made its monster frightening in the first place. It wants to humanize the Predator, but in doing so, it domesticates him. The hunt goes on, but this time, it’s been scrubbed clean, softened for a matinee crowd. The result is a film that looks and moves like Predator, but rarely feels like it.

3/5