{"id":122897,"date":"2025-11-08T20:04:09","date_gmt":"2025-11-08T20:04:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/122897\/"},"modified":"2025-11-08T20:04:09","modified_gmt":"2025-11-08T20:04:09","slug":"what-is-dan-trachtenbergs-predator-trilogy-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/122897\/","title":{"rendered":"What Is Dan Trachtenberg’s ‘Predator’ Trilogy About?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not every franchise can have a comeback as consistently strong as what Predator\u00a0is having right now. Beginning with 2022\u2019s\u00a0Prey<\/a>,\u00a0the sci-fi horror series has found itself revitalized between that and this year\u2019s Predator: Killer of Killers<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Predator: Badlands<\/a>,\u00a0the latter of which hit theaters this past weekend.<\/p>\n

Directing all three is Dan Trachtenberg<\/a>, whose feature film debut was 2016\u2019s 10 Cloverfield Lane. Along with each film giving longtime Predator\u00a0fans things they\u2019ve wanted or didn\u2019t expect\u2014like officially canonizing the term \u201cYautja\u201d in these movies or Killer\u00a0pitting the aliens against different historical factions\u2014what binds them together are the thematic threads that run between specific pairs or the full trilogy and may define the filmmaker\u2019s larger mission statement.<\/p>\n

\"Io9<\/p>\n

The most prevalent theme explored in Trachtenberg\u2019s trio is masculinity. Predator\u00a0has always been about this to some degree\u2014how can it not, when it\u2019s got that handshake<\/a> and features big dudes picking fights to stroke their egos and blowing themselves up when things don\u2019t go to plan?\u2014and it\u2019s all over Prey\u00a0and\u00a0Badlands in particular.<\/p>\n

Badlands\u2019\u00a0protagonist Dek is deemed a lesser Yautja owing to his small size, a status so humiliating in Yautjan culture his father Njohrr considers his son too weak to survive and wants to just kill him. Meanwhile, Prey\u2019s\u00a0Naru longs to be a hunter alongside her brother Taabe, but she\u2019s impeded mainly by the other young men in their Comanche tribe, who try to physically or verbally prevent her from proving herself. She can\u2019t join them because she\u2019s a woman, but she\u00a0thinks the other Comanche women\u2019s duty of foraging and healing is a lesser act.<\/p>\n

\"Predator<\/p>\n

Prey and\u00a0Badlands\u00a0explore masculinity from different angles: the former posits that Naru needs to use both her hunting and\u00a0foraging skills if she\u2019s to defeat the Feral Predator, who otherwise tears through the Comanche, the French fur traders, and the local animal population with a degree of curiosity and cockiness. Yautja have always been likened to big game hunters whose advanced technology enhances the mean streak they have for killing things. But when they mess up, they really mess up; Prey\u2019s Feral Predator almost meets his end just going up against a wolf and a bear, and there\u2019s a similar arrogance in Dek. Despite declaring he won\u2019t fail in killing a beast to redeem himself, he\u2019s humbled within minutes of crash landing on Genna when the local flora steal most of his gear and nearly do him in then and there. \u00a0<\/p>\n

Of the two,\u00a0Badlands\u2019 jabs at masculinity are sharper and hit harder owing to Dek being the first Predator protagonist in these films. Like Naru, he\u2019s positioned by Trachtenberg as an underdog, which likely wasn\u2019t a coincidence, since the director\u2019s mentioned almost pairing<\/a> the two together. Instead, Dek\u2019s allies are the bisected Weyland-Yutani synthetic Thia and a Gennan creature dubbed Bud. Dek takes pride in his people\u2019s ethos of survival through strength and solidarity, which is established at the start of the film with an opening epigraph. But he also does some reconsidering when Thia asks him a simple question that challenges his whole worldview: \u201cWho would want to survive on their own?\u201d He eventually repays the kindness of Thia and his brother Kwei, who died protecting Dek against their father, in the film\u2019s climax by using Genna\u2019s wildlife to save her.<\/p>\n

\"PredatorDek on the hunt. \u2013 Fox <\/p>\n

People are nothing without community, as emphasized in Killer of Killers and Badlands. The animated film\u2019s three leads\u2014Viking warrior Ursa, airman John Torres, and exiled shinobi Kenji\u2014all fight their respective Predators with allies by their side. None of them have the honor of surviving, but they give the heroes a shot they otherwise might not have if they worked alone, and when they\u2019re forced to fight each other for the amusement of spectating Yautja, they decide to work together to escape. Language barrier be damned, the three of them watch each other\u2019s backs, and almost all get away, with Kenji and Torres flying off thanks to Ursa staying behind. She ends the film in suspended animation again, but Killers establishes that the Yautja capture anyone who\u2019s killed a Predator, including Naru, but also Dutch and Harrigan (the respective leads of the first two Predator\u00a0movies), so she\u2019s not entirely on her own.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s good to have friends, so quit being a jerk\u201d is an interesting pivot for the\u00a0Predator\u00a0films to make, and it\u2019s telling that all three films close on the promise of community. Those endings may tease ominous things for the characters\u2014Kenji and Torres look well and truly screwed against a legion of Yautja ships, ditto Dek squaring off against his mother\u2014but the underlying message Trachtenberg establishes here gives Predator\u00a0some potentially fun new tools to play with as it continues gloriously doing its own thing.<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel<\/a>, Star Wars<\/a>, and Star Trek<\/a> releases, what\u2019s next for the DC Universe on film and TV<\/a>, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not every franchise can have a comeback as consistently strong as what Predator\u00a0is having right now. Beginning with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122898,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[67416,146,85,46,397,45429,77880,45430],"class_list":{"0":"post-122897","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-dan-trachtenberg","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-il","11":"tag-israel","12":"tag-movies","13":"tag-predator-badlands","14":"tag-predator-killer-of-killers","15":"tag-prey"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122897\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}