I’ve always enjoyed the Predator movies, starting with the incisive and thrilling first film released in 1987. Nobody could have appreciated more than me the fresh life writer-director Dan Trachtenberg injected into the franchise with Prey, released on Hulu back in 2022. Trachtenberg has continued to push the franchise’s narrative boundaries with the boldly designed animated anthology Predator: Killer of Killers, another straight-to-Hulu release from earlier this year.
Now his Predator: Badlands is actually pulling crowds into theaters. It’s an amazing feat, coming up with a hit film in these box-office doldrums that are once again inspiring think pieces about the death of the movies as a popular entertainment form.
Though Predator: Badlands is earning some opprobrium among die-hard fans who hate the way Trachtenberg keeps striking out into increasingly remote territory plot-wise. The concern is he’ll save the franchise only by destroying everything that defined the Predator films in the first place.
And it’s true that this time he seems to have gone right to the outermost edge of what’s tolerable in Predator narratives. With Badlands, he does the unthinkable and actually brings us inside the society of the franchise’s alien race, the Yautja, that until now we’ve always loved for its terrifying otherness: that towering height, those tentacles on the head pulled back Rasta-fashion, those yellow eyes and four-corner mandibles, the iridescent green blood and the futuristic tech cloaking them with an eerie, transparent shimmer as they move through jungle canopy!
Such a perfect killer to emerge suddenly from the treetops to slaughter you before you know what’s happening! How dismaying to make its social organization manifest and even its psychology familiar to us, thus breeding a contempt we could never feel for a true apex predator that remains fundamentally unknowable.
But as with many beloved genre characters, it’s amazing how far you can…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
