It’s a joy as a professional film critic to be wrong and have one’s expectations upended. It’s a joy for a Yautja–the quadra-tusked extraterrestrial hunter race that’s been stalking tough guys and beefcakes in natural and urban environments since 1987–to feel their prey’s warm, freshly drawn blood trickle over the mandibles on their handsome mugs. Obviously, these aren’t the same thing. But Dan Trachtenberg’s run with the Predator series, starting with 2022’s excellent Prey and continuing this year first with Predator: Killer of Killers, and now with Predator: Badlands, functions as a collision point where those subverted expectations meet the cruel machismo of alien big-game sport.
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The effect of Trachtenberg’s work in the franchise is a clarification of what it means to make a good Predator movie, or more specifically, what makes a Predator movie good to begin with. For the most part, the qualifying criteria are self-evident: there must be a Predator, of course, because a Predator movie must do what it says on the tin; the cast list must run deep, the better for racking up a respectable body count; suspense must be prioritized just after action; the action choreography must fall squarely between “brute force” and “graceful”; and the FX must be well-resourced, especially concerning the Predator itself. Simply having a Predator show up in your Predator movie, after all, isn’t enough. The Predator has to look good.
Read more: How Predator: Badlands Fits Into the Predator and Alien Universes
Nestled within these basic essentials, though, is a much more philosophical one: a good Predator movie isn’t a Predator movie at all. Rather, it’s a genre movie that happens to have a Predator in it.
John McTiernan’s Central American-set original movie is a riff on war movies. Stephen Hopkins’ 1990 follow-up orbits around a gritty crime plot. Prey, at its heart, is a coming of age story and a period film, unfolding in 1700s Comanche culture. Predator: Killer of Killers is a triptych comprising a Viking revenge film, a chanbara film, and a World War II dogfight film that leads to a superior version of the Petranaki arena sequence in Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. At face value, the Predator–its appearance, its tactics, its merciless killing spree–is the common thread that ties these four pictures together. The creature is the key structural element each movie is built around; take away that pillar and the remaining architecture sags. Imagine opening a clam shack without any deep fryers, and you’ve got the right idea.
But Predator, Predator 2, Prey, and Predator: Killer of Killers share a defining trait other than the Predator that is, surprisingly enough, more important: they’re all human dramas, interrupted by the Predator’s participation. You’ve seen Vietnam War movies, cop movies, rite of passage movies, and samurai movies. You’ll only ever see those same movies rudely thrown off course by a Predator if you watch the four worthy Predator movies out of the series’ nine total installments. Grant that if all you care about in a Predator title is Predators doing Predator things, the movies oblige: Nimród Antal’s 2010 standalone, Predators, marked the first solo Predator film released in theaters since Predator 2; eight years later, Shane Black’s The Predator debuted with quippy banter and a fizzle; and prior to both, in 2004 and 2007, Paul W.S. Anderson’s Alien vs. Predator and Greg and Colin Strause’s Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, gave table scraps to viewers hungry for Yautja action after starving for 14 years.
Neither the 2000s or 2010s-era Predator movies meet the standards set by McTiernan’s in 1987, though. They make the mistake of centering the Predator itself as a protagonist instead of an antagonist, and subsequently giving them necessary legroom to stretch out and get comfy. The Predator films released in that span of years aren’t “[insert name of genre]” movies; straightforwardly, they’re movies about Predators, which demystify a movie monster that thrives on mystification and renders them as caricatures. What makes the Yautja captivating in their “monster” role is a combination of enigmaticness and slasher-level unstoppability. But what makes them compelling as a threat rests in what they force human characters to discover in themselves, a dynamic that crystallizes beautifully in Killer of Killers: Scandinavian warrior chieftain Ursa (Lindsay LaVanchy) realizes the futility of her lifelong revenge quest following the death of her only child, Anders (Damien Haas); Kenji (Louis Ozawa Changchien) and his twin brother Kiyoshi (likewise voiced by Changchien) reconcile with one another decades after their samurai warlord father’s pitiless favoritism tore them apart; and John J. Torres (Rick Gonzalez) proves his capability as a pilot, and as a man, in the U.S. Navy.
No such effect is achieved in either of the Alien vs. Predator movies, or Predators, or The Predator, because none of their directors crack the formula conceived by Jim and John Thomas, the screenwriters of McTiernan’s classic and the creators of the Yautja mythos. On paper, Predator: Badlands reads in line with these movies more so than the others: Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a Predator too small and puny to be taken seriously by his own kin, much less allowed to live by his father, Njhorr (played, again, by Schuster-Koloamatangi), escapes execution on his homeworld and makes for Genna, a planet that sounds like a death trap to you and me but Disneyworld to Predators, where the grass is sharp enough to dice flesh and even forest vines crave raw meat. The young blood’s plan is to kill the Kalis, an apex predator said to be unkillable, and bring its head home to dad, who Dek imagines will finally accept him as his son with the right trophy kill. (It’s a cute thought.)
But that’s the outline. Predator: Badlands is set on an alien world, littered with alien creatures and humanoid synthetics, and designed around a surplus of action set pieces where blood spills and things go “boom.” In its DNA, the film has unexpected kinship with buddy comedies and fish-out-of-water plots; Dek is a stranger in a strange land, ignorant of its ecology, and spectacularly out of his depth, until he bumps into the upper half of Thia (Elle Fanning), a happy-go-lucky android working for the Weyland-Yutani corporation–the big bads in the Alien franchise–who helps Dek on his mission. The pair pick up a stray critter along the way that Thia affectionately names “Bud.” They become a trio. (“A tree-o!” Thia giddily declares, after their first encounter with Bud ends in Dek crushing a colossal insect with fallen lumber.)
It can’t be overstated how integral Fanning’s comic timing is to the success of Predator: Badlands’ narrative, partly because nobody who knows Predator would walk into a new entry in the series in 2025 and expect to laugh so hard they snort their fountain drink, and partly because Trachtenberg’s comedy moves the film into the “good Predator film” territory. For as much as Predator: Badlands is about Predator culture, and how their unforgiving might-makes-right ethos makes them equally as terrifying as it makes them vulnerable, at its core it’s about a youth at adulthood’s precipice, learning how to let go of acculturated isolation to make a found family.
In the Yautja codex, quoted at the start of the movie and referenced throughout the rest, it’s a virtue to carry out life alone, in the hunt as well as in everything else. Predator: Badlands spurs such a thorough examination of this notion that the journey undertaken by Predator’s Dutch Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Predator 2’s Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover), and Prey’s Naru (Amber Midthunder) quietly subsumes the journey Dek means to take in Predator: Badlands. He hunts, alright, and kills slews of monsters and synthetic humanoids in the process. But he also learns who he is as a Yautja the way that Dutch, Mike, Naru, Ursa, Kenji, and John learn who they are as people–and that’s the truest mark of a good Predator, and a good Predator movie.