(courtesy IMP Awards)
When you’re a pop culture junkie, one of the most satisfying things imaginable is when a threadbare but entertaining franchise embarks, sometimes decades in the making, on super substantial world-building and elaborate exposition, enlarging and enriching its storytelling in the process.
It can take a franchise that tickled your fancy but really, if we’re honest, didn’t do much more than that, and make it something truly unmissable and which lingers with you long after its earlier iterations would have vanished after the frothy morning haze.
Exhibit A in this regard is the Predator franchise which kicked off in 1987 with an excellent thriller-type film directed by John McTiernan and while it was an immersively invigorating watch that kept you absolutely glued to the edge of your cinema seat, it came with thrills-and-spills and not much else.
Which is fine as far as it goes – not every film has to be a toweringly substantial entry in the cinematic canon.
But what is hugely impressive about the Predator franchise is how over the last almost-forty decades, and arguably most noticeably in the last few days, is has brilliantly well grown and developed the stories about extraterrestrial bounty hunters, who exude a Mad Max meets Klingons on steroid vibe, to the point where their world-building allows a film like Predator: Badlands to exist and thrive.
Following from 2022’s Prey, which was one of the best movies of that year with its focus on richly affecting characterisation, nuanced storytelling and a dazzlingly impressive execution on an imaginative premise, Predator: Badlands is an absolute joy to watch because it takes the franchise to some very interesting places indeed.
Helmed was Prey by Dan Trachtenberg, Predator: Badlands takes a story by the director and Patrick Aison, who also penned the screenplay, and runs it with it, romping from the Yautja (the official name of the predators) homeworld to the “death planet” of Genna where a biome dedicated solely it seems to predatory consumption – even the grass is serrated and able to kill on touch – almost does the predator of Badlands in he seeks to capture a beast that no other Yautja has ever taken home as a trophy.
Driven by a need for revenge, the usual single-minded Yautja ethos that they are always predator and never prey, and some pretty nasty family trauma that makes fights over Christmas lunch look garden variety tame, the protagonist of Predator: Badlands, known as Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is out to prove that he and he alone can secure the head of the fearsomely predatory Kalisk which possesses an ability to near-instantly and wholly regenerate making it almost unkillable.
Take note of the word “almost” because it is key to what happens later in the film, but suffice to say that Dek, schooled in the art of merciless hunting by his much-loved brother Kwei (Mike Homik), only cares about securing his prize, making a name for himself and being officially marked as a member of his clan by his uncompromisingly near-sociopathic father Njohrr (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) who establishes that Yautja society, for all its technological wizardry, is still brutally tribal at heart.
Dek’s unwillingness to see himself as anything other than a lone wolf proving himself is challenged when he comes across a damaged Weyland-Yutani synthetic known as Thia (Elle Fanning) who not only imparts some life-saving advice in a field of plants dedicated to paralysing prey for higher-up flying predators but who dares to suggest that Dek might benefit from having a hunting partner.
This is anathema to the young, out-to-prove-himself Yautja who cannot conceive of a world where he would need any help which, considering how many threats he has fended off to that point is almost laughable in its blusteringly aggressive naivety.
While Dek initially forcefully rebuffs Thia’s chirpy chatter and cooperative entreaty, circumstances mean that he has to reluctantly accept her help, a development which thrills the gushingly avuncular Thia who peppers her new partner with all kinds of bubbly questions, not even reading the room and understanding that Dek, recoiling from grief that will not even admit to, isn’t happy with having her along for the ride.
It’s at this point that Predator: Badlands turns into something quite unique for the franchise.
In the space of a few key scenes, spread over the film, Dek goes from a lone wolf insulated from anyone and everyone and caring only for his mission, the benefits of which are dubious at best if the events preceding his departure from the Yautja homeworld are any guide, to someone who actually cares about his synthetic companion and another being they pick up along the way and who comes to see them as the true members of his clan.
A Yautja embracing the concept of “found family”? Is that even a thing?
It very much is in Predator: Badlands which, for the lack of a better term, humanises Dek and in so doing, expands the idea of what a Yautja is and can be and that the single-note killing machine of the 1987 film is in fact capable of becoming richer and more meaningful than anyone might have imagined.
The crossover over with the Alien universe is nothing new but Predator: Badlands makes the most of it, delivering us a nuanced Big Bad who is closer to Thia that she would like and a sense that the Weyland-Yutani really are the vile epitome of callous, bottom line-worshipping corporate culture.
Interesting though this is, the real game in town is what happens to Dek in his momentous journey from a typical Yautja who cares only for the hunt and the glory and benefits that brings to a nuanced figure who acts on his predatory instinct but with a far greater, more layered sensibility at work and who transforms in the end into someone who can well and truly anchor any successive films which, if the barely-into-the-credits scene is any guide, are well and truly coming our way sooner rather than later.