Predator: Badlands Review – Dan Trachtenberg's Propulsive Action Sequel Hides A Lack Of Depth

Predator: Badlands is both the beneficiary and the victim of its own scope. A relentless barrage of well-choreographed and designed action scenes, Dan Trachtenberg’s third entry into the franchise is nothing if not propulsive. Appreciably, the film is forging its own path within the larger canon, avoiding much of the temptation for fan service that films of this ilk can fall prey to. But there’s a lack of depth to the proceedings, with its more tantalizing themes brusquely shoved into the margins.

Previous Predator films have used their hard sci-fi and horror genre trappings to expound upon juicy sociological and political questions of the day. John McTiernan’s 1987 original was a reflection of foolhardy American exceptionalism as it fought an invisible enemy in the form of communist South America. As refracted off the Yautja’s cloaking device, McTiernan showed how uber-masculinity clouds the judgment of men. Stephen Hopkins’s sequel symbolized and satirized the chaotic chain of corruption within Los Angeles’s political and legal systems.

Yes, those films were also staging grounds for brutal action, but there was a weight underneath them that has made them so lasting. Badlands isn’t devoid of weight, to be sure, with a cogent, surprisingly uplifting message about how the people that society deems as refuse can find comfort in solidarity. There is also an enticing use of the Alien franchise’s Weyland-Yutani company, as their motivations reveal themselves in the third act — an indictment of how corporate technological advancement comes at the expense of the natural world (the film is not technically a crossover, but, ironically, borrows more from that canon).

But Trachtenberg is more focused on the opportunity to expand on the Predator lore, and that’s not necessarily a terrible thing. Between Prey and this year’s Killer of Killers, the director has exploded our understanding of what were once seen as heartless, bloodthirsty, sociopathic trophy hunters. With Badlands, the Yautja’s world is more fully fleshed out: an honor-based, patriarchal society in a similar vein to Star Trek‘s Klingon race.

Badlands Favors Propulsive Action Over Depth — Which Is (Mostly) Okay

Trachtenberg can stage the hell out of a set piece, and, in the film’s myriad of violence, there is no shortage of galvanizing action. In its very opening sequence on Yautja Prime, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) fights his older brother, Kwei (physicalized by Michael Homick and voiced by Stefan Grube) in a kinetic plasma sword battle through a gorgeously designed cavern. From there, there is another 20 minutes or so of tense action before the opening title even appears. The film’s inevitable confrontation is defined by consistently surprising camera work amidst a sea of delightful callbacks.

Dek is smaller than a typical Yautja, with a broken fang from an incident in which he saved Kwei’s life, and his stature has him branded by his father (Reuben De Jong) as a weak “runt” who must be excised. To prove his strength and to earn his invisibility cloak, Dek vows to travel to the planet Genna to slay the fabled Kalisk. The problem is that the Kalisk is assumed to be impossible to kill. “Even father fears it,” Kwei warns. But he forges on.

Once on Genna, Dek is immediately confronted with the planet’s danger. Its flora and fauna are a veritable minefield of weaponized natural life: razor grass, worms that explode like grenades, and flower beds that shoot paralyzing needles. The magnitude of the planet’s natural weaponry has seduced the Weyland-Yutani Company to send a troop of synthetic androids to cull its riches. One of those synths, Thia (Elle Fanning), meets Dek while caught in the iron grip of a tree’s deathly branches.

Dek initially spurns Thia’s offer to help him track the Kalisk in exchange for passage across the Badlands, until she proves herself useful as a “tool.” Thia has no bottom half, and so Dek fashions a series of branches into a backpack-like contraption, carrying her around from place to place. As they move from one dangerous moment to the next, Dek’s walls start to drop, and the two find mutual comfort as equally lost, equally “broken” beings.

Trachtenberg’s symbolism is frustratingly surface-level throughout, but no more so than in the obvious attraction of these two unlikely friends (visually, too, with their backs perpetually to each other as two sides of the same coin). The film sometimes wants for deeper engagement. Notably, the film is PG-13, a far cry from the maximalist gore of Predators 1-4, which isn’t a problem except that it does distinctly feel Disney-fied in its cloying corniness.

But Fanning and Schuster-Koloamatangi do make us believe it. As Thia, Fanning is like a cross between Dory from Finding Nemo and Donkey from Shrek, a quippy, warm-spirited, entirely too talkative companion that our hero is mostly humoring for his own benefit. Fanning is delightful, and the film is often funnier than most of the franchise’s more self-serious entries. As Tessa, Thia’s clone-like compatriot, Fanning is cold and villainous. Ultimately, Badlands belongs to Fanning, who is exceedingly watchable and deft at both roles.

Shrouded as he is in CGI-enhanced prosthetic makeup, Schuster-Koloamatangi has a difficult job to endear us to his character’s “ugly as a motherf***er” face. But the eyes have it, and Trachtenberg more often than not makes us believe that a character of this kind can soften, even inside the confines of someone who enjoys murder as a sport.

Shot in New Zealand by Prey‘s cinematographer Jeff Cutter, Badlands is frequently jaw-dropping in its visual beauty, despite its fountain of alien goop. Some of the visual effects are wanting in ways that suggest the budget here may have been stretched to its limit, but it is extremely effective and evocative. It’s very easy to get swept up in the film’s action beats and tantalizing color.

Badlands technically features no human beings, but it is certainly humanistic, arguably more so than any of its predecessors. Trachtenberg’s film is something of a contradiction in terms, imposing as it does a moral code on a historically sociopathic race through the eyes of one of its discarded members. There’s beauty in that, even when it becomes as noxiously simple as a parable of “found family,” a singularly hokey idea that seems out of place in the larger Predator canon.

But it is good, rousing fun, and if Predator is to continue, it is in good hands with Trachtenberg. Perhaps the story here is not that all predators can become prey, but that all predators can be human, even when there aren’t any around to hunt.