Whatever happened to subtext? With regard to the Predator franchise, it seems weird to bring this up so late in the day, after six movies and two Alien tie-ins. But the question that bubbles up right at the very beginning of Predator: Badlands is very simple: what does the idea of the predator even mean anymore? Nearly 40 years ago, the sweaty, jungle-set original riffed on the Vietnam war, pitting Arnold Schwarzenegger and a crack team of paramilitary mercenaries against a formidable army of alien insurgents in Central America. It didn’t matter who or what the predators were or where they came from; they were a waking nightmare: monsters from the id, coming to give the USA a kick in the ass.
In that respect, the predator of Predator had quite a lot in common with the alien of Alien, a similar creature of such pure, ruthless intent that it seemed perfectly logical to pit them against one another in two standalone movies. But to what end? Both creatures have racked up seven movies of their own each, and, of the two, only Alien’s xenomorph has — just about — kept its mystery and gravitas, despite Ridley Scott’s best efforts in the bizarre attempt at an origins story in Prometheus. The predator, meanwhile, has long since gone the way of James Cameron’s Na’vi — its people are the Yautja, and they have their unique codes and customs, plus their very own nonsense language, too.
To be fair, Predator: Badlands puts all this upfront with a title card that tells us the Yautja “are prey to none and friend to none”, which sounds impressive and leads us to a fight between fraternal predators Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) and Kwei (Mike Homik). Dek is the weakest link in his warrior family, and the arrival of their father cements that fact; there is no sentimentality here as the elder predator orders Kwei to kill his brother and be done with him. But Kwei fights back, saving Dek’s life at the cost of his own. Somewhat at odds with the Yautja’s martial smarts, Dek bumbles into a waiting spaceship that takes him off to Genna (AKA “The Death Planet”) with his family’s words ringing in whatever he has for ears: “Choose your prey, bring it home — or never return.”
On Genna, Dek meets Thia (Elle Fanning), a Weyland-Yutani android who is missing both of her legs and her sister Tessa (also Elle Fanning). Thia is sassy (which is an acquired taste), upbeat about her missing limbs (“Humans wouldn’t last a day on this planet”) and, being part supercomputer, is able to speak fluent Yautja to Dek, who is intent on taking home the scalp of the Kalisk, a fierce creature deemed “unkillable” and about as scary as the Gruffalo. Dek and Thia become an unlikely team, as Thia tracks down her lower body and the cold, calculating Tessa, and, in doing so, uncovers a sinister plot to capture and study extra-terrestrial wildlife, a trope instantly familiar from the Alien universe.
Unsurprisingly, nothing much is new here, but the chemistry between the two leads is somewhat refreshing, and Schuster-Koloamatangi in particular brings an unexpected amount of personality to what could have been a simple make-up job. Fanning, too, is quirky and broadly likable and very much at home as a sassy sci-fi lead, even when working from an overly cute script.
What’s sorely missing, though, is a sense of danger in what is essentially a buddy movie with a lot of FX-heavy set pieces. In its place is a weird kind of family psychotherapy: What Dek and Thia have in common is that they are both outsiders, ostracized by their next of kin, giving the film an unexpected and potentially intriguing find-your-own-tribe vibe. But how can androids be sisters, and so different, and how predatory can a predator be if it’s making friends?
Returning director Dan Trachtenberg is clearly in a groove here, and his enthusiasm helps, notably in the film’s impeccable world-building. But the action scenes never seem to galvanize, and somewhere along the line the predator, once a ruthless, unstoppable killing machine, has simply lost its menacing mojo. It all seems a bit, well, silly — like a long episode of Succession starring John Travolta’s character in Battlefield Earth, or the adventures of Eric Trump in space — and that surely can’t bode well for the inevitable next instalment.
Title: Predator: Badlands
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Screenwriters: Patrick Aison, Brian Duffield
Cast: Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, Elle Fanning
Distributor: 20th Century Studios
Running time: 1 hr 47 mins