Predator: Badlands
The monster franchise returns for another display of CGI violence, this time without a single human character.
Timed to kill: Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi
Image courtesy of Walt Disney Studios.
If there’s ever been anything remotely interesting about the Predator films, it has been the prey. The hulking alien monsters themselves, with their high-tech arsenal of weapons, massive strength, thermal night vision and invisibility, have been virtually impossible to vanquish. In the last chapter, Prey (2022), directed by Dan Trachtenberg and scripted by Patrick Aison, the series was relocated to the Great Plains of North America in 1719 and featured a proto-feminist Comanche healer who drew on her feminine wiles to outsmart the boastful men in her tribe. It was an auspicious change in direction for the franchise, which seems happy to skip from one location and century at will as the predators, or Yautja, can nip across galaxies to satiate their bloodlust. They live to kill.
In Badlands, the eighth in the series, we kick off on the planet Yautja Prime, where two Yautjas are locked in ruthless combat, gurgling at each other menacingly. As it happens, they are brothers and when their father turns up he orders Kwei to kill his brother Dek, who he has bested in combat, as their father cannot abide weakness. But Kwei refuses, allows his brother to escape and is summarily executed by their father, who chuckles as he beheads his own son. The Yautja are a thoroughly odious lot, who measure their worth by the number of dead they leave in their wake. Which is not hard, when you are equipped like a Yautja. However, to earn his father’s approval, Dek sets off for the inhospitable planet of Genna to hunt and kill the Kalisk, an apparently invincible monster.
It is on the planet Genna that Predator: Badlands comes alive, as Trachtenberg and Aison display considerable imagination in realising some of the most deadly and ingenious fauna and flora ever committed to film. There’s also the torso of a robot that Dek comes across, who tries to teach him the advantages of teamwork and friendship, qualities that clash with everything Dek has been taught. “I hunt alone,” he repeats like a broken record, while suffering the endless twittering of his new companion, the upper half of Thia (a perky Elle Fanning). The latter character is presumably meant to provide some comic relief, but is quashed by the relentless violence of the film, which would have received an 18 certificate two decades ago. However, as the unremitting brutality and gore is purely reserved for the destruction of automatons and extraterrestrial creatures, it is presumably OK to exhibit it to pre-teens who are probably already inured by violent video games. Nonetheless, it is a tedious continuation of a franchise whose raison d'être is to show the death of the Predators’ prey, in ever increasingly mind-numbing ways.
JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
Cast: Elle Fanning, Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi.
Dir Dan Trachtenberg, Pro John Davis, Brent O'Connor, Marc Toberoff, Dan Trachtenberg and Ben Rosenblatt, Screenplay Patrick Aison, Ph Jeff Cutter, Pro Des Ra Vincent, Ed Stefan Grube and David Trachtenberg, Music Sarah Schachner and Benjamin Wallfisch, Costumes Ngila Dickson, Sound James Miller.
Lawrence Gordon Productions/Davis Entertainment/Toberoff Entertainment-20th Century Studios/Walt Disney Studios.
107 mins. USA. 2025. UK and US Rel: 7 November 2025. Cert. 12A.
