Predator: Badlands represents a surprising lower point for a renewed franchise that was just starting to show some signs of life after decades of stagnancy and mismanagement. Coming on the heels of the thrilling and inventive Prey and the surprisingly ambitious animated feature Predator: Killer of Killers, this latest instalment from returning director and co-writer Dan Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison should hold up to the same standard. But it doesn’t. Instead of a taut thriller, Predator: Badlands is an average looking sci-fi adventure that does away with the chills and intensity of previous franchise entries and replaces it with a decidedly cuddlier, more teen appropriate disposition that feels like a betrayal of everything that came before it. Sure, Predator: Badlands is doing something different by taking the perspective of the fabled intergalactic hunters, but in this case that just means taking a renowned villain and turning them into a Mandalorian clone.
Predator: Badlands opens on the home planet of the Yautja, a ritualistic race of hunters with monstrous faces and highly evolved technological weaponry. It’s a right of passage for all Yautja to travel to distant lands for a hunt, bringing back their dead and proving their worth to the tribe. Young predator Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is the runt of his tribe, and is thusly doomed by his father (and the clan’s leader) to death. Dek’s older brother helps him escape dad’s wrath, believing everyone should be entitled to prove themselves in a hunt. In a bid to impress and get revenge on his father, Dek travels to Gemma, also known as “the death planet,” probably because everything in sight is trying to kill you. Gemma is home to the fabled Kalisk, an enormous, supposedly unkillable monster that even Dek’s father fears. Out of his element and in grave danger, Dek finds an unlikely ally in Thia (Elle Fanning), a bisected and broken Weyland-Yutani synth that was part of an all synth research team sent to Gemma to get the Kalisk for themselves. With the help of Thia and a cute little alien creature that wants to tag along for the journey, Dek comes closer to his intended prey. But a different synth (also played by Fanning) seeks to continue the Weyland-Yutani mission, no matter the cost.
One has to admire the way that Trachtenberg has found a way to skirt the MPAA rating system in the U.S. to bring Predator: Badlands into violently respectable PG-13 territory. By making all of the characters on screen aliens, robots, or assorted creatures, Trachtenberg is free to do whatever he wants in terms of violence because there’s no “real blood” to be seen. Predator: Badlands never skimps on the chaos and fighting, even in a tamer format. Outstanding make-up and creature design are also on display throughout Predator: Badlands, so if not much else, the budget of the film is going to good use in a visual sense. The variety of flora, fauna, and atmosphere on Gemma displays a kind of imagination the rest of Trachtenberg’s film is lacking.
I’m not going to say that the Predator franchise should always be built upon the creatures stalking their prey and causing mass carnage and chaos along the way. I’m not miffed in the slightest that in this film the shoe is on the other foot, with the hunter becoming the hunted, or even that he’s only slaughtering mythical creatures and synthetics. The problem here lies in the fact that there’s no tension to the situation at hand. The suspense that made the better entries in the Predator franchise so intriguing is nowhere to be found. In place of tension, Predator: Badlands offers up stock adventure movie beats, quirky sidekicks, and a misplaced attempt to humanize a character that the franchise has spent decades trying to paint as the most terrifying creature in the cosmos. In its better moments, Predator: Badlands plays like the flip side to Prey – an underestimated hunter tries to prove their worth to a familial tribe – but instead of leaning into those impulses, Trachtenberg’s film gets lost in a lot of other competing influences, not to mention further tying the franchise to the Alien mythology.
Predator: Badlands plays things so safe that there’s never any doubt about Dek’s journey to prove himself. The twists and reveals along the way are easy to predict. The bond between Dek and the unusually sunny and optimistic Thia plays out with expected results. Fanning (speaking English) and Koloamtangi (speaking Yautja) have good chemistry for the material they’ve been given, but their relationship feels a lot more like recent Star Wars offerings, the 80s sci-fi cult classic Enemy Mine, or a Jurassic World movie than a Predator film. Their banter is snarky and based on a lot of misunderstandings, and it works for Trachtenberg’s situations, but it’s hard for me to divorce this character from everything that has come before in the series. The chemistry between the leads is perfect, with Fanning’s nicely layered dual performances and Koloamtangi’s physicality and expressiveness emerging as Trachtenberg’s biggest assets. They’re more than pulling their own weight, but the film still falls short because they both feel like characters that have been trucked in from completely different franchises.
Maybe I’m the problem here, and I’m willing to admit that. I’ve come to expect that films in this series have a bit more of a nail biting fright factor to them, and Predator: Badlands is completely devoid of those feelings. If I wanted this kind of specific adventure and buddy picture, I would’ve watched a different franchise. After the film opens with a reminder that the Yautja are friends to none and predators to all, it’s hard to square the lack of overall stakes in Trachtenberg’s film. Dek only occasionally looks to be in the same kind of danger other predators before him have inflicted on their prey. And as an adventure movie, the beats still feel like they’ve been lifted from better, more imaginative films. It’s fine if all you want is a movie about a swarthy antihero slicing and dicing his way through an interplanetary jungle, but don’t expect much more than that.
Predator: Badlands opens in theatres everywhere on Friday, November 7, 2025.
