I’ve had a complicated relationship with the Predator franchise. The 1987 2qaz a as z. X x remains a masterpiece of sweat-drenched, testosterone-soaked practical effects carnage. Predator 2 has its moments (Danny Glover fighting a dreadlocked alien in a slaughterhouse — tell me that’s not inspired). But then we got Predators, which was fine, I guess (I refuse to even mention Predator vs Aliens). And The Predator (2018)? A bloated, committee-written mess that made me genuinely angry.
Then came Prey in 2022. Suddenly, Dan Trachtenberg showed up and reminded everyone what this franchise could be. Focused. Lean. Mythologically rich. And now? He’s back with Predator: Badlands, and I’m sitting here trying to figure out how the same franchise that gave us the disaster of 2018 has now delivered back-to-back genuinely great films.
Let’s get into it.
The Big Swing: A Predator as the Hero
Right. So the thing that’ll either hook you immediately or send you bolting for the exit — Badlands follows a Predator. Not humans being hunted. Not Colonial Marines. Not special ops units sweating through a jungle. A young, undersized Yautja named Dek, the runt of his clan, trying to survive on a planet that is actively trying to kill him in seventeen different ways simultaneously.
This is genuinely bold. The Predator has always been this implacable force of alien menace — enigmatic, brutal, unknowable. The whole point of the creature is that you don’t get inside its head. You just fear it. Flipping that entirely, making Dek not just the protagonist but a bullied, anxious, desperate underdog trying to prove himself to a brutish father? That should not work. It really, truly should not work.
It works.
Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi deserves real credit here. There’s no dialogue in any conventional sense. No expressive human face to lean on. Just physicality — posture, hesitation, the way Dek moves when he’s scared versus when he finally finds his footing. It’s genuinely impressive nonverbal performance work, the kind the Academy will ignore because it’s a genre film and they are, as always, utterly ridiculous.
Elle Fanning and the Android That Stole the Movie
Now. Elle Fanning as Thia, a damaged Weyland-Yutani synthetic stranded on the death-world Genna.
Look, I didn’t see this coming. I didn’t expect to care this much about an android in a Predator film. But Fanning is doing something genuinely special here — she’s providing the emotional and comedic core of a film that has no human characters. None. Zero. The closest thing to a human perspective is an artificial one, and somehow that makes the whole thing more affecting.
Thia is damaged — literally, parts of her are missing — and her deal with Dek (help me find my missing components, I’ll help you hunt the Kalisk) gives the film its odd-couple engine. She’s dry, she’s sardonic, she delivers dark humor with this clinical android timing that shouldn’t be funny and frequently is. There’s a moment — I won’t spoil it — where Thia’s “humanity” becomes the emotional pivot of the film, and Fanning plays it without a shred of sentimentality. Just clean, quiet devastation.
Reviewers called Dek and Thia one of the most memorable duos in franchise history. I’d go further. I’d put them up against any genre pairing in recent memory.
Genna: The Death World as Character
Trachtenberg has always been good at environment. The claustrophobic geometry of 10 Cloverfield Lane. The Comanche Territory wilderness of Prey. In Badlands, he’s building an entire alien ecosystem from scratch, and the planet Genna is — I say this admiringly — utterly harrowing.
Everything on this planet wants to eat you. The flora. The fauna. The air quality is probably negotiable but I wouldn’t bet on it. There’s a sequence in the second act where Dek and Thia are moving through what I can only describe as a bioluminescent hellscape that is simultaneously gorgeous and deeply unsettling, and Trachtenberg holds on it long enough for you to feel the dread before unleashing whatever nightmare is lurking in the undergrowth.
And then there’s “Bud.” A native Genna creature that attaches itself to Dek and Thia and becomes their unlikely third. Part of the found-family motif the film is quietly building toward. I loved Bud. Bud deserves his own spinoff. (He won’t get one, but he deserves it.)
The PG-13 Question
Alright. I know some of you are already typing. “PG-13? For a Predator film? What is this, a theme park ride?”
I get it. The 1987 film was a blood-soaked practical effects showcase. Prey earned its R with genuine ferocity. So the PG-13 rating on Badlands raised my eyebrows too. I’ll admit that.
Here’s the thing, though— Trachtenberg isn’t making a gore film. He’s making a survival adventure with horror elements, and the PG-13 doesn’t actually defang it as much as I feared. The violence is intense. The creature design for the Kalisk — the apex predator Dek is hunting — is viscerally unsettling. What the film loses in explicit carnage, it makes up for in genuine tension and dread. The Kalisk doesn’t need to be shown in close-up gore to be terrifying. Sometimes the thing just standing there, enormous and wrong-shaped, is enough.
Is it less splattery than Prey? Yes. Is that a dealbreaker? For me, no. For hardcore splatter fans, probably yes, and that’s fair. Know your audience, know yourself.
Yautja Culture and the World-Building We’ve Been Waiting For
This is where Badlands earns its place as something more than a good action film.
The opening on Yautja Prime — showing Dek’s training, the clan hierarchy, his brutal father Njohrr, his brother Kwei — is the most substantial look at Predator society the franchise has ever attempted. We’ve always gotten glimpses. Trophy skulls on the ship. Ritualized hunting codes. But here, Trachtenberg and Patrick Aison have actually built a culture. Rigid. Violent. Brutally hierarchical in the way only deeply insecure warrior societies tend to be.
And what makes it interesting is that the film uses Dek’s outsider status within that culture to interrogate it. He’s the runt. He’s “weak” by Yautja standards. His whole arc is about redefining what the code means when the code is used to oppress rather than to honor. By the end of the film, Dek’s understanding of “clan” has been completely remade — and the agent of that change is an android and a weird alien creature, not a fellow Yautja.
That’s genuinely interesting science fiction, using genre trappings to say something real about belonging and toxic hierarchies. I did not expect to be thinking about any of this walking out of a Predator film. Here we are.
The Numbers and What They Mean
Badlands pulled about $184.6 million worldwide on a reported $105 million budget. Strongest opening weekend in the franchise’s history. Highest-grossing Predator film ever made, including the Alien vs. Predator films.
Which means, yes, we are almost certainly getting more. Trachtenberg and the studio have both made noises about future installments. I have complicated feelings about this. On one hand — more world-building in this Yautja-expanded universe sounds great. On the other hand, the history of franchise filmmaking is littered with first entries that earned sequels they didn’t need and got diminished by them.
For now, though? Badlands works as a standalone. If you never see another Predator film after this, you’ll have gotten a complete story. I hope whoever steers the next one remembers that.
Coda
Predator: Badlands is, without question, one of the two best 21st century films in the franchise. Whether it edges out Prey depends on what you want from the series — if you prefer survival horror with a human face, Prey still wins. But if you want myth-building, world-expansion, and the sheer audacity of a studio sci-fi film that commits entirely to its weird premise and pulls it off… Badlands is your film.
Trachtenberg has now done something extraordinarily difficult twice: taken a beloved, calcified franchise and found a genuinely new angle into it. The man clearly loves this universe and, more importantly, respects the audience enough to do something unexpected with it.
Rating: 7.5/10. Astonishing creature work, a genuinely moving odd-couple dynamic, and the most ambitious world-building the Predator franchise has ever attempted. The PG-13 will put some of you off, and that’s your prerogative. But if you’re willing to meet the film on its own terms — a survival quest seen through alien eyes, on the most dangerous planet in the universe — Badlands will absolutely rip your heart out (in a good way).
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