Director Dan Trachtenberg takes his third crack at Yautja lore with Predator: Badlands, and this time the protagonist is the galaxy’s most notorious trophy hunter himself. It’s a pretty wild shift in perspective for the franchise, but one that I think Trachtenberg pulls off.
After Prey and Predator: Killer of Killers got Hulu-only releases, the Yautja are finally back on the big screen. Predator: Badlands follows Dek, a little brother, runt of the litter, as he’s exiled from his clan and on the deadliest planet in the galaxy trying to earn his stripes. Well, his stripes and a cloaking device. It’s a rite of passage storyline that should sound familiar, which is exactly why it works so well for this movie and the point-of-view change it’s attempting.
It’s hard to flesh out mythology like this, though. Being seven movies deep into a franchise that’s had a handful of twists and turns and failures, deciding where to shift focus is a near impossible task. Trachtenberg’s answer to that is an elegant solution, which is to say, “you know, just being a little brother can be hard.”
Dan Trachtenberg’s track record (his Dan Track-ten-record?) shows that he knows how to build a good movie. His films are structured with clean and simple storylines, but he stages sequences well, blocks scenes efficiently, and puts the camera in all the right places to get the most out of those simple premises. Badlands is yet another example in his filmography of doing all the small things right. Little, personal details get set up early in the movie, like the reason Dek’s missing a fang and what that means to him and his brother, that come back to play an important role in the plot later on. It’s simple but effective filmmaking, textbook even.
But most importantly, there’s always a relatable, emotional core to what Trachtenberg’s doing. That’s what made Prey and Killer of Killers such novel entries in the Predator canon. Amber Midthunder’s Naru and Killer of Killers’ cast of poor frozen bastards from across time all had proper emotional reasons to fight and survive. Dek in Badlands is no different.
The other half of the protagonist duoe is Dek’s new Weyland Yutani synth pal, Thia. Elle Fanning is programmed to be an ‘aww shucks’ kind of synthetic that ultimately learns as much from Dek as he does from her. She’s got a hard-coded good nature that takes her on a similar emotional journey as her new Yautja bestie. She’s got a wholesome quality that I don’t think has been seen outside of some quieter, family based moments in Trachtenberg’s other two Predator entries. By the end of the movie though, Thia has some of the most charming and creative ass-kicking in the whole story and Fanning really pulls it off.
But the ass-kicking that had me chuckling and giddy? That was all Dek’s. There’s a moment in the final act that had me saying “yes, that. THAT is the Predator.” Granted, it came a little late in the runtime, but it’s definitely there. The fighting is a mix of a clever use of his surroundings and brutal head-stomping, which, by the way, is how I would describe the action in all the best parts of Predator as a franchise.
But speaking of the ass-kicking, that they’re on a distant alien planet is really the only reason this movie is PG-13. As the first non-R-rated Yautja hunt this movie still goes pretty hard. The biggest difference is that it’s all alien gore splashing around. If it were people, like it was in Prey and Killer of Killers even, the brutality with which Dek goes about his business would be an easy R rating.
Aesthetically speaking, the creature design is pretty good. The alien death planet is populated with ravenous flora and fauna and, while they compare unfavorably to the creatures of Avatar, for example, they are better than most. And there’s something very engaging about Dek and Thia encountering one deadly thing after another, learning a quick and important fact about them, then killing and eating them. And nothing dies the same way. All those vine things we see him fighting in the trailer? Not a single one of them gets a repeat dispatching.
To be fair, there is also a certain amount of (and hold on to your shoulder cannons here) cuteness in this movie. It makes sense and it moves the story along, so it’s not cuteness just to sell toys or shill a new ride at Disneyland, but it is ironically an alien idea in a Predator movie.
Some of it works, some of it doesn’t, of course, but Dek is such an earnest young Yautja. The kid tries to make a joke. It’s one of the moments that doesn’t really work, but it plays as that overly literal style of humor you get from characters like the Terminator. He’s just programmed a certain way and he’s slowly learning a different way. But even though the joke didn’t fully land, I appreciate the effort. Once you open the door to the Yautja having a language, they can immediately start telling you who they are. From there it’s no surprise that Dek is a unique specimen among his clan, a little different from the rest, which is fine because how boring would that be if they were all the same!
You need the familiar to get away with the new.Trachtenberg and screenwriters Patrick Aison and Brian Duffield take great pains to portray Dek as eager to prove himself and passionate about the Yautja way of life, but also a little worried about his place in it. And actor Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi manages a subtlety in his performance that makes Dek a downright relatable dude. He’s not any less strong, less violent or more gore averse than any Predator that’s been on screen so far. He’s out for vengeance. He loves stabbing his prey in the head and bathing in its viscera. But he’s also mad and smart and capable and underestimated. It’s the same story we saw with Naru from Prey. They even repurposed a line of dialogue from Prey to drive that point home making Dek’s story a very familiar one, surrounded by equally familiar imagery from the Yautja ship and weapons, to the Alien franchise easter eggs. But that’s exactly what’s needed to shift the POV. You need the familiar to get away with the new.
One of those new things is the Yautja Codex, which we got our first peek at in Killer of Killers. Badlands gives us another look at these Biblical commandments that guide the entire culture of the hunters. And even though there was a divided reaction to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch and Danny Glover’s Harrigan showing up in a post-release post-credit Killer of Killers scene (which i believe set the record for the furthest post credits a post-credit scene has ever landed), I like what Trachtenberg and his team are doing here. There’s something to be said for not revealing too much of your monster though. It’s the “don’t show the shark” rule of filmmaking. But as much as the last three entries in this franchise have added to the lore, there’s still plenty we don’t know about the Yautja. But Trachtenberg isn’t only interested in breaking new ground. Badlands makes great use of everything Predators have done to be interesting in the 40 years since that original ugly mother fucker first blew up a jungle and all the special ops badasses in it.
In fact, the thing Badlands seems to understand better than anything is that there are only so many ways you can do “oh no, what are these giant things that are trying to kill us?” before that well runs dry. After all, there are literally decades worth of movies that failed to live up to the first one. Dan Trachtenberg cracked the code a little with Prey by giving the protagonist something to prove, Killer of Killers took it the next step by digging a little further into the culture of the Predators, and the natural progression is putting a Yautja in the protagonist's seat with a chip on his shoulder. These three movies are almost an equation. Prey multiplied by Killer of Killers equals Badlands.
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