"Predator: Badlands": review

Elle Fanning (Thia) and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi (Dek)

God help me, I broke down and watched 2025's "Predator: Badlands," another Alien/Predator crossover sci-fi/action movie directed by Dan Trachtenberg and starring Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi and Elle Fanning. Schuster-Koloamatangi plays a runty Predator while Fanning plays a Weyland-Yutani synth, both of whom have come to the "death planet" of Genna (hard "g," as in golden, and possibly referencing Gehenna) to seek out the enormous and deadly Kalisk, a beast that supposedly cannot be killed because of its self-healing properties.

The story begins with our Predator protagonist, Dek (Schuster-Koloamatangi), sparring with his brother Kwei on their home planet while using energy-edged swords that evoke lightsabers. Dek is a runt among Predators who, as the Spartans reputedly* did, normally cull their weak and malformed. Kwei, still hopeful about Dek's prospects, tells the still-unproven Dek to choose his prey, and Dek chooses the giant Kalisk of Genna, a prey so fierce that even Dek's father Njohrr fears it. Njohrr appears, however, and demands to know why Kwei hasn't already killed Dek as he'd been told to do. Kwei obviously loves his younger brother, so when Njohrr commands him to kill Dek then and there, Kwei fights his father and is killed. Before he dies, Kwei forces Dek aboard a spaceship programmed to navigate to Genna; the ship launches, and as Dek departs, he sees his father behead his brother. The now-bereaved Dek then crash-lands on Genna, where all of the life forms have evolved to kill foreign organisms. (I see I'm not the only critic to make "Australia" jokes about this fact.) There are serpentine vines, cliff-dwelling eels that shoot darts, exploding plants, and (in what feels like a goofy visual pun) extremely sharp blades of grass. As if that weren't enough, there's a hulking, fanged, tentacled meatball that lives in the trees and is capable of eating massive prey.

There is also Thia. Dek meets Thia (Fanning), a cheerfully bubbly, sensitive, and optimistic android who has been ripped in half by a Kalisk while she and her "twin sister" Tessa (also Fanning) had been on a mission to capture the Kalisk for Weyland-Yutani. Thia tells Dek she got separated from Tessa and their team of synths, and that she can be useful to him, like a tool, and Dek agrees to take her along on his hunt (which is still her hunt, too), at first addressing her only as "tool." Thia is annoyingly talkative but a trove of information about Genna's lifeforms, most of which she seems familiar with after having spent time on this world. She and Dek begin to form something like a mutually respectful friendship as Dek carries her around like Chewbacca carrying C-3PO, and they pick up another travel companion, a big-eyed, ape-like creature that takes an immediate liking to Dek and spits on him to show he has become part of her clan. Thia, amused, names this creature Bud despite its being a female, and Bud shows many traits associated with younger brothers who imitate their older brothers: she does everything Dek does until Dek gets tired of her. Bud is, however, a huge key to a biological mystery. Meanwhile, we learn that Tessa and much of her team are still alive and still on the hunt. Tessa is also aware of Dek's presence, and unlike Thia, there is nothing chirpy or optimistic about her: she is utterly focused on completing her mission.

"Predator: Badlands" contains many, many callbacks to the very first "Predator" with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers. We see scenes of Dek engaging in painful moments of self-administered first aid, like that first Predator. Later on, when he's lost most of his equipment, Dek pulls an Arnold and improvises his own weapons from the deadly environment around him. He pulls another Arnold when he holds a torch high and roars a challenge to the Kalisk—who proves, ultimately, not to be the biggest bad guy. He pulls a third Arnold when he tumbles over a high waterfall and survives. The movie also has a callback to "Aliens" when a character pilots a huge mech suit, and in that same scene, there's a hilarious reference to the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie "Hard Target," in which Van Damme's character roars to the villain, "How does it feel to be hunted?", and the villain roars back, "You tell me!" The same lines of dialogue appear in "Badlands." I laughed. I think, though, that the Van Damme reference is a sly tribute to the fact that Van Damme had originally been cast to be the first Predator, but the suit they had built for him proved too stifling for their jungle location, and he dropped out. Huge actor Kevin Peter Hall replaced Van Damme, then died of infection four years after "Predator" came out.

The movie doesn't feel quite like part of the Predator franchise. I understand that it was rated PG-13 in the States, probably because there are no human characters, so the beings that get ripped apart and stomped and eaten by various creatures are all androids and aliens—entities with white circulatory fluid or glowing, green blood. The presence of the cute, big-eyed, simian Bud also threw off the tone a bit; Bud often felt like an animal sidekick in a Disney film ("Badlands" was distributed by 20th Century Studios) or like an Ewok in "Return of the Jedi." While there was definitely humor in the 1987 movie, it wasn't of this sort, and the new film also lacks the horror/thriller aspect that made the first movie so intense.

That said, Elle Fanning does good work in two roles as the good-hearted Thia and the cold, mission-oriented Tessa. Much of the movie's visual humor comes from Thia's attempts to reunite with the lower half of her body, which she finds when she and Dek happen upon the wreckage of her team's previous encounter with the Kalisk. Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi as Dek the Predator brings a brawny physicality to his role: even Predator runts are huge and muscular compared to human-sized synths. Dek always speaks in his own language (expressly made for this movie) and Thia speaks English but is understood to be using some kind of universal translator, so what Dek hears from her is his own language. Weyland-Yutani apparently knows a lot about Predators and their culture.

The movie did evoke two plot-logic points that stumped me, though: (1) when Thia initially reunites with Tessa, she excitedly tells her frosty "sister" about all of the astounding creatures she's encountered on Genna... but she had spent the movie's first reel explaining the biology and habits of these same life forms to Dek, so why was she suddenly acting as though all of this were new? (2) When Thia finally manages to reunite with the lower half of her body, we never see how this was done. The first time Thia tried to fuse her bottom half to her top half, she'd had to lie on a table and let complicated machinery slowly put her back together (a process that got ruined by the marauding return of the Kalisk which, in fighting Dek, smashed Thia's lab table and re-ripped her in two). So how did Thia successfully re-fuse herself in the final reel of the movie? We don't see how this happened.

We can also talk about themes and tropes. The movie leaned extremely heavily on, among other things, the notion of Chekhov's gun. This is the idea that if, in the first act of a play, you see a gun somewhere on stage, then that gun has to be used by the third act. Pretty much every detail about Genna comes into play by the end of the movie as Dek, without his usual Predator tech, wreaks havoc among the Weyland-Yutani synths who are also trying to capture the Kalisk. Dek uses everything from woven razor-grass to serpentine vines to dart-firing eels to exploding plants to mow down the enemy. The other major trope to make an appearance was, as I've mentioned in several previous reviews, the trope of the family you make versus the family you're born into. American movies tend to repeat this trope a lot. I can see how, say, soldiers might appreciate the trope because of the parallels with brotherhood forged in battle; otherwise, the notion that the best family is an adoptive family is a Hollywood idea that's been pushed on us for years. Frankly, I'm not entirely unsympathetic; I just wish the trope didn't reappear so often. There also the same themes we see in the Star Wars franchise: the conflict with the physically imposing father and a sprawling, galactic entity out to dominate all alien species (the Empire in the Star Wars universe; Weyland-Yutani in this crossover universe); the presence of twin siblings and the need for cute, helpful beasts.

"Predator: Badlands" does hint at one interesting idea voiced by Thia, though: that synths can transcend their programmed roles to become more than what their missions call for. This evokes an AI desire for human-like free will. Assuming this kind of crossover will continue in the future, I hope that that idea will be explored more deeply. Thia and Dek make a good pair by the end, and from Dek's point of view, Thia and Bud are part of his new clan. There's a chance for them all to explore Thia's evolution together.

That said, I still feel some hesitation about how Disneyfied this movie is—the humor, the cutesy sidekick, the tone of action-adventure at the expense of horror. Like other critics, I'm also unsure what to think about demystifying and fleshing out Predator culture. It was a bold move to make the Predator the good protagonist for this film, and with that came a humanizing of the character. But was that a good move for the franchise as a whole?

In the final analysis, though, the movie was watchable and might even be rewatchable. I give this flick a cautious recommendation, but I'd advise people who love the Predator franchise to assess this movie less as a part of that franchise and more as a stand-alone film. Judge it on its own merits. I see a lot of people praising director Trachtenberg, who also directed "Prey"—which takes place in 1700s North America and pits natives and colonials against one of the first-ever Predators to visit Earth. (I still haven't seen it.) Maybe Trachtenberg should be the go-to director for both Predator films and Predator/Alien crossover stories the way director David Yates ably took over the Harry Potter series from the fifth movie onward. I haven't seen enough Trachtenberg films to judge, but if "Badlands" is an example of what the man can do, I might have to watch "Prey" next.

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*This is apparently a myth.