The Best ‘Predator’ Since the First

If you don’t know it already Google “original Predator design” and take a gander at the results. You’re looking for the thing that looks like a cross between a giant cockroach and a cheap lawn decoration you’d buy at Spirit Halloween.

Bear in mind: This wasn’t some early, rejected concept art. They actually took that suit to the set of 1987’s Predator in the jungles of Mexico. Carl Weathers tried to fight it. Jean-Claude Van Damme got inside it and attempted to performs stunt in it. (Guess how well that turned out.)

Eventually, the filmmakers came to their senses, shut down production while they fixed the problem, and went back to the drawing board. That process eventually gave us the now famous creature design by Stan Winston and his effects team. But even the A+ Predator of that first film had limitations. It was heavy. It was hot. It was impossible for the actor inside, Kevin Peter Hall, to see where he was going. The Predator’s signature cloaking technology is certainly a cool gadget, but it was also a solution to a filmmaking problem: How do we make this bulky immobile suit a terrifying onscreen presence? The answer was to avoid showing it for as long as humanly possible, a la Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.

READ MORE: The 10 Best Horror Movies of the Last 10 Years

I thought about that old Predator suit a few times in the beginning of Predator: Badlands, which introduces its title character in the midst of a ferocious sword fight. This Predator leaps,  spins, and falls around a massive underground cave as it exchanges fluid martial arts moves with another Predator alien. It never turns invisible — in this scene or in most of the movie, because this character, a warrior named Dek, has yet to earn his cloak from his clan.

But it’s not just that this Predator isn’t hidden from view during the action sequences. He’s Badlands’ main character. The film hinges on Dek’s emotional arc. After this opening battle, the camera narrows in on his face, with that signature toothy Predator maw, as it expresses a whole range of emotions: Rage, fear, pride, confusion. I assume these images are created with a combination of practical prosthetics or animatronics and some digital effects — but however it was done, it looks so convincing that the viewer simply accepts it as a living, flesh-and-blood creature.

In other words, special effects of technology has come a long way in 35+ years since Predator. But a lot of absolutely awful movies have been made in that time with impressive special effects. Predator: Badlands is a special film precisely because it uses those technological advances to tell a genuinely absorbing adventure story involving these characters. Here is a Predator film that is ultimately about humanity — in which there are absolutely no human characters onscreen.

Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is considered the “runt” of his Predator clan, underestimated and disliked by the other “Yautja” aliens, except his brother Kwei (Mike Homik). Their massive, towering Predator dad (also portrayed by Schuster-Koloamatangi, ironically) considers Dek weak. And Predators do not abide weakness.

That’s how Dek winds up on Genna, the deadliest planet in the galaxy, hoping to earn his clan’s approval by killing a supposedly unstoppable monster known as “the Kalisk.” Badlands director and co-writer Dan Trachtenberg observes Dek as he marshals his supplies and advanced weapons, including a plasma sword and an energy-based bow and arrow, and begins to acclimate to Genna’s harsh environment. At a distance, the place looks gorgeous. Up close, it’s full of man-eating plants, grass as sharp as razors, and strange creatures that spew poisons.

These early scenes make for an amusing sort of Predator procedural, as Trachtenberg once again makes visible the elements of the Predator mythology and methodology that were typically kept off-screen in the earlier films, because their stories were mostly about the aliens’ prey. As he explores Genna, Dek, who was raised by his fellow Yautja to live a life of lonely self-sufficiency, winds up with a pair of comedic sidekicks, including Elle Fanning as an impossibly cheerful android, who begin to (very reluctantly) teach him the value of community and family.

It’s a use of the Predator concept that’s both totally surprising and yet totally logical. And yet even amidst a lot of humor and a small dollop of sentiment, Trachtenberg still manages to maintain the ferocity one expects from a former Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle about an invisible alien hunter who kills for sport. Badlands is emotionally and physically brutal at times, with some of the more gnarly action sequences that have ever been featured in this franchise. But the economical script by Patrick Aison also finds ways for Dek’s actions to express some ideas about this creature, and ultimately of all of our shared Darwinian existence. Even elements like the Kalisk’s unique abilities in combat reflect Predator: Badlands’ themes about brotherhood and finding strength in unity rather than solitude.

In some ways, Predator: Badlands is the Predator franchise’s answer to James Cameron’s Terminator 2. It’s not quite that massive in scope or as astonishing in terms of sheer bravura filmmaking. But it definitely recalls that sequel in terms of its ideas and its structure, especially in the way it manages to turn an inscrutable, nigh-indestructible villain into a complicated but sympathetic protagonist without betraying what made that central character so special in the first place.

Yes, this is yet another sequel to a long-running, nostalgia-driven intellectual property controlled by a massive corporation. But within the rules prescribed by that sort of filmmaking, I don’t think you’re going to find a much more inventive use of a franchise than Predator: Badlands. This is not just a cheap rehash of the story beats of an earlier film. It is not a legacyquel that trots out a few beloved old characters to bestow their blessing on a new generation. It takes the core elements of this concept and reconfigures them into something new.

This is Dan Trachtenberg’s third Predator, following 2022’s inventive prequel Prey and this year’s animated anthology Killer of Killers. I’ve never met the man, but based on what he has done with this franchise, he strikes me as someone who adored Predator as a kid — maybe even more than its sometimes only-just-okay films deserved — and spent years thinking about the property’s untapped potential and imagining what his ideal film based on the concept could look like. With Predator: Badlands, I think he finally made it.

Additional Thoughts:

-I was so excited by Predator: Badlands that after I got home from the theater I immediately put on Trachtenberg’s Prey — and was struck by the very obvious and intentional parallels that he clearly baked into both films. (Both begin with nearly identical shots from inside a tent or cave that track out into an expanse of wilderness; both share similar opening title designs.) I can’t wait to see the YouTube video putting all these elements side by side.

RATING: 8/10