Whether it's greenlighting another Tron movie, throwing Rachel Zegler and Nia DaCosta under the bus after the tremendous commercial failure of movies that barely anybody liked or caving into the demands of a fascist president, The Walt Disney Corporation has made plenty of awful decisions in recent years. One thing the cowardly mouse house has done correctly is entrust Dan Trachtenberg to be the creative czar of the Predator franchise. Trachtenberg has bucked the modern Disney playbook entirely by daring to do more than just worship at the altar of the classic original like Fede Alvarez did with Alien: Romulus last year. Instead, Trachtenberg has dared to experiment with different subgenres, settings (both location and time period) and even mediums to tell Predator stories in and it's resulted in an image rehabilitation for the brand that felt like a complete pipe dream after Shane Black's The Predator ate shit back in September 2018. Trachtenberg's third Predator film (and first theatrical release) Badlands pushes the boundaries even further by doing something that the series has never done before: Have the protagonist be a Predator (aka Yautja).
The uniqueness of Badlands isn't limited to having the main character be a member of the lethal alien race that's served as the franchise's antagonist in every prior film. Trachtenberg uses the character of Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Kolomatangi)-a Yautja whose been labeled as an outcast and liability to his clan by his own father (Reuben De Jong)- as the driver for a story of someone deifying the odds to prove their worth in a world that has labeled them as a disgraceful failure that's unworthy of existing. The prideful underdog setup then quickly blossoms into unexpected found family story when Dek reluctantly teams up with a wounded Weyland-Yutani synthetic (Elle Fanning, who is disarmingly charming and chipper in a role that's crucial to selling this narrative) and a fellow lonely alien creature named Bud to complete his mission of slaying the most lethal predator on the "death planet" of Genna known as the Kalisk-a massive dragon-esque creature that even Dek's alpha father fears. Having such a simple, universal story provides the kind of relatable emotional stakes that we've never seen in a Predator movie before. There have been enough riffs on the badass "humans try to outwit an elite alien hunter that they can't always see" over the years that it's cool to a version of the story where the Yautja has the kind of proper character arc and range of emotions that are typically reserved for the Homo sapiens. The fact that this massive reimagining of an iconic villain didn't come at the expense of softening the action makes it even better as the producers weren't lying when they said that Badlands wouldn't sanitized be due to the PG-13 rating. Giving the Predator a heart all and is great but it wouldn't be a Predator movie if there weren't spines getting ripped out and limbs flying off, so shoutout to Trachtenberg for understanding that a Yautja finding their heart doesn't mean that they're going to stop using their collection of sick ass alien weapons to murder their enemies in a bunch of creative ways.
I will say that despite its uniqueness, I'll stop short of saying that Badlands is the best Predator sequel. It slips into the dreaded "big shit repeatedly slamming into each other" phenomenon at times-which brings an unwelcome choppiness to some of the bigger action sequences and the wall-to-wall VFX prevents the natural beauty of its on-location shooting in New Zealand from hitting the same way it did in the less VFX-heavy Prey. Perhaps I'll warm up to these elements upon rewatch, but for now they were enough to allow Badlands to fall just short of greatness.
Grade: B
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