Crew
Director – Dan Trachtenberg, Screenplay – Patrick Aison, Story – Patrick Aison & Dan Trachtenberg, Producers – John Davis, Brent O’Connor, Ben Rosenblatt, Marc Toberoff, Dan Trachtenberg, Photography – Jeff Cutter, Music – Sarah Schachner & Benjamin Wallfisch, Visual Effects Supervisor – Olivier Dumont, Visual Effects/Animation – Industrial Light and Magic (Supervisor – Chad Wiebe, Animation Supervisors – Adrian Millington & Alexander Poei) & Weta FX Limited (Supervisors – Sheldon Stopsack & Erik Winquist), Visual Effects – Framestore (Supervisor – Mark Curtis), Important Looking Pirates (Supervisor – Nicolas Hernandez), Trixter (Supervisor – Dominik Zimmerle) & The Yard VFX (Supervisor – Laurens Ehrmann), Special Effects Supervisor – Dean Clarke, Predator Designs – Alec Gillis, Production Design – Ra Vincent. Production Company – Davis Entertainment/Toberoff Entertainment/TSG Entertainment.
Cast
Elle Fanning (Thia/Tessa), Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi (Dek/Father Voice), Rohinal Nayaran (Bud), Mike Homik (Kwei Suit), Reuben De Jong (Father Suit), Stefan Grube (Kwei Voice)
Plot
On Yautja Prime, Dek is considered a runt among the Yautja Predator species. He seeks to prove himself in combat by hunting the Kalisk on the death planet Genna, which is considered unkillable. However, his father orders his older brother Kwei to kill Dek because he is weak. Instead, Kwei kills their father and shoves Dek into the ship and activates it, sending it to Genna. Dek crashes on the surface where he tries to survive amongst the lethal and menacing flora and fauna there. He comes across Thai, the severed top half of an android manufactured by the Weiland-Yutani Corporation, arrived on Genna as part of an all-android expedition with a mission to capture a Kalisk. Dek has no interest in collaborating but she persuades him that he can use her as a tool to help him. They are also aided by a small creature that adopts Dek and Thia names Bud. At the same time, Thia’s android sister Tessa has been repaired and returns even more determined on her singular mission to capture the Kalisk.
Badlands is the ninth film in the Predator series. This started with the original Predator (1987), which was followed by an okay sequel Predator 2 (1990). It was then decided to combine the Predator and Alien series because the copyright for both was held by 20th Century Fox, resulting in the disliked AVP: Aliens vs Predator (2004) and AVPR: Aliens vs Predator Requiem (2007). Sporadic other sequels were made with Predators (2010) and The Predator (2018).
The series gained a new lease of life under director Dan Trachenberg who had previously made 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016). Trachtenberg’s sequel Prey (2022) with the Predator up against a Native American woman received a great reception, being called one of the best of the series. Trachtenberg then went on to make the animated Predator: Killer of Killers (2025) as a teaser for Badlands, which tells three different tales of Predator vs human.
Dan Trachtenberg has become the director most associated with the Predator franchise – indeed is the only director to return for more than a single outing. He has definitely done something different with each of his entries. While none of the other films vary too much from the basics of humans vs Predators, he is willing to mix up the setting and place it into different eras – a Native American woman in Prey, and three stories at various points of history covering the Vikings, samurai and World War II in Killers of Killers.
Badlands is the most variant of any Predator film so far. For one, it abandons any human vs Predator combat altogether – there are no human characters in the film. Furthermore, the rest of the Predator films have the Predator as a fearsome hunter – a nemesis to the other characters – whereas here, the Predator is the protagonist and a sympathetic character. Here the near invincible prey has been stripped down to become a much weaker character being forced to survive in a harsh environment where they are up against an even more fearsome and unkillable creature. The film is now more of a Planetary Adventure than a hunter vs prey film – and one where Dan Tractenberg has substantially borrowed the flora and fauna of his Planet locale from Harry Harrison’s Deathworld books.
I have mixed feelings about the humanising of the Predators. On the plus side, doing so mixes up and does something interesting with the basics of the Predator series, which so far have just been centered around the same human vs predator matches. On the other hand, the unveiling of the Predator culture did nothing too much to excite me. Now they just seem like extreme sports junkie versions of Klingons. TV’s Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-94) did a far better exploration of exploring Klingon warrior culture and this adds little.
The other aspect that is a minus point is that Badlands returns to the aspect of the Predator universe that everybody hated – namely, the crossover with the Alien films. On the face of it anyway. About the point that we meet Elle Fanning and she announces she is from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, your hopes sink that we are in for Aliens vs Predator 3. However, that doesn’t quite turn out to be the case. Certainly, Badlands is clearly located in the Aliens universe and Weyland-Yutani are still up to their usual dirty tricks of acquiring new deadly lifeforms for weapons research. But there are no Xenomorphs this time, just the androids and the corporate backdrop. The film also borrows from the classic powerloader vs alien mother climactic showdown of Aliens (1986) but interestingly replays it in having the alien as the good guy and the Sigourney Weaver equivalent operating the powerloader as the bad guy.
This works quite well. My only issue with this is when it comes to Elle Fanning’s Thia android. It is hard to imagine Elle Fanning’s Thia here as being in the same product range as Ian Holm’s Ash in Alien (1979) or Michael Fassbender’s David in Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). Trachtenberg pits the two as an odd couple – the dour, fiercely independent Predator and the chirpy constantly talkative android, offering information tidbits at every opportunity. What this seems more like is the taciturn hero and the annoying kid relationship we have in films like True Grit (2010) or Bookworm (2024), or perhaps even the old man and the kid in Up (2009). And when a small cute animal gets thrown into the mix as well, the entire set up starts to seem like a bad cliché.
Badlands doesn’t quite lean into this as much as you expect. Thereafter there are a couple of twists and the story becomes more about the evil corporation and their schemes. We then get Thia’s synthetic sibling Tessa, who is pitched as being the evil twin version of Thia right from the outset when we see her damaged (something that is never facially corrected throughout the film) and ruthlessly mission oriented. In contrast to the chatty talkative and quite open Thia, the difference is quite striking. On the other hand, you keep wondering how we could end up with such a cold, ruthless Tessa when Thia explains that the two of them were designed for empathy. It does feel that the film is badly falling into good twin/bad twin cliches here. On the plus side, the two roles allow Ella Fanning to strike quite an effective range in her performance(s).
Much of the film feels like it is tilted too easily at these easy cliches – the wilderness odd couple, the good and bad twin pitted against one another, the appropriation of Klingon warrior culture – and that made Predator: Badlands far from the classic that it has been instantly called. It’s okay and fun. I did enjoy it for some of the interesting battles with flora and fauna and especially during the various climactic fight scenes – the legs almost deserve their own film.
Trailer here