PREDATOR: BADLANDS - Film Review

Predator: Badlands doesn’t just continue the franchise it gives it new life. Dan Trachtenberg opens on Yautja Prime, and you can feel the tone of the entire franchise change immediately. It’s not the familiar humid horror of the jungle, not the metallic sprawl of the city. It’s ritual and rot. The planet feels ancient and exhausted, a place where the air hums with old laws. The sequence is wordless, but it tells you everything: this is a society eating its young. And right at the center of it stands Dek, played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, not a seasoned hunter, but the runt of the clan. The one who is unwanted by his father, who, after the death of his brother, is cast out before he ever gets to earn a trophy.

That opening stretch rewires the series. For the first time, the Predator isn’t a symbol of unstoppable power; he’s the outcast. When Dek is exiled to the planet Genna, you can feel the tonal jolt. The light goes wide, the air thickens, the silence stretches. Trachtenberg is announcing a new kind of Predator film, one that isn’t about being hunted, but about figuring out what it means to be a hunter when the hunt no longer matters.

Dek lands in a world that feels alive and hostile in equal measure. Genna is half paradise, half infection, a landscape that constantly shifts between beauty and threat. Trachtenberg and cinematographer Jeff Cutter treat it like a living organism: the camera never stays still, drifting between calm and chaos. The colors are violent. The light burns too long. Every frame tells you the rules here are different, and every moment Dek survives feels earned.

The story picks up when he crosses paths with This (Elle Fanning), a synthetic explorer who shouldn’t still be functioning but somehow is. She’s curious, sharp, and completely unafraid, the perfect counterpoint to Dek’s silence. More importantly, she’s the audience’s anchor. Through her, we get just enough language, just enough explanation, to follow the logic of Yautja honor and instinct. She asks the questions we would, and Dek answers in a mix of growls, fragments, and gestures that somehow feel intimate. Their dialogue is spare but effective, exposition without the smell of exposition.

Without Thia, the film might’ve drowned in its own atmosphere. With her, it finds its rhythm. She humanizes the silence. She gives the movie space to translate itself. Together, they form something the series has never had before: emotional continuity. A connection that doesn’t rely on fear, but on comprehension.

The comparisons to The Mandalorian are fair, the lone warrior, the stripped-down storytelling, the moral quiet between bursts of violence. But Trachtenberg isn’t copying the formula; he’s using it to build something older, weirder, and more physical. This isn’t about bounty hunters or father figures. It’s about a young exile learning what strength actually means when tradition has abandoned him. The film’s rhythm, deliberate, punctuated by quick, brutal combat, feels closer to anthropology than action. You don’t watch Dek fight; you study the way he moves, the way he hesitates before killing, the way every strike feels like a question asked of his own species.

Cutter’s cinematography keeps everything tactile. The close-ups sweat. The landscapes look half-remembered, like a dream you can taste. When violence hits, it’s sudden and grounded. No slow-motion heroics, no showy choreography, just survival rendered in hard cuts and heavy breathing. The score stays low and physical, a pulse that lives in the chest. It’s not trying to tell you what to feel; it’s trying to make you feel like you’re standing too close.

Yes, it’s more PG-13. Yes, it’s less gory. But that restraint turns out to be the film’s best weapon. Trachtenberg isn’t chasing the shock of Predator 2 or the nostalgia of the first film; he’s carving out new terrain. Like Prey, Badlands expands the mythology by narrowing the focus. It reminds you that world-building isn’t just set design, it’s empathy, curiosity, perspective. For the first time, the Yautja aren’t monsters or metaphors; they’re a civilization with fractures, fears, and rules that actually feel lived-in.

By the time the story closes, you realize how much has changed. You’re not watching humans trying to survive the alien anymore, you’re watching the alien trying to survive himself. Predator: Badlands is lean, patient, and unashamedly strange. It’s a science-fiction survival story wrapped in an exile’s coming-of-age tale, and somehow, it works.

At one hour and forty-five minutes, it never drags. Every frame serves the world it’s building. It’s not a reboot or a sequel, it’s a reorientation. A reminder that the Predator franchise didn’t need a bigger gun. It needed a point of view.

Trachtenberg found it. And for the first time in a long while, the hunt feels alive again.