****/****
starring Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, Reuben de Jong
screenplay by Patrick Alson and Brian Duffield
directed by Dan Trachtenberg
by Walter Chaw There are two moments back-to-back in the last 20 minutes of Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator: Badlands that wouldn’t work as well as they do if the rest of the film hadn’t already proven itself so earnest and open-hearted. They’re bellwethers, if you will; canaries in the coal mine. If you’re a basketball fan, you’d call them “heat checks”–the shots a scorer on a heater might take that would be ill-advised at any other point in the game, but because that basket looks like the ocean… The first involves an ally giving a goofy wave when she notices she’s being watched; the second is a celebratory “high-five” between a hand and a foot. Detached from the film, they are perilously close to dad-joke territory. In the context of a movie about families constructed of outcasts, outsiders, and orphans, these gags land with the heft of cathedral bells. They’re the peck on the cheek Leia gives Luke before they swing over the abyss in Star Wars, or Chewbacca scaring the shit out of a little mouse droid on the Death Star. If you like these characters, like them to the point of investing in them, this is the stuff you not only get away with, but which elevates your piece from conventional to sublime. More importantly, it makes this shit fun. As I like to say about corn and cheese in the right proportions: “Son, that sounds like a good plate of nachos.” My kids hate it when I do that. I got a million of ’em.
Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is the runt of the litter. Born small for a Yautja, the Predator species, he has reached the age where he must go on a hunt to prove his worthiness to his clan. His father (Reuben de Jong) has decided he will kill Dek instead, to save his bloodline the humiliation of this diminutive mistake’s inevitable failure, but Dek’s older brother, Kwei (Mike Homik), defends him against their father, and Dek, to honour Kwei’s belief in him, chooses the “unkillable” Kalisk monster of the planet Genna as his trophy. No Yautja has ever successfully taken down a Kalisk; Dek decides he will be the first. That’ll show ’em. As soon as Dek crashes on Genna in his glass-enclosed Harley, he encounters Thia (Elle Fanning), a synth from everybody’s favourite evil corporation, Weyland-Yutani, programmed as a zoologist but bisected by the mighty Kalisk. Since Thia knows where to find it, Dek straps her to his back, and the two set off in a Chewie + C-3PO on Cloud City/Hellboy + Tam O’Clannie in Ireland fashion across the deadly landscape. And it’s delightful. If all this seems like the ultimate “What If” comic, hold onto your shoulder cannon and smart plasma shuriken, true believers: it is. Fortunately, it isn’t necessary to be familiar with the six previous films that take place in this universe (more, if one factors in the Alien saga), or the stacks of comic books, novelizations, video games, and literal tons of collectible figures, just as it’s not a requirement to have read Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian novels (nor L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter’s), to which Predator: Badlands is equally indebted. Suffice it to say, the film is a true sequel to The Chronicles of Riddick; I have no higher praise.
Between this and 2022’s Prey, Trachtenberg has mastered the art of making films within established intellectual properties that don’t rely on an affection for previous instalments or puzzlebox mythmaking to justify their existence. The particular glory of Predator: Badlands is how, within a franchise that has for decades clung to the bellicose Reagan-era “I ain’t got time to bleed” hero sensibility of the original, it finds a new way to sledgehammer assault toxic masculinity. Sure, Dek challenges his dad to a duel to the death, but, ultimately, the film is a sloppy (in the best way) embrace of sentimentality in its preaching of love and the importance of found family. At a certain point in my adult life, I made the decision to defy my traditional Chinese programming and start telling my male friends I love them. It took a few of them by surprise, but they’re all returning the sentiment now whenever we part. It changed my life in a small but, I think, meaningful way. My last words to my buddies will be telling them they matter to me. I used to be too cool to care about that, but I’m corny as fuck in my dotage. At the end of Predator: Badlands, the top half of Elle Fanning, playing a dorky robot Jane Goodall, opens her eyes wide in surprise and says, “You came back for me?”–and I wanted to hug this goopy, warm, broken-family melodrama. It’s true, there’s a giant, beating heart in the middle of what could have been another hollow exploitation of our lamented childhoods. Predator: Badlands says that whatever your upbringing, your life is yours, and that old saw about not being able to choose your family isn’t true. You can not only choose who your family is–you fucking get to.
