Predator: Badlands

The Hunter and the Backpack

When Dan Trachtenberg announced that his next *Predator* movie would put the alien hunter at the center, I assumed we were looking at a franchise gimmick—the kind of idea you reach for once you’ve burned through every possible human action lead. What surprised me about *Predator: Badlands* is that it doesn't stop at making the monster the hero. It turns him into the deadpan half of a deeply weird sci-fi two-hander.

And yes, his partner really is half of Elle Fanning.



Literally. Fanning plays Thia, a Weyland-Yutani synthetic missing her lower half. Dek, the Yautja outcast played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, picks her up and spends much of the movie carrying her around like a motorized, opinionated backpack. It is an absurd swing, and somehow a committed one. After stripping the series down to the bone with *Prey*, Trachtenberg goes in the opposite direction here, filling in Yautja mythology, showing their vicious homeworld where weakness is practically a capital offense, and sending Dek into exile on the deadly planet Genna to hunt a legendary beast called the Kalisk. On paper, a movie about a CGI Predator and a bisected android hiking across an artificial planet ought to feel like a long cutscene. In execution, there’s real blood in it.



Fanning is what keeps the whole contraption upright. Thia is a synthetic supposedly designed with empathy so she can better extract information, and Fanning uses that premise to puncture the movie’s macho heaviness. In the quieter survival scenes, her eyes keep darting—not in a generic exposition way, but as if she’s actively studying Dek, trying to figure out why this hulking apex predator is so desperate for approval from a clan that despises him. She has always been good at characters who feel just a half-step misaligned with the world around them—her oddball royalty in *The Great* comes to mind—and she calibrates Thia’s artificiality just right. The humanity creeps in gradually, which makes it land.

There’s a moment in the middle that keeps rattling around in my head. Dek, already frayed by Genna’s hostile, blade-like plant life, snaps and reduces Thia to a tool. He clings to the Yautja creed that solitude is power and empathy gets you killed. Thia, perched on his back, answers him softly: "I can survive on my own," she says. "But who would want to survive on their own?" It lands with a surprising sting. BJ Colangelo at *Fangoria* got at the film’s odd little heart when she wrote that it uses this setup "to tell a far more meaningful story about the literal life-saving importance of learning how to work with people who come from different backgrounds."



If that earnest streak is going to bug you, it’ll probably happen the moment you realize this *Predator* movie wants emotional development from its iconic monster. Dek often plays less like an unstoppable killer than a humiliated teenager lashing out at a rotten warrior culture. Schuster-Koloamatangi, buried under effects work, still gets a lot across through posture and movement. When a hunt goes wrong and his shoulders cave inward, he stops looking menacing and starts looking young—like someone who wants to go home and knows home has already rejected him.

Trachtenberg still shoots action with clear, sturdy geography, even if Genna’s all-digital landscapes never quite have the tactile crunch of *Prey*’s forests. The movie keeps you moving through force of invention anyway: odd creature designs, frantic fights with rival Weyland-Yutani synthetics, and a weird sidekick named Bud who shouldn’t work any better than the backpack idea does. I never thought I needed a *Predator* installment that doubled as a small essay on alpha-male rot. I’m glad this one exists.