Predator Badlands Review

Predator Badlands

It was probably an inevitable evolution of the Predator franchise that it would morph into a quixotic buddy adventure quest, taking it a surprisingly far distance from its origins as an action horror from the eighties where macho men find themselves helpless (at first) before an unstoppable alien. This formula changed very little for most of the Predator films, until Badlands arrived: here now we have the Predator as a macho underdog, and the sympathetic hero of our tale, paired with a medley of allies that are not out of sorts for a fantasy adventure in other circumstances. 

I'll preface my review with a warning: I saw it in a ScreenX theater, which is a "270 degree wrap-around panoramic view of the movie with extra footage shot to fill in the left and right sides of the screen." The reality was a square theater in which a sometimes cool but more often skewed image was projected on the left and right walls, leading to a constantly annoying, distracting and occasionally disorienting mess. Despite what I felt like was a borderline unwatchable experience (without prompting both my wife and my 13 year old son also criticized the experience so it wasn't just me) the movie was a genuinely entertaining experience, a constant thrill ride of one action sequence after another wrapped in a suitably basic tale, as is befitting of a Predator movie. Indeed, if you try to get too fancy with a Predator film's plot you end up with trainwrecks like the 2018 "The Predator" film or the AvP films. This one kept it nice and simple.

Dek is the protagonist of our adventure, a yautja (predator species) runt of the litter who has been nurtured by his older brother against the wishes of his father, who in fact expected his older brother to cull him from the clan entirely. When his father finds out Dek is still alive, he orders Dek's brother to kill him, but he refuses, and dies defending Dek, who gets a chance to escape. Dek, still being a Predator in logic, decides to seek out the greatest beast known, one which he knows even his father could not defeat: the legendary Kalisk, located on an insanely dangerous planet that reminded me a bit of the Harry Harrison Deathworld novels.

On the planet, Dek discovers the wrecked torso of a Weyland-Yutani synthetic named Thia. Thia is badly damaged and missing legs. She is also part of a pair of synths woking for The Company, the empathetic one who is built to understand animal behaviors. She convinces Dek to rescue her from the nest of an aerial predator that has dumped her and take her along, admitting The Company sent an entire team on synths to the planet specifically to find and capture the very same creature Dek is hunting, the Kalisk.

Thia and Dek have multiple encounters with various deadly predators on the planet, which has a steroid-driven ecosystem designed to eat pretty much everything it can. Along the way they pick up a curious little mongrel of a creature that proves surprisingly loyal and helpful, much to Dek's dismay, who is so deeply engrained with yautja tradition that the idea of relying on others is anathema to his mindset. He has to label Thia a "tool" for him to accept her help! This runs contrary to lessons learned from his dead brother, of course, and plays into Dek's transformation over time; being a protector is a thing that exists in yautja culture, but its hidden away....kindness or protective behavior in their society is frowned upon like alternative lifestyles were in the 1950s, one might say.

Eventually this conflict escalates, as Dek discovers Thia's synth companion is not as nice as her, and the Company's army of synths are just as dangerous as the Kalisk, which it turns out has immense value for biomedicine. This conflict culminates in the kind of showdown we are used to in a Predator film, but instead of it being Dutch or Harrigan or Naru coming up with a brilliant scheme to defeat an overwhelmingly dangerous Predator, it is instead Dek, a predator runt, overcoming a Weyland-Yutani army. Great stuff!

This movie reinvents the Predator films as not merely being an action-horror-scifi mashup with a human protagonist and a predator villain, but into a sort of quest/adventure film about an unlikely mishmash of survivors who must learn to cooperate to get things done. It also effectively blends the universe of Alien and Predator in the most definitive way possible, asserting that the Predators are part of this bigger universe which can function just fine without always having an alien xenomorph show up to wreck the party. It ends on a lovely cliffhanger, too. I really hope it does well enough for a sequel. Solid A, and definitely in the top three of my favorite Predator films behind the original film and Predator 2.