You can feel from Predator: Badlands' approach that Disney recognizes how bad they dropped the ball on 2022’s Prey, having consigned it directly to Hulu so they wouldn’t have to share its streaming provenance with HBO. No such mistake here — the new sequel is working all the premium exhibition formats (IMAX, RPX, The Big D, Screen X, 4DX) to tie the latest installment of yautja-based sparagmos to the concrete experience of the movie theater.
And for the purposes of this review, we’re opting for the 4DX experience, as it includes 3D as well as the kind of motion-sync madness that will scratch both the theme park and renegade osteopathy itches you might be having. This is a film that at its best steeps and reduces into pure, wild sensation, so the shake in your seats and the puffs of air and friscalating mists fit the proceedings perfectly.
One of the great joys of the original 1987 Predator was seeing a bunch of CIA mercs get their asses handed to them by a creature with actual ethics in warfare, and each successive film in the series has helped add a bit more to the mysteries of these intergalactic hunters. In fact, one of the things that has kept the series from playing itself out is understanding exactly how much lore to serve up at any given moment. (In its way, the Predator series is the inverse of the John Wick universe, where the lore got exponentially more complicated and labyrinthine, and the cumulative weight of it all pulled everything down to earth.)
We know the yautja go on hunts to validate themselves and to advance in their world’s social structure, and Badlands gives us an opening sequence in which the young warrior Dek (Dimitrius Schuster Koloamatangi) gets put through it as a means of demonstrating what their culture is built on. And then we’re on the Death Planet Genna to try and claim the deadliest beast in the universe as a trophy.
A good monster can help smooth over all manner of cinematic oopsies, and Predator: Badlands is well aware that it needs to deliver action, thrills, sci-fi possibilities and a bunch of monsters at all times. And it serves up so many great creatures that I will offer it the highest of compliments; elementary school me would never want to stop drawing each and every one of the many critters populating this film. Personal favorite: the adorable caterpillar whose defense mechanism is to explode — like a butternut woolyworm made of nitroglycerine. Put this beast alongside the assassin worm from Attack of the Clones, the cupcake that eats people’s faces in Five Nights at Freddy’s, the crivits in V, the living jakhodo in K-Pop Demon Hunters, and the attack squids that launch themselves into the air like dolphins in the trailer for the new Avatar film as creatures that convert tiny amounts of screen time into heaps of joy just by existing.
With this and Sentimental Value (coming to Nashville on Nov. 21), Elle Fanning is having quite a year incarnating boundless enthusiasm held in check by inescapable pragmatism, and it’s wild that you can say that about both a Hollywood party girl in the world of European art cinema and a modified-capability Weyland-Yutani artificial person just trying to get her legs back. She’s having a blast here, both as an instrument of identification for the audience and as a warbot handling business in a two-on-one fight because her upper and lower torso are separated from one another.
So yes, there’s Alien and Predator crossover herein, but not in the fashion moviegoers might be accustomed to. More so, it’s so vastly preferable to the two Alien vs. Predator films that you’re left with a sense of splattery joy at how perfectly it all comes together.
My colleague Alonso Duralde was first out the gate recognizing the thematic similarities between Badlands and 2022’s Hundreds of Beavers, and I can’t wait to see someone’s edit of this film with Chris Ryan’s HoB score dubbed into the various and sundry monster, plant, monster plant and robot fights that proliferate as one would hope. The two films would make an inspired double feature — creative and kinetic journeys into prog-rock album covers, playground physics and the ethos of kaiju cinema.
Predator: Badlands is a delight — a crowd-pleasing punch in a monster’s face and a moral lesson that slips in, elegantly, behind sprays of neon blood, robot juice and (in the 4DX version, at least) low-level spinal realignment.*
