Review: Predator: Badlands (2025)

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It is a testament to the power of IP in Hollywood that a second-tier legacy sci-fi franchise can qualify for a big new action flick with half the dialogue in an alien language with subtitles and not a single human character. That’s right, Predator: Badlands only features aliens and androids, a bold choice that matches the extravagantly imagined flora and fauna of the deadly planet Genna, the main setting for the movie. The storyline may be predictable, but the special effects are competent, and the action abundant and feral. My nine-year-old boys ate it up and asked for another helping.

“Wait, Anton, you showed nine-year-olds a Predator movie?” I can imagine more than a few parents questioning my choice, and more than a few kids cheering. The other notable feature of this Predator soft reboot is that it is a PG-13 film. Gone are the ways of the 80s R-rated action movie. There are no boobs and the only blood is glowing alien goo, which I guess allows you to show it abundantly.

Dan Trachtenberg directed Predator: Badlands. This is his second entry in the franchise, after 2022’s Prey (unseen by me), which set a predator against a Comanche tribe on the Great Plains in 1719. Predator: Badlands goes for a similarly novel set-up, following a young predator alien—or “Yautja,” as the species are called in the movie—on his quest to prove himself to his merciless tribe by hunting down an alpha creature on the strange planet Genna. The young predator’s name is Dek. The shift in narrative focus from human prey to predator Dek and his Yautja culture is itself worthwhile. The different approach also seems meant to draw in new audiences and not just the Gen-Xers who know the scene in the original where the Arnold Schwarzenegger–Carl Weathers handshake meme comes from.

This time, the Predator rarely dons the famous mask, instead presenting us with his bizarre open-crab face for most of the movie. It’s another strange choice that actually works, and the man behind the suit, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, gives some personality to the creature. (I particularly enjoyed the scene when he cracks his joints before bedtime.) The predator culture we see on Yautja Prime at the start of the movie is intriguing, recalling the insane tribes of Mad Max: Fury Road (2014).

Elle Fanning—not to be outdone by Michael Fassbender in Ridley Scott’s Alien follow-ups, Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017)—gives us two good performances: first, as Thia, a severely damaged synthetic whom the Predator helps, and, second, Thia’s “sister” Tessa. If Thia is chipper and chatty, Tessa is cold and mission-focused. Their competing loyalties—Thia to her new friend, Dek, and Tessa to her orders from the corporation—provide additional conflict to Dek’s survival and hunting storyline. As Thia, Fanning delivers the kind of performance that is colourful and talkative enough to fill in the gaps of having no real human characters on screen.

The movie is most successful when it leans into its Survivorman side. Like Robinson Crusoe on his island, the Predator crash lands on Genna, and he has to learn to survive with scant supplies on a planet that is like something out of a boy’s nightmare. Genna contains razor grass and plants that shoot poison darts and countless killer animals. Thia, who arrived before the Predator, becomes, in a way, his Girl Friday. As I write this review, it dawns on me: might the movie even be considered a loose adaptation of Daniel Defoe’s classic survival novel?

For all of Trachtenberg’s bold choices, however, you get the sense that he wasn’t allowed to play this out as a pure survival movie. As the film continues it morphs, in the last act, into a more standard Alien-universe movie, with a futuristic industrial factory setting and a fight involving a mech. (For what it’s worth, I have no idea about the continuity of this movie with the other Predator and Alien movies, but I do know that the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is mentioned.) You could argue that the androids serving their corporate masters are the film’s equivalent of the cannibals who come to Crusoe’s island, but I would have to develop that interpretation after a second viewing.

For now, what I can say is that Predator: Badlands is far superior to the absurd farce it appeared to be in its trailers. The film also marks another entry in Hollywood’s pivot away from the anxious, self-reflective legacy sequels and diegetic reboots of 2015–2023 (which I remarked on in my review of last year’s Jurassic World: Rebirth). Hollywood, let’s keep this approach to franchises coming.

7 out of 10

Predator: Badlands (2025, USA)

Directed by Dan Trachtenberg; screenplay by Patrick Aison; starring Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi.

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