Kinder, Gentler…
Our favourite be-dreaded space hunter gets an emotional Lucasfilm make-over. It doesn’t look so hot.
Predator: Badlands
Director: Dan Trachtenberg • Writers: Patrick Aison, Brian Duffield
Starring: Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi
USA • 1hr 48mins
Opens Hong Kong November 6 • IIA
Grade: B
It’s officially happened. The Disneyfication of the Predator is complete. In its typical rush to hit that PG-13/IIA (II fucking A) sweet spot and perpetuate a franchise – sorry – a money-printing “universe” the Overlords who know better (tee hee) have decided the best way forward is to imprint our favourite badass space hunter with an emotional backstory complete with daddy issues and redemption for the villain we loved to hate/fear (see: Maleficent, Cruella). To add insult to injury, Predator: Badlands would be a Star Wars film if it weren’t dotted with Weyland-Yutani gear and an army of its wackadoodle milk-bleeding synths that inveitably break bad. The Overlords have seemingly granted director Dan Trachtenberg (The Boys, 10 Cloverfield Lane) his own fiefdom on the Disney backlot, à la James Gunn at DC/Warner or, more appropriately, Dave Filoni (The Mandalorian, The Bad Batch, Skeleton Crew, etc and so on) to re-envision the aggressively mandibled hunter as a hero for the next generation.
And make no mistake: Mixing things up and going in a new direction is not the problem, particulary when the first direction was hilariously ’80s. New is fabulous, and it’s why Rian Johnson was right to try with The Last Jedi. Trachtenberg knocked it out of the park with Prey and Predator: Killer of Killers – new perspectives, timelines, media. All good. What those, especially Prey, didn’t do was fuck with the fundamentals of the Predator so drastically as to make it. unrecognisable. He still fell from the sky, turned invisible at will and hunted other living creatures for fun and spines. The end. In Badlands, we get a hunt story from the Predator’s POV. Cool… but why is he the good guy? We learn that the Predators are Yautja (okay), and the one we’re watching hunt this time is called Luke Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, and erm), the runt of his warrior clan who heads off to the death planet Genna to earn his cloak by besting a Kalisk. He goes about his business in the Yautja way – alone – until he finds justification for partnering with Thia (Elle Fanning), a legless Weyland-Yutani synth and a gooey monkey-type native creature Thia names Bud (Rohinal Nayaran).
That’s a lightsabre, right?
Not only is the Filoni/Gen-Z Kindness/Lucasfilm of it all bearing down on the Predator, Trachtenberg is leaning hard into the shared aspects of the Alien/Xenomorph and Predator/Yautja (now) universes. It’s not like they haven’t gone that way before: Alien vs. Predator and the gawdawful Alien vs. Predator: Requiem have been followed by Weyland-Yutani shenanigans in Alien: Earth on television, which has a ton of the tech on display in Badlands all over it. And lest we forget, way back in Predator 2 in 1990, one of the Predator’s trophies was a Xenomorph skull. They’ve been dropping breadcrumbs for years. Now they’re the size of croutons.
That said, this is where Thia’s synth “sister” Tessa (also Fanning) really makes her presence known, and thankfully she spices things up a bit. She’s not damaged and it 100% on mission, which, being Weyland-Yutani, is the dodgy AF one to get a Kalisk of its own. Probably for bioweapons. It’s always bioweapons. Once Dek, Thia and Bud make the now-requisite emotional connection (?) to each other and define clan (read: family) for themselves via spit, it’s off to get Thia’s legs back and get a damn Kalisk for Dek. Badlands picks up considerably in the third act, when Dek goes on a Dutch-style mission to suit up with what he can scavange from his crashed ship and the entirely weird and deadly local flora and fauna (this shit’s almost as out there as anything on HBO’s Scavengers Reign and go watch that right now).
Badlands is undeniably entertaining, with solid action that has heft to it, and it’s probably a crowd-pleaser for all its cutesy, forced comedy (that sometimes works) and fist-pump redemption arc, albeit one with a super-low tension conclusion. And it looks great (if a bit Tatooine-y to start) with Yautja Prime’s bleak-beautiful rocky desert playing host to the family feud that gets the ball rolling. The film has a misplaced two-hander buddy comedy tone that Fanning at times early on lets get the better of her, so more than once you may be tempted to yell at the screen, “Stop talking!” Kiwi actor Schuster-Koloamatangi doesn’t get to show off that he can actually act (head to New Zealand miniseries The Panthers for that) under the prosthetics (strong) and mocap (the he does manage to emote through) but he clearly has no trouble with the physicality of the role, even if he doesn’t have the otherworldly bounce we all know so well. Still. A nicer, gentler, affirming Predator – does he do a daily affirmation? – just doesn’t feel right.
Where does it rank among all the Predator films? Below the original (duh), Prey and Killers, above The Predator and marginally above Predators, which Adrien Brody and Walton Goggins make just odd enough to be compelling. It’s designed to be a standalone film unlike Prey, which hinted at more in its series of cave paintings depicting Predator ships descending towards the Comanche, and Killers, which ends with the Nordic warrior being stashed alongside others that bested Yautja: Amber Midthunder’s Naru, Danny Glover’s LAPD cop Harrigan, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s OG Predator foe Dutch (“If it bleeds, we can kill it.”). Full disclosure: I may just be a crank that actively scorns nice things. Plenty of viewers who prefer their blood bloodless, their personal growth quantifiable and their heroes objectively good will get on board with Predator: Badlands. Godspeed. I’ll just go back to jungle with Carl Weathers.