The Predator and Alien franchises are in a weird place right now.
Yes, both franchises were picked up by Disney, after they bought out 20th Century Fox and related companies. Trouble is, both franchises are distinctly R-rated, which doesn’t exactly make a good fit with Disney’s ongoing and self-defeating efforts at courting the young male demographic. Of course it certainly doesn’t help that Predator was coming off Predators in 2010 and The Predator in 2018, both underwhelming efforts at restarting that franchise. As for Alien, what the hell do you even do with that franchise after Prometheus and Covenant?!
Sure enough, Alien: Romulus got the Disney Era of the franchise off to a bit of a rocky start, but it did well enough to put a sequel into development. And a year later, nobody’s even thinking about Alien: Romulus because “Alien: Earth” did such a massively successful job at opening up the world of the Alien franchise. At the same time, Prey and “Predator: Killer of Killers” did pretty much the exact same thing, expanding the Predator franchise in a huge way that audiences freaking loved.
Unfortunately, “Alien: Earth”, Prey, and “Predator: Killer of Killers” all went straight to Hulu. You know, the streaming service that’s getting phased out. Will these franchises have a place on the big screen or on Disney+? If Hulu is still around in some form or another, will that still work just as well? For now, all we can do is guess.
In the meantime, we now have Predator: Badlands, a new Predator film that got dumped into a terrible November slot with virtually zero hype. Yet the film comes to us from director Dan Trachtenberg and writer Paul Aison, the same team that became the de facto franchise shepherds ever since they knocked Prey out of the park. It’s been strange looking forward to this one, considering how hyped up the fanbase was despite the perplexing lack of promotion for a franchise movie of this scale.
Turns out this is yet another case of a quality product that’s so far out there, no way would the studio execs have any idea how to sell it.
Case in point: Our protagonist this time is a yautja. We’ve got a Predator in the lead role of a Predator movie. What a concept, right? But seriously, it’s been clearly established from the jump that the yautja are their own culture with their own code of honor. We all knew there was a massive alien civilization churning under the surface all throughout these films, and exploring that from the viewpoint of a yautja lead character is a genuinely fascinating prospect.
Unfortunately, this means that the franchise namesake villains won’t actually be the villain of this particular story. It also means that our lead character is an alien, which means we’re getting someone covered in CGI and prosthetic makeup instead of a recognizable A-list face, or even a human one. (Yes, I know there’s a celebrity name attached to a supporting role, we’ll get to that.) Oh, and we’re getting a lead character who speaks entirely in subtitles. You can see why the corporate overlords were so obviously skittish about marketing this one.
Far more importantly, it’s a fundamental tenet of good storytelling that the protagonist can never be more powerful than the antagonist until the last possible moment. That’s a problem when the protagonist is a yautja, the species built up over so many movies to be the ultimate apex predator of the galaxy. So naturally, the filmmakers did everything they possibly could to swing the pendulum in the other direction without breaking the franchise entirely.
Thus we have Dek, played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi (I swear, that’s not a typo). Dek is a young yautja, rejected as the runt of the litter. So right off the bat, he’s relatively weak and inexperienced by the standards we’ve come to expect from this species, without the cloaking tech or any of the other neat toys we’ve seen the yautja use in other films. Though he’s still a freaking yautja, so he’s nonetheless tougher and stronger than most other known species in the galaxy.
More importantly, precisely because Dek is a weakling by yautja standards, he’s a pariah to the rest of his species (most especially his tyrannical father, also played by DSK) and liable to be killed at any moment simply for being the weakest. As a direct result, Dek keeps training that much harder and pushing himself that much farther. Thus for his traditional first hunt, Dek is setting out to Genna, a planet so thoroughly loaded with such dangerous wildlife that not even the freaking yautja will go there. Even better, Dek is going after the Kalisk, a beast that the yautja — to repeat, we’re talking about the goddamn Predators here — have declared unkillable.
So, what we’ve got here is a movie about a trained killer struggling to survive in a hostile wilderness, armed with basically nothing but a plasma sword and his wits against all the various plants and animals that want him dead. It’s a plot and premise well in keeping with the spirit of the franchise, but with everything ramped up to meet the level of a yautja protagonist. Which means in turn that the hostile forest is loaded with all sorts of fantastic alien threats that are dangerous in new and terrifying ways.
Furthermore, we have a plot in which Dek learns to reject the pressure of his homicidal father and adopt the yautja cultural standards on his own terms. It’s genuinely fascinating to watch this in action, as Dek loses more and more of his traditional weaponry and trappings, struggling against the hostile wilderness until he learns to use the flora and fauna to his advantage.
Simply put, THIS IS FUCKING AWESOME.
But of course Disney would never have greenlit this without a recognizable name and a bankable face attached. Enter Elle Fanning, in the role of Thia. And I hope you’re sitting down for this, because Thia is a Weyland-Yutani android.
You read that right. We’ve got Weyland-Yutani in this picture. They are explicitly name-dropped multiple times, their logo is clearly prominent, there is no mistaking what this is. The Alien/Predator crossover is strong with this picture.
Anyway, given Weyland-Yutani’s extensive and embarrassing track record with discovering, capturing, and spectacularly failing to exploit new and dangerous extraterrestrial species in the Alien franchise, of course they are amply familiar with the yautja. More to the point, it should come as no surprise that Weyland-Yutani sent an expedition of androids to Genna just as soon as they discovered this veritable motherlode of exotic and dangerous aliens.
Predictably, the expedition quickly spiraled into a bloody goatfuck. While Thia survived, she was split in half and stuck in the nest of an avian beast. Thia needs someone with a functioning pair of legs to carry her around, and Dek needs her intel about the planet. I might further add that while Dek is far stronger and more capable with weaponry, Thia is uniquely immune to toxins and poisons, with no need to eat or sleep.
It’s a mutually beneficial relationship, which goes a long way to helping Dek outgrow the “lone wolf” attitude he was brought up with. More importantly, Thia was programmed with enough empathy to understand strange new alien races, directly challenging the yautja notion that compassion is weakness. I might further add that Fanning plays the character’s inquisitive and talkative nature in a way that’s genuinely funny, which is certainly a rare accomplishment.
And then of course we have the family theme. On the one hand, Dek has a late beloved brother (Kwei, played by Mike Homik) — who got killed by Daddy for standing up to defend Dek. Contrast that with the misfit Thia, who’s got a beloved “sister” android (Tessa, also played by Elle Fanning, because I guess Dakota wasn’t available) who somehow escaped the expedition and made it back to base. So now Mother (you know, the AI from the Alien films) is turning the sisters against each other for the sake of the mission.
Naturally, Tessa isn’t coming back alone, so now we’ve got a whole army of Weyland-Yutani androids for Dek to slaughter for our enjoyment. And precisely because there isn’t a single flesh-and-blood human in this entire picture, there are no shortage of options for how the characters can destroy each other or get dismembered. Don’t let the PG-13 rating fool you, that’s only because there’s no human blood in all the grisly kills. (I call it the “M3GAN Loophole”.)
While the characters are two-dimensional at best and some effects look better than others, Predator: Badlands is just plain fun. The action scenes are enjoyable, the comic relief is funny, and it crosses over with the Alien franchise in a way that informs and expands both franchises. For that matter, I love and appreciate how Predator hits the sweet spot where it’s big enough for an auteur like Trachtenberg to play and have fun with it, but small enough that a huge conglomerate like Disney doesn’t care enough to micromanage the property or squeeze it to death.
With Predator and Alien both, we’ve got an opportunity for brilliant and talented auteurs to take big risks and expand the properties far beyond what mere nostalgia could allow. To be blunt, this is too good to last. All the more reason to enjoy it while we can.