Set on one of the most dangerous planets in movie history, “Predator: Badlands” is an exceptional sci-fi action thriller with memorable characters, beautiful and terrifying animals (and plants), a structurally airtight script, and lead performances that deserve to be included in discussions of the year’s best (but likely won’t, because much of their brilliance is nonverbal). It’s a memorable entry in the Predator franchise, with enough familiar situations and high-tech hunting gear to satisfy fans of the series, but a story that stands alone. Most impressively, it’s a sincere consideration of what it means to be human, even though there are zero humans in it.
None of the above will be a surprise to anyone who’s been following the recent development of this franchise. This film and its two predecessors, the all-Native American sci-fi Western “Prey” and the animated anthology “Predator: Killer of Killers,” were directed by Dan Trachtenberg. They have the obsessive consistency of George A. Romero’s zombie movies and Takeshi Kitano’s yakuza thrillers, which also mined inexhaustible depths of inspirational gold from a patch of ground that others might have assumed was shallow. Like those films, Trachtenberg’s Predator films make sure to include situations and images that fans of the franchise expect, but are so structurally, tonally, and visually distinctive that it’s impossible to say which is the best. Different but equal is more like it.
This one is the first to have a Predator as its main character. The story begins on the Predators’ home world. Their official species name is Yaujta. They’re a violently aggressive culture in the vein of the Klingons, worshiping strength and loathing every manifestation of vulnerability. The main character is Dek, a young predator who wants to be officially recognized as a warrior but has been excluded from consideration because of his youth and small stature (the others call him “a runt”). After Dek narrowly escapes being killed by his own father, the chief of his tribe, he flees to Genna, also known as The Death Planet, hoping to kill a supposedly invincible predator that has slain all previous challengers and bring its head and spine to daddy, who will belatedly recognize his specialness.
The first section of “Predator: Badlands” is a pure survival story, about a newcomer in a treacherous wilderness who must learn about the terrain, flora, and fauna to survive and get closer to his goal. Think of a story like Robinson Crusoe, Jeremiah Johnson, or “Cast Away,” but in a science fiction setting. The opening section of the movie is probably a little too familiar for its own good—”tribal outcast plots triumphant return” is as narrative itself—but it becomes ecstatically fresh and exciting once Dek lands on Genna and realizes that the entire planet wants to kill him.
He finds an unexpected ally in Thia (Elle Fanning), an android who was part of an all-android landing party. She, like Dek, came to Genna for the super-predator known as the Kalisk, a spiny, bristling, dagger-toothed thing that’s probably ten meters tall. The thing apparently killed the landing party and left her for dead after ripping her in half. Now she walks on her arms in swaying movements that evoke a gymnast on parallel bars. Thia tells Dek that there was another android of her make and model in their group named Tessa, also played by Fanning. She wants to return to the scene of the massacre to find her—and reattach herself to her missing legs, if they’re around. She offers to help Dek kill the Kalisk if he’ll make her his partner.
What ensues is a strange and wonderful twist on the buddy movie. Fanning initially plays Thia as a tragic but charming kook, so relentlessly inquisitive and friendly that being around her is torture for Drek, a revenge-driven sourpuss who hates small talk and takes pride in working alone. At first, Dek reluctantly carries Thia’s upper half around like a baby in a carrier. Then he turns her around and wears her like a backpack after tiring of her incessant yammering, which includes getting-to-know-you questions like, “What does the chewing—your outside fangs or your inside teeth?” But Dek won’t abandon Thia because she knows the planet far better than he does, and can warn him of impending dangers he wouldn’t otherwise recognize. “The only way to survive Genna is to learn it,” she tells him.
Both Dek and the movie take Thia’s advice to heart, resulting in a rare portrait of an alien world that feels as real as documentary footage of Earth’s creatures. Trachtenberg has claimed the epic naturalist Terrence Malick as one of his many directorial influences, along with influential Western directors like Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone, both of whom are cleverly but subtly referenced in the filmmaking. The Malick nod might sound absurdly lofty unless you’ve seen either of Trachtenberg’s previous Predator films, which have a respectful, attentive, often awed appreciation of how different species interact in an ecosystem that is as important as the characters that move through it.
Many planetary exploration movies only seem interested in big, scary carnivores. This one has lots of them. But it’s equally interested in smaller creatures, including herbivores, insects, and plants. And it delves even deeper into world-building by showing that all of Genna’s creatures have some awareness of other beings’ characteristics and know how to evade, thwart, or simply use them. This is demonstrated in an early scene where a pterodactyl-like flying creature drops stones on a plant covered in quivering sacs, causing them to explode and creating a sort of organic napalm to kill the prey it’s hunting.
Tools are an important part of this story, as is usually the case in Predator movies. Dek has his own imported gear, of course, and uses it with flair. But like many a human adversary facing off against Predators in other films, there are times when he has to use whatever happens to be around him, to devise something new to kill a foe before it can kill him first. There are abstracted, multivalent notions of “family” floating around in here as well. These thankfully serve more as thought prompts than inspirational slogans, from Dek and Thia’s invocation of fathers, brothers, sisters and mothers (as in the “Alien” movies, the previous crew that landed on Genna took orders from a master computer called MUTHER, which represents company authority), with all the reflexive associations and deceptive potential that those words entail; to the big-eyed, dog-faced, monkey-like creature called Bud who joins the duo, and mirrors Dek’s gestures and rituals as a child mirrors those of a parent.
To its great credit, “Predator: Badlands” is never content to invoke a concept like “tool,” “family,” or “weakness” and only let it drive a part of the plot or add detail to characters (though it does both). Instead, in conversations between Thia and Dek as well as in intricately mapped-out action sequences, it shows different ways one can interpret such concepts, self-servingly or generously. Dek and Thia’s interactions expand both of their minds, opening them to new meanings and possible choices. Thia never thought of Tessa as a sister until Dek referred to his own brother. Dek never questioned the wisdom of his warrior code until Thia caught him equating feelings like empathy with weakness. She says she was programmed to feel emotion because it improves a synthetic person’s chances of survival; instilling trust makes other beings more willing to give up useful secrets. Dek seems surprised by how sensible she sounds. Ditto when Thia tells Dek, “I could survive on my own. But why would I want to survive on my own?”
There’s much more to recommend this movie. But it’s probably best to avoid seeking out additional information because one of the great pleasures of watching it is not quite knowing where it’s taking you, being surprised where it goes, then retrospectively appreciating how every turn in the story was telegraphed from the start, in images as well as in dialogue. Among its other satisfactions, it’s an even more coded riff on the Western than “Prey” (specifically Eastwood’s “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” about an embittered, vengeful warrior who insists he works alone but keeps accumulating allies as he goes along).
It’s a bizarrely inspirational adventure about different types of beings overcoming the limiting parts of their own programming (literal or figurative) and/or proving there is more to them than others assumed. And the takeaway, I think, is applicable to beings all across the universe: sometimes the things you want most are not worth wanting, and until you figure that out, you’ll never be free.
