Most everyone knows what to expect with a Predator movie. A group of humans get picked off, one by one, by ruthless extraterrestrials known as the Yautja, except for a lucky few who survive based on their own resourcefulness. It’s a monster movie franchise dressed up in sci-fi lore, a testosterone-addled excuse for men to bang their action figures together and imagine that they, too, could survive a Predator encounter just as well as Arnold Schwarzenegger did. But the franchise struggled to survive beyond the brawny blockbuster era of the late ‘80s and ‘90s, and by the mid-aughts, it had exhausted the B-movie potential by pitting Predators against xenomorphs. After two failed attempts to reboot the franchise, where could the Predator movies go next? In 2022, Dan Trachtenberg provided one answer with Prey, a back-to-basics survival thriller that took the Yautja to 18th century America, and pitted a cunning young Comanche woman against the alien. It felt refreshing, energizing, and novel. Trachtenberg has done it once again, with Predator: Badlands. Predator: Badlands asks the impossible question: what if the Predator was the protagonist? After 38 years and nine movies of the Yautja being the most merciless sonuvabitch ever, it seems absurd to even consider it. But after Trachtenberg miraculously rebooted the franchise with Prey, and strengthened his vision of the franchise with his animated spinoff, he’s pulled off his greatest magic trick yet with Badlands, a movie that not only manages to make you root for the Yautja, but also delivers the most accessible Predator movie yet. |
