Predator: Badlands (2025)
There’s something audacious about taking your franchise’s iconic monster and asking audiences to care whether it lives or dies. Dan Trachtenberg has already proven himself willing to mess with the Predator formula, but Badlands pushes further than anyone might have anticipated. The gamble, in my opinion, largely succeeds. Though not without its moments of conventional retreat, this is a film confident enough to strip away everything familiar except the mandibles and the wrist blades.
Set on Genna, a planet where even the vegetation seems personally affronted by your existence, the story centres on Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi). He’s a Yautja outcast, deemed too small and weak by his warrior clan. Rather than accept this judgment, Dek sets out to hunt the Kalisk, an apex predator so terrifying that his own species gives it a wide berth. It’s a redemption quest, essentially. The twist? His travelling companion is Thia (Elle Fanning), a malfunctioning Weyland-Yutani synthetic whose programming sits somewhere between cold logic and something approaching actual feeling. Together they navigate terrain that makes the Australian outback look positively welcoming.
The complete absence of human characters is the film’s defining choice. Not a single one. This isn’t a gimmick, though it could easily have been. Instead, it becomes the foundation for exploring what humanity means when you remove humans entirely from the equation. Thia, being synthetic, serves as our emotional anchor. Watching her wrestle with concepts like loyalty and sacrifice, you start to wonder whether consciousness requires biology or just… well, consciousness. Fanning commits fully to the physicality of the role, conveying entire emotional arcs through minor shifts in her bearing. It’s impressive work that will probably go unrecognised come awards season because, you know, genre films.
Schuster-Koloamatangi faces an even stranger challenge: making us invest in a creature whose entire cultural identity revolves around ritualistic murder. He pulls it off. Dek’s journey from entitled youngster to reluctant guardian feels earned rather than imposed. Trachtenberg leans heavily into Western mythology here, turning the alien wasteland into frontier territory where moral complexity lives alongside necessary violence. Think Shane meets The Outlaw Josey Wales, but with considerably more fluorescent blood. The film’s meditation on leadership (real strength protects rather than dominates) feels particularly pointed, though I’ll leave it to others to draw their own contemporary parallels.
The PG-13 (US)/M (AUS) rating initially raised concerns among franchise devotees. Understandable, given the series’ history. But without human bodies to dismember, Badlands sidesteps the issue more cleverly than expected. The action remains brutal. It’s just that the brutality involves alien anatomies rendered in decidedly non-red colours. Jeff Cutter’s cinematography transforms what could have been generic CGI landscapes into something approaching mythic scale, though the digital effects do occasionally remind you you’re watching pixels rather than practical work.
Where things falter is the final act. After spending most of its runtime engaging with genuinely interesting questions about manufactured identity and the performance of strength, the film opts for a resolution that feels… safe. Crowd-pleasing, certainly. But the philosophical ambitions deserve something braver, in my opinion. Something that trusts the audience to sit with complexity rather than reaching for neat closure. We get satisfaction instead of provocation. Not terrible, just somewhat disappointing after everything that came before.
Still, credit where it’s due. Trachtenberg has created something genuinely distinct within a franchise too often content to rehash the same hunting-in-the-jungle formula. Predator: Badlands suggests that the most human stories don’t necessarily require humans at all. Sometimes you just need a damaged android and an outcast alien learning what it means to care about something beyond your own survival. The execution isn’t flawless, but the ambition deserves recognition.