{"id":121664,"date":"2025-11-04T17:43:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-04T17:43:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/121664\/"},"modified":"2025-11-04T17:43:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-04T17:43:06","slug":"the-alien-killing-machine-loses-its-menacing-mojo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/121664\/","title":{"rendered":"The Alien Killing Machine Loses Its Menacing Mojo"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWhatever 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<\/a> tie-ins. But the question that bubbles up right at the very beginning of Predator: Badlands<\/a> 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 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\u2019s xenomorph has \u2014 just about \u2014 kept its mystery and gravitas, despite Ridley Scott\u2019s best efforts in the bizarre attempt at an origins story in Prometheus. The predator, meanwhile, has long since gone the way of James Cameron\u2019s Na\u2019vi \u2014 its people are the Yautja, and they have their unique codes and customs, plus their very own nonsense language, too.<\/p>\n

\n\tTo be fair, Predator: Badlands puts all this upfront with a title card that tells us the Yautja \u201care prey to none and friend to none\u201d, 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\u2019s life at the cost of his own. Somewhat at odds with the Yautja\u2019s martial smarts, Dek bumbles into a waiting spaceship that takes him off to Genna (AKA \u201cThe Death Planet\u201d) with his family\u2019s words ringing in whatever he has for ears: \u201cChoose your prey, bring it home \u2014 or never return.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Genna, Dek meets Thia (Elle Fanning<\/a>), 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 (\u201cHumans wouldn\u2019t last a day on this planet\u201d) 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 \u201cunkillable\u201d 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. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tUnsurprisingly, 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tWhat\u2019s 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\u2019s making friends?<\/p>\n

\n\tReturning director Dan Trachtenberg<\/a> is clearly in a groove here, and his enthusiasm helps, notably in the film\u2019s 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 \u2014 like a long episode of Succession starring John Travolta\u2019s character in Battlefield Earth, or the adventures of Eric Trump in space \u2014 and that surely can\u2019t bode well for the inevitable next instalment.<\/p>\n

\n\tTitle: 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<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Whatever happened to subtext? With regard to the Predator franchise, it seems weird to bring this up so…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":121665,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[22606,66242,2979,93,61,60,270,46189,563],"class_list":["post-121664","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-alien","tag-dan-trachtenberg","tag-elle-fanning","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies","tag-predator-badlands","tag-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121664","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=121664"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/121664\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/121665"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=121664"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=121664"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=121664"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}