Dan Trachtenberg has always read the pulpy mythos of the Predator-verse through a distinctly anthropological lens. The premise this time is as primal as any in the franchise, but Trachtenberg uses it to dig for commentaries on the violence of masculine expectation. By folding the franchise’s blood-slick mythology of the hunt and hierarchy, inward, the Yautja-revivalist — behind Prey (2022) and this year’s animated anthology Predator: Killer of Killers — has done something few modern blockbuster directors can do, by turning one of cinema’s most brutish creatures into a misunderstood softie.
A young Yautja, Dek (played with surprising nuance by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), is exiled from his clan for being “too small” and “too weak.” His father — also played by Schuster-Koloamatangi — would rather see him culled for being the runt of the litter. When his elder brother Kwei, sacrifices himself to save his life, Dek is condemned to the hellscape of Genna to reclaim honour through ritualised slaughter of the strongest. His mission: slay the Kalisk, a creature so vicious that even the apex hunters of the galaxy refuse to face it.
Predator: Badlands (English)
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Cast: Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi
Runtime: 107 minutes
Storyline: Cast out from its clan, a Yautja and an unlikely ally, embark on a treacherous journey in search of the ultimate adversary
Genna feels like an ecosystem in revolt. Everything — flora, fauna, and otherwise — seems to be plotting its own creative form of homicide. Trachtenberg captures the planet’s lush chaos with a biologist’s curiosity, finding wonder in grotesquerie that glistens with appetite. Genna dismantles Dek’s arrogance one cut at a time until instinct replaces ritual, and the hunter becomes just another organism trying not to die. Here on, the film’s first act resembles a fevered nature documentary, and Trachtenberg directs it like a gory, existential space-western that’s reminiscent of HBO’s Scavengers Reign in its morphing visceral aesthetics, and recalls the survival-of-the-fittest style encounters of Monster Hunter.
A still from ‘Predator: Badlands’
| Photo Credit:
20th Century Studios
Dek’s exile brings him to Thia, a bisected synthetic marooned from some forgotten Weyland-Yutani mission (yup, that Weyland-Yutani). Elle Fanning plays her with disarming brightness. Still smiling after being torn in half, Thia talks like a precocious child and thinks like a philosopher. Though half a body she still feels more human than anyone else in the film. The interspecies screwball comedy between Dek and Thia carries the rhythm of discovery, as the machine teaches the monster to feel.
Badlands has an elemental visual clarity. The film is less painterly than Prey or the animated delirium of Killer of Killers, but it compensates with density and texture. Cinematographer Jeff Cutter treats light as something tactile. Shadows feel almost wet and sticky, and every frame feels touched by something living. The saturations shift with mood rather than geography as Dek’s perception widens. The practical effects have considerable weight, and the digital textures never smother the world’s physicality.
Sarah Schachner and Benjamin Wallfisch’s score thrums like a war chant from another dimension, fusing The Hu-style throat-sung ferocity of (something-like?) distorted Mongolian death metal, filtered through droning Travis Scott auto-tune electronica that make the film’s violence feel epic and earned. And the snarling blend of guttural clicks that makes up the Yautja tongue is fascinating on its own, but Trachtenberg’s smartest move was using Thia’s synthetic cognition as a meta universal translator.
The choreography balances pulp and poetry with near-perfect precision. Trachtenberg has a gift for absurdity that never feels indulgent, and the propulsive action is laced with comic ingenuity (one brilliant set piece involves Thia’s detached legs kung-fu fighting an ambush of synths in tandem with her torso). Even the studio-mandated inclusion of a silly token sidekick — the big-eyed, gremlin-like “Bud” — avoids any saccharine Disneyfication, and instead serves as a living echo of Dek’s emotional evolution (among other Chekhovian reveals).
A still from ‘Predator: Badlands’
| Photo Credit:
20th Century Studios
The film’s hyperviolence also pauses to make room for observation. The unlikely companionship develops through small exchanges of trust. There’s also sly humour in Thia’s attempts to “train” Dek in empathy, and a melancholy in the way she studies his vulnerability.
Thia’s remark — “I could survive on my own, but why would I want to?” — becomes the film’s thesis. What Trachtenberg understands (and what most of his predecessors didn’t) is that while the Yautja worship strength, their greatest weakness is their inability to see that cooperation is its truest form. The franchise has rarely allowed space for tenderness, but Badlands does. It’s desperately trying to unlearn the idea of learned empathy as some sort of evolutionary liability.
There’s a kind of moral archaeology at work here. The original Predator revelled in the Reagan-era machismo of muscles, guns, and one-liners as proof of worth; and this film dismantles that code from within. Trachtenberg recasts the Yautja’s initiation rites as a primer in emotional literacy, and Dek’s exile strips away codified masculinity. There’s something almost queer in Dek’s coming-of-age. He has evolved in ways his species never intended, and so has the franchise.
But Trachtenberg doesn’t make the gnarly, gorgeous carnage of the Predator feel any less lethal. Cinema’s most enthusiastic murder tourist still rips, bleeds, and flexes with the swagger of a classic Yautja bloodfest, but Badlands turns the galaxy’s most macho pastime into a strangely moving study of empathy in armour.
Predator: Badlands is currently running in theatres
Published – November 07, 2025 02:57 pm IST
