I’ve said it before, but I don’t think I’ve ever really gotten the Predator franchise, and it drives me crazy. It’s not just like I’m not getting a joke that everyone else in the world seems to be in on, but a decades-long failing in basic media literacy on my part.
So for anyone else who might be in the same boat, sitting down to see Predator: Badlands, my first piece of advice is simple: let it cook for a while.
It starts out on the Yautja homeworld, with a shot of various prey being eaten by predators that’s so cringingly on the nose that I was honestly tempted to walk out right then and there. Then there’s an extended fight scene in a dark cave between two characters we don’t know and can barely see, but there’s an awful lot of slashing and punching and dialogue thrown back and forth. It’s a good thing that we have absolutely no stakes in this fight sequence, because it’s practically impossible to tell one character from the other or get any sense of who’s winning.
That leads to a sequence that actually introduces the character and explains what our protagonist is all about. The basics are that he’s a Predator who’s the runt of his clan, and to prove himself, he makes a vow to go off and kill an unkillable monster, one of the only creatures even the Yautja are afraid of.
We see him crash land on the creature’s home planet, and that’s when my armchair director kicked in, insisting that they should’ve started the movie here. And I still believe that, since this is where it starts getting kind of interesting, showing one of the Predators being immediately at a disadvantage on a ludicrously hostile planet. It seems that literally every living organism on the planet is trying to kill him in one way or another.
I already knew that the concept was that a Predator was the protagonist of this movie, trying to prove himself to a clan that had rejected him. But I quickly started to wonder whether I was even on board with the premise as much as I’d thought. It felt less like an interesting mix-up of the formula, and more like it was missing everything that makes the franchise interesting. It seemed like if you made a Halloween movie that not only focused on Michael Myers, but had him talking a lot and sharing all of his inner monologue with the audience.1Now that I think about it, isn’t that what Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies did? I haven’t and won’t ever see them, but I seem to remember that they put all of the focus on Michael’s back story, which misses the point entirely.
Anyway, eventually our protagonist runs into Thia, an android created by the Weyland-Yutani corporation. After a run-in with the aforementioned unkillable monster left her torn in half, she’s been stuck in a vulture’s nest. She suggests that she can help him survive the planet if he helps her out of her current predicament. He eventually agrees, and they head out on his quest to the monster’s lair, with Thia strapped to his back, Banjo-Kazooie style.
This feels like it must be at least thirty minutes into the movie, but it’s only here that Predator: Badlands finds its legs, so to speak. Until that point, the only trace of personality I was able to detect in the movie was a brief scene where our protagonist almost eats an exploding caterpillar creature. With the introduction of Thia, it settles into more of a light-hearted buddy action movie.
The moment that I like best in Predator: Badlands is a spoiler, but it made me laugh out of recognition that it was cleverly letting the pieces of plot that it’d seeded earlier start to fall into place.
The non-spoiler (mostly) moment I liked a lot is from the same sequence. During an extended fight sequence in which our protagonist is getting thrown around, he’s flung into the table on which Thia has been re-assembling herself, causing her to get split in half again. She just reacts with an exasperated, “Oh, come on.”
I wish there were more sparks of cleverness like that in the movie, which otherwise maintains a tone of “surprisingly light-hearted” instead of genuinely surprising. There’s an extended sequence later on, set inside the Weiland Yutani outpost on the planet, where the movie allows itself to get genuinely goofy, still structured like an action movie but also making it absolutely clear that it’s not taking any of it too seriously. That’s where we see one clever moment after another of our protagonists taking out a ton of identical androids — almost like GI Joe cartoons, I guess because this is a PG-13-rated installment in a series that otherwise features monsters ripping out people’s spines. I didn’t feel like the rest of the movie ever hit that level of imagination, though.
I kept having the sense that this movie is like one of the Dark Horse comics set in the Predator universe, but if they’d been allowed to let loose and have fun with it. I haven’t read a ton of those comics, but the ones I did seemed like the end of Predator 2 had sparked something in a ton of writers and artists, suggesting a conjoined Alien/Predator universe that could spawn any number of stories going deeper into the lore of that shared universe. But they also seemed grim and dark to a fault, as if this lore was something to be taken very, very seriously.
And that helped build this imaginary version of “The Target Audience for Predator Movies” that I’ve had in my head since then. It’s all guys in their early-to-mid 20s, fans of Alien and Zack Snyder movies, who casually throw out “Yautja” as if of course everyone is aware that’s what the Predators are called, who almost certainly own at least one katana, and will not hesitate to earnestly and inaccurately explain to you the principles of the samurai code of bushido.
When Thia starts explaining about Earth wolves and alphas, my immediate reaction was oh no here it comes. But that’s definitely not what the movie is about. And I suspect that that type of stereotypical dudebro audience member would reject Badlands as being too goofy and too “woke.” Ugh, the Yautja are a proud and honorable culture and you’re mocking it with your silly DEI bullshit!
But it’s a lot more likely that I’ve turned fans of stuff that I’m not into a cartoon that has gotten more and more ridiculously cartoonish over the years. It’s more likely that the core audience has always been more of the Mortal Kombat variety: people who can appreciate ridiculously over-the-top hyper-violence but still not take any of it all that seriously.
In which case, it seems like they’re going to be disappointed by the toned-down violence, and the inclusion of a lovable animal sidekick?
Ultimately, I’ve just got to resign myself to the fact that not everything with lasers, spaceships, and aliens is made for me, dammit. And even though it wasn’t, I still enjoyed it fine, once I was able to get a handle on the tone it was going for.
Prey is still my favorite entry in the franchise, and I still genuinely love that Dan Trachtenberg — who I’m assuming must be a fan of the franchise — is getting to do what he wants with it, delivering three tight, mid-budget action movies that expand on the lore and are all tonally distinct. Badlands ends with a suggestion of a story to follow, and I’m sure I’ll be watching that as soon as it comes out, too, and likely being every bit as frustrated that I’m just not getting it.