Then Trachtenberg love Predator more than most people love their own children, but they don’t quite explain why his “Predator” movies — of which there are now suddenly three — continue to be so much better than all of the franchise’s previous sequels, spinoffs and reboots (not to mention most of the IP-driven garbage that Hollywood churns out on a regular basis). No, Trachtenberg’s “Predator” movies are so unusually satisfying because his love for the franchise’s alien trophy hunters allows him to celebrate how stupid they are.
No disrespect to the many different warrior tribes that may have inspired the Yautja, but there’s something fundamentally backwards about a hyper-advanced alien species that – despite solving intergalactic travel – still only knows how to measure its own worth in murder and masculine aggression. It’s always been that way, on earth as it is in heaven, but Trachtenberg realizes that the predators are always just a little more embarrassing than they are ugly.
The genius of the franchise-reviving ‘Prey’ and last summer’s absolutely fantastic ‘Killer of Killers” is that they both cast Yautja as one foil first and an antagonist second. Now, the super fun and amazingly perky”Predator: Badlands” takes that approach to its logical conclusion by making one of these creatures the hero of a story in which he is deprogrammed from his culture’s “The Most Dangerous Game”-inspired attitude toward other species.
Yes, “Alien vs. Predator” struck a short-lived Yautja-human alliance out of situational necessity, but Trachtenberg’s latest pursuit takes direct aim at the evolutionary futility of being the universe’s biggest shithole. Xenomorphs aren’t smart enough to know better, but these “ugly bastards” have invisibility cloaks and triangulated laser sights! They’ve been around long enough to have T. rex skulls on their mantelpieces! Together, they are now the only actors in film history to have ever shared the screen with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Elle Fanning, and they’ve stood up to both of them!
And yet, for all these accomplishments, Yautja’s religious credo never evolved beyond “Prey to none, friend to none, predator to all.” Congratulations on surviving more than 65 million years on the hellish “Star Wars” concept on a planet you idiots call home, but as someone asks at a pivotal moment midway through “Badlands,” “Who would want to survive on their own?”
True to “Predator” style, it’s a question that Patrick Aison and Brian Duffield’s screenplay answers less with gooey sentiment than with ruthless practicality: It’s a lot easier to survive with a little help. In theory, it should appeal to a member of the Yautja clan, or—as the case may be—a bratty kid determined to prove his worth and be accepted into his father’s clan. His name is Dek, he’s played with stunning expressiveness by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi (the film is only a few minutes old before he offers us a heartbreaking portrait of what fear looks like on a predator’s toothy face), and if the ultra-Darwinian wildlife of his birth planet doesn’t kill him, then his dad will be only too happy to finish the job.
Also played by Schuster-Koloamatangi, Njohrr likes to think of himself as the royal shithead Yautja, and is so disgusted by his youngest son’s stinginess that he instructs the elder Kwei (Mike Homik) to kill Dek in his sleep. But Kwei, in the first display of mercy or kindness Dek has ever seen, refuses to kill his own brother. Instead, he sends Dek to the “death planet” Genna, where the undersized kid will get a chance to prove his worth by killing a creature no member of his species has ever been able to kill: the fearsome Kalisk.
This is how the first “Predator” begins film where the hunter of the same name is by far the most vulnerable character, a novelty that “Badlands” emphasizes by releasing Dek in the middle of a live-action “Scavengers Reign”. Genna – pronounced with a hard “G” and not like George W. Bush’s daughter – more than lives up to her reputation, as absolutely everything on the planet has been engineered to kill anyone unlucky enough to crash land there. The grass is made of razors, the trees have “Deep Rising”-like tentacles for branches, and even the cute Luna Bugs are hideous horrors waiting to dole out death from above. Genna’s bland gray landscape may be far from the wonder of Pandora (though random celestial lava makes up for all sorts of sins), but its flora and fauna are a constant delight, and there’s no doubt in our minds that even a trained survivalist like Dek would die in about 10 minutes without some of the help he’s been conditioned to see as weaklings.
Enter: Thia, a Weyland-Yutani synthetic who has been torn apart by the beast Dek has come to kill. Despite being separated from her legs and stranded on a perch where she’s had nothing to do but study the planet’s indigenous population, the chippy and childlike artificial humanoid instantly becomes the happiest character this franchise has ever seen, and Elle Fanning’s extremely winning performance – an affordable marvel of ingenuity, incredible empathy, and makes her the ultimate empath, and interesting character that this franchise has ever seen almost as quickly. She promises to help guide Dek to Kalisken’s lair if he agrees to help reunite her with her lower half (an offer Dek can only accept by thinking of Thia as “a tool”), and so the two begin their journey across Genna’s wild wastes, the synth strapped to the Predator’s back.
It’s all very Luke and Yoda, but if Luke was a hunter who was just a miser, whose species had evolved in a way that made it impossible for them to smile, and if Yoda was a button-nosed chatterbox whose ancient wisdom belies the naivety of a teenage girl on the brink of her first heartbreak (nor is it to say that it’s not so spoilers, played by Fanning, doesn’t share our new favorite synth’s ability to care about others creatures). With the same bluntness required of Dek to stand up to his father, “Badlands” confronts the endearing dynamic that emerges between these two characters, and it refuses to budge from that charm even when the film threatens to steer closer to streaming fan-sweeter territory. liked.
Crucially, though, Trachtenberg and his screenwriters find ways to be sweet without mocking, just as they find ways to be absolutely brutal without spilling human blood—a solution that allows them to honor the franchise’s brutality under the auspices of a PG-13 rating. I was more than a little nervous when the heroes team up with an adorable CGI creature Thia names “Bud” (imagine an adorable, wide-eyed green ape with iron skin), but “Badlands” deploys the little guy to perfection, deftly positioning Bud as a reminder of Genna’s “kill or be killed” ferocity rather than a simple G-art.
Unlike Thia, who has the benefit of a universal translator, friendliness — or at least a grudgingly mutual concern — is the closest thing Dek and Bud have to a common language, and it’s consistently rewarding to see both of these characters learn to speak it on their own terms. Dek has learned that “to forgive weakness is to show weakness”, and yet “weaknesses” such as sadness, longing and sensitivity become important tools in his quest to kill the Kalisken and escape from Genna in one piece. In fact, these tools are even more essential to this story than familiar Yautja weapons, which Trachtenberg nevertheless finds a number of new and exciting ways to mix into the fray; The “awesomeness” factor here is never cranked quite as high as it was in “Killer of Killers,” but the action is so full of fist-pumping moments that I almost didn’t care that the climax is staged in the most generic place imaginable, or that it threatens to devolve into a better-staged version of the pixel-vs.-pixel movie that has made the last “fightjus” movie feel weightless.
Such crowd-pleasing veers away from the franchise’s core principles might have been disastrous in a lesser version of this film, but even — or especially — the least “Predator”-like moments in this standalone sequel are rooted in Trachtenberg’s love of the property, and all help “Badlands” make a uniquely compelling case that “Predator” deserves to rank higher than any other. the last 40 years. By counting on the series’ fundamental weakness rather than continuing to pretend it’s the series’ greatest strength, Trachtenberg has made the brand richer than ever before. No, this is not your father’s “Predator” and that definitely isn’t it Dek’s dad’s “Predator,” but as a wise synthetic once said, “We can be more than they ask of us.” How rare – and extremely refreshing – to see a major studio film realize that the same can be true of itself.
Grade: B+
20th Century Studios will release “Predator: Badlands” in theaters on Friday, November 7.
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