Predator: Badlands — an action-adventure romp filled with outlandish creatures and alien landscapes

“You’re one ugly motherf***er!” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s immortal line in 1987’s Predator is the most succinct description ever put on screen to describe the high-tech extraterrestrial baddie that hunted down Arnie’s musclebound military crew.

Over the course of nearly four decades of mixed media appearances following that original classic, the combo of only-a-mother-could-love-it looks and brutal lethality cemented the “Yautja” race as iconic Hollywood monsters despite how inconsistent in quality their respective movies were.

But now, continuing the emphatic franchise revival he started with 2022’s Prey, director Dan Trachtenberg has seemingly done the unthinkable in Predator: Badlands by transforming one of science-fiction’s favourite — and ugliest — antagonists into a hero you want to cheer for.

In hindsight, the idea was quite obvious, given what we know about the lore for the Yautja’s heavily warrior-centric society: young members of various tribalistic clans have to prove themselves by travelling to other worlds to hunt the most dangerous prey and return with trophies to earn the respect of their peers. It’s practically Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero’s Journey” but with shoulder-mounted laser cannons.

And much like in Prey, where Trachtenberg had a young Comanche woman in the 18th century face off against an exponentially more advanced adversary, Predator: Badlands doesn’t make this a fair fight for our proverbial hero.

Despite his enthusiasm to prove himself, the undersized Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is the runt of his clan’s litter. And as we quickly learn from his brute of a father, the Yautja cull weakness. One exceptionally violent family squabble later, and Dek finds himself blasting off from his homeworld, Yautja Prime, fleeing his father’s wrath, with his eyes on an unthinkable prize.

Dek intends to travel to the planet Genna and kill the Kalisk to prove his warrior status. There is just one problem: Genna is a nightmarish ecosystem filled with monstrous fauna and flora — even the grass wants to kill you! And sitting atop this food chain as the apex predator on a world of apex predators is the Kalisk, an unkillable hellbeast that has already claimed the lives of all previous Yautja who set out to hunt it.

Crash-landing on Genna, Dek immediately finds himself on the back foot. Luckily, he meets Thia (Elle Fanning), a humanoid Weyland-Yutani synthetic who has already had a run-in with the Kalisk. It rampaged through the camp of the expedition with whom she arrived on Genna, tearing off her lower half, and leaving her upper body to be carried away by the local beasties.

The surprisingly chipper Thia quickly suggests a team-up: Dek will help to reunite her with her legs as well as the remaining members of the Weyland-Yutani group, and in return she will guide him through the lethal perils of Genna with her databank knowledge of the planet.

“Yuatja hunt alone,” the gruff and proud Dek proclaims to Thia, despite his reluctant acceptance of her aid via a warrior code loophole. Along the way, the mismatched duo inadvertently rope in the assistance of “Bud”, a cute but viciously strong local creature that takes a liking to Dek, much to the warrior’s chagrin. As the unforgiving Genna does its utmost best to kill the motley crew at every turn though, they are forced to work together if they want to survive.

And if that sounds nothing like any Predator movie you’ve ever seen before, it’s because it’s not. Badlands doesn’t feel like a follow-up to Prey; its most direct live-action predecessor, and definitely not to any of the earlier entries in the franchise. The closest comparison would be Predator: Killer of Killers, Trachtenberg’s animated anthology feature film released earlier this year, but only in that both efforts are full of likeable and badass characters pulling off crazy action in increasingly unhinged scenarios and looking damn cool while doing it.

Driving home how singular Badlands is, you could easily watch this movie without ever having seen anything else in the Predator franchise and not be lost at all. A lot of that is due to how straightforward the narrative is, focusing on well-known themes of found family and discovering who you are instead of who you’re expected to be.

Such oft-traversed plotting means that Predator: Badlands is very rarely surprising from a narrative perspective, but Trachtenberg and returning Prey co-writer Patrick Aison know very well that they are colouring inside very familiar lines, so they simply use the brightest and most striking crayons they can.

While not on the psychedelic level of Avatar’s Pandora, Genna is a sight to behold. And fear. Dek, Thia and Bud have to run a continuous gauntlet of increasingly outlandish creatures, with neither side holding anything back in their clashes.

The result is a series of muscular action beats — with extra aural inertia added by Sarah Schachner and Benjamin Wallfisch’s pounding musical score — that never gets boring. And despite the abundance of CG work required to bring it all to life within a franchise-first PG-13 rating, it still feels tactile and savage.

A lot of that is due to the strong physical makeup work done to bring Schuster-Koloamatangi’s Dek to life. It’s incredibly hard to see where the layered bodysuit ends and the CG enhancements begin.

More importantly, the stuntman-turned-actor’s performance (including all dialogue spoken in a full Yautja language developed exclusively for this film) still shines through despite his actual face being hidden behind a computer-generated double-jawed alien maw. This writer would have liked to see Dek’s arc filled with just a bit more emotional gravitas, but what we get is solid enough.

It’s Fanning though that is the real standout here. Possessed of more human personality than any Weyland-Yutani synthetic we’ve ever seen on screen, she’s an absolute delight. Her infectiously bubbly demeanour and lilting speech stand as the perfect contrast to Dek’s growling broodiness, but when the story calls for her to abruptly flip a thespian switch as well, she absolutely nails it. Not to mention that she’s at the center of arguably the film’s most memorable action sequence.

All that being said, there’s no getting around the fact that Predator: Badlands is not as good as the modern-classic Prey. While, yes, this is once again a massive creative pivot for the franchise (the third in as many titles from Trachtenberg), it doesn’t quite feel as fresh as Prey did upon its release, with its gritty survival story and reverent historical representation. It is a whole lot of fun though.

What Trachtenberg and co deliver here is the cinematic equivalent of a rollercoaster. You can spot all the treacherous climbs, vertiginous drops, stomach-slinging loops, and even its final stop from a fair distance away, but when you’re actually barrelling forward on that track from one whooping thrill to the next, you don’t care.

You’re just having a blast, even if you know it’s fleeting fun that seems to have shifted its target audience to blockbuster-loving adolescents (and the adolescent minded).

If there was one criticism to level at Predator: Badlands though, it would be its title. Predator: Alpha would have been more appropriate, both for an in-story reason (which we won’t spoil here) as well as fitting into that series-launcher model that studios love so much. DM

Predator: Badlands is out in cinemas from 7 November 2025. This review was first published in Pfangirl.