Alex Wheeler Movie Ops

The Predator franchise is in a pivotal spot. It’s never been as big as its sometimes rival, Alien, and it’s started and stopped with failed reboots several times. It wasn’t until Dan Trachtenberg took a big swing with Prey that the franchise found stable footing. Prey relied on the rudimentary story of an underdog proving herself and a series of inventive action sequences to breathe fresh life into the series. After the success Trachtenberg decided to stay with the series, and first we got his co-directed Predator: Killer of Killers, essentially a series of animated shorts utilizing varied fighting techniques for almost non-stop action. That was a teaser for Trachtenberg’s big offering, Predator: Badlands, and it didn’t indicate he going to take a new approach to the series.

And Predator: Badlands does largely stick to what’s been successful for Trachtenberg. There’s an underdog who must prove themselves through a succession of fights, except this time the underdog is a Predator, flipping your allegiance to the traditional antagonist.

The Predator Dek is an underdog because he’s a runt. The film begins with him training with his brother Kwei for his first hunt, where he must kill an apex predator to be accepted into their clan. The problem is Predators aren’t forgiving of weakness, and the leader of their clan, who happens to be their father, demands Dek be killed without getting the opportunity to prove himself. Kwei sticks up for him, though, and sends him to hunt a Kalisk, a creature even their father fears. Kwei dies in the effort, adding not just his own survival but the weight of revenge onto Dek’s shoulders.

Time is given to this setup, and it results in a surprisingly emotional opening. It’s not a novel place to begin, but it’s a common launching point because it stems from universal drives. Proving yourself, finding your place, these are things we all must do, which allows the film to quickly put you on a Predator’s side.

Streamlining this shift is an excellent performance by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, who donned the elaborate Predator getup and had his face digitally altered to properly capture the creature. The expressions were based on his own performance, making what we see onscreen a seamless blend of a team’s work into a clear, cohesive character. Schuster-Koloamatangi is the blueprint, though, and he drew not just a physically imposing character but an unsure, bullheaded youth. After all, Dek has not done this before. He’s unfamiliar with how messy a hunt gets, and in the early goings he hangs on dangerously to rigid rules.

When he meets the broken Weyland-Yutani Corporation synthetic Thia (Elle Fanning), she recognizes his type immediately. Dek allows her to help, but she throws in as many digs as advice. They form a comedic duo as well as an imposing one, and as the action scenes stack up their banter keeps the movie from feeling monotonous.

And monotony was a big danger for Badlands, because once the planet’s various creatures take their turns attacking them, the scenes fall into a familiar tempo. Dek runs recklessly into danger, Thia provides information about the character at a key time, and Dek puts together the information and his training to win the fight, often in such a similar way that I began counting how many times Dek climbed up a large creature to kill it. If Badlands had been as purely about the action as Killer of Killers or Prey, the repetition may very well have sunk the film.

But Trachtenberg lays down more character work as the story progresses, giving Thia a yearning for her own family and saddling both of them with a silly little creature to look out for. As they face death time and again, the group draws close and begins to rival their blood kin in importance. 

Trachtenberg and his team sell the dynamic, and the film repeatedly draws real emotion as the band of misfits draw each other away from their initial goals. But it’s still a Predator film. It doesn’t get unnecessarily deep or complicated, but Trachtenberg exceeds his first outing by layering a more solid story under the violent action.

Release: In theaters now
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Writers: Patrick Aison, Dan Trachtenberg
Cast: Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, Elle Fanning