Predator: Badlands brings Star Wars sweetness to film's most lethal hunter

The Predator, as a fictional adversary, is irrepressibly cool. The invisibility, the radar vision, those harpoon spikes, the mandibles that glisten as it moves in for the kill—there’s a reason why the alien creature endures as one of film’s most iconic monsters. But design is only a part of its charm. In John McTiernan’s 1987 jungle chop-a-thon Predator, its appeal came from the unknown. That its quarry—filled out by alpha machos like Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Dillon (Carl Weathers), among others—had no idea what stalked them, only that it was faster and deadlier. A squad of Rambos up against an enemy who could best them at their own violent game, a sly B-movie subversion of the ’80s action flick during its peak. Dutch’s sole hope for survival boiled down to one piece of almost elemental logic: “If it bleeds, we can kill it.”

The mystique of the Predator, what it was and where it came from, was best left to the imagination; the second you start pulling at that thread, the whole idea falls apart. What kind of ridiculous cosmic being would achieve interstellar travel for the sole purpose of hunting big game across the galactic expanse? From where does it hail? Does it go home to a spouse? File taxes? The less we knew, the better. All that mattered was that the Predator was awesome—and bug-nuts terrifying.

Dan Trachtenberg successfully remixed Predator with 2022’s Prey, a historical action epic where the Predator hunted a Comanche warrior (Amber Midthunder) who lacked the efficiency of automatic weapons but shared Dutch’s knack for self-preservation. In pitting these two unlikely foes against each other, Prey maintained the essence of the monster. Trachtenberg charts a wildly different course with Predator: Badlands, a lore-centric franchise expansion that flips the concept on its head by placing the Predator front and center as a hunter-hero with motivations that transcend its species’ vicious reputation. Trachtenberg (with Prey screenwriter Patrick Aison) tosses us into the deep end with Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a young Yautja (the Predator’s race, cooked up in a 1994 novelization of Dark Horse’s Alien Vs. Predator comic), who is having a rough go proving himself worthy of his clan’s legacy. We’ll learn even more about him before his story’s done.

From the jump, Badlands establishes Dek’s personal stakes. His disapproving father believes he’s weak and doubts his worth, and so his one shot at redemption lies in bagging the Kalisk, a notoriously unkillable beast that roams the so-called “death planet” Genna. After a lively inter-family brawl, where we see Predator fight Predator in the first of many choreographed-to-the-gills and cozily PG-13 battles, Dek sets off to Genna with the burden of tragedy as well as duty to keep him company. However, despite the planet’s foreboding nickname, there is a surprising amount of activity on its surface, with the ever-slimy Weyland-Yutani Corporation (of the Alien franchise) setting up a synthetic-staffed research outpost for purposes that threaten Genna’s natural order. Their endgame ends up clashing with Dek’s, though the ensuing strife between these entities, polished with a squeaky-clean “good versus evil” finish, doesn’t pack the subtextual, anti-corporate punch the film is feinting at. Considering who’s paying the bills, it can’t.

Giving a face to the corporation is Thia (Elle Fanning), an unusually chipper android who’s lost her legs to the Kalisk yet maintains a positive disposition and a subversive anti-boss streak as Dek’s unlikely companion. Fitted with a universal translator (Dek initially calls her “Tool”), Thia is often strapped to Dek’s back like C-3PO on Chewbacca during the climax of The Empire Strikes Back, cataloging Genna’s many flora and fauna, among them, razor grass, worms that spit acid, grenade grubs, and a googly-eyed mascot creature in the Stitch mold who tags along to complete Dek’s oddball family unit. From there, their fates intertwine and play out precisely how they must in a frictionless glide towards the film’s sequel-baiting finale, where Badlands fuses iconography from two franchises that haven’t had the best of luck sharing space in live action. The action is kinetic and frequent, buoyed by Wētā Workshop’s digital sorcery and a notably propulsive score (from Sarah Schachner and Benjamin Wallfisch) that booms over IMAX sound systems and blends alarmingly well with Dek’s frequent bursts of primal rage. Yet it’s hard to shake the feeling that something is woefully absent from all this Saturday morning frenzy.

And speaking of Threepio: That Star Wars echo can’t be an accident. In both structure and family-friendly cadence, Predator: Badlands can often come off like a bootleg Mandalorian, with Dek as an (admittedly more belligerent) antihero, meekened somewhat by his adorable misfit sidekicks. Between this, Prey, and this summer’s Killer Of Killers, Trachtenberg seems to be forging his own Dave Filoni-esque cinematic universe for the Predator—only with its edges sanded down where they were once barbed and nasty. In fact, the movie feels downright toyetic: Dek’s wee alien pal is plush-ready, he has a sword that glows red, he slices up animated beasties who regenerate limbs at will, and when he dispatches synths, they don’t spill viscous milk like in the very R-rated Alien movies but short-circuit and collapse in a tidy heap of mannequin limbs. Dek doesn’t do much here that might send his new buddies, or his audience, running in the opposite direction in terror. Few will accuse him of being sedentary, yet this Predator, once that brutal embodiment of macho-decimating death, now has something new driving his carnage: a sense of belonging. The hunt goes on, but the thrill is gone.

Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Writer: Patrick Aison
Starring: Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi
Release Date: November 7, 2025