Flasz On Film

When the Dan Trachtenberg-directed Prey was released to widespread applause from both critics and fans of the Predator series, it was generally understood that the franchise might have found itself a worthy champion who’d open up its stale formula and turn it into a money-making machine. Now, I think we can say that only one of these two assumptions came true. The newly-released Predator: Badlands was just about reported to have made a hefty return during its opening weekend. However, I’m not so sure I like the way the franchise has opened up and in fact I’m about to question the fundamental assumption that what Trachtenberg’s Predator movies are serving should count as fresh in the first place.

In the span of a few short years we’ve gone from seeing the Predator playbook widen its horizons with the introduction of its “would it be cool if we had a movie where the Predator fought [insert your favourite flavour of a cool warrior]” in Prey to seeing it flaunted and pauperized in the utterly abysmal Predator: Killer of Killers, which also looked as though Trachtenberg and his co-conspirators made the executive decision to draw inspiration from the extended Predator lore found in comic books and various incarnations of fan fiction of dubious quality. What happens in Predator: Badlands can only be described as likely concocted by Redditors whose devotion to the lore of the series might only be closely matched by their inability to conjure a coherent narrative, let alone an original one.

And that’s how we find ourselves on Yautja Prime, the home planet of bemandibled humanoids whose entire backstory refers to their warrior code (because the villain in the original Predator chose to fight Arnie fair and square in the final act) and somehow attempts to explain the various Easter eggs left behind by production designers and set decorators. So, what happens in this movie is we meet Dek (Dimitrius Schuster Koloamatangi), a young Yautja—

I’m sorry, every time I type the word “Yautja” I have to recompose myself because this entire lore is so unfathomably preposterous that it looks as though it was written by an intern in the storytelling department at a small video game developer during their first week on the job, maybe even during bio breaks. It’s so embarrassingly awkward, uninspired and void of depth that it just hurts to even think of it for longer than three seconds at a time. But I digress…

So, Dek is a young Yautja/Predator who needs to prove himself to his clan after his older brother sacrifices himself to spare him from being culled by their stern-looking father. He shoots off to a planet called Genna in search of the Kalisk, the ultimate prey that nobody has ever defeated before. As he fights his way through various deadly obstacles—as it seems that the entire planet is teeming with creatures big and small and carnivorous vegetation, all seemingly evolved to kill Yautja/Predators—he meets Thia (Elle Fanning), a damaged robot sent to this planet by, you guessed it, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation as part of the mission to retrieve the Kalisk as well. And so, a race begins where Dek must outwit both the apex predator of this planet that is seemingly capable of rapid regeneration bordering on effective immortality and a bunch of faceless Weyland-Yutani operatives, all to be able to go back home and face off against his father.

That’s more or less the movie, which in many respects follows the logic of the tried-and-true hero’s journey archetype. However, it doesso in a very specific manner because it seemingly looks as if it had more in common with the way video games are assembled narratively, than with movies or other storytelling modalities. In fact, Predator: Badlands looks indistinguishable from a feature-length video game run-through video, the likes of which you can find on YouTube without much ado. It follows this logic to the letter in that any and all exposition delivered mostly by Thia (who travels on Dek’s back like a chatty sidekick without legs) is delivered as needed without sugarcoating anything or even attempting to hide what clearly are information dumps in otherwise innocuous conversations. When Dek encounters a deadly plant with tentacles, Thia tells us exactly what its name and abilities are. When he’s about to step out of a forest, he is warned immediately that “bone bisons graze on razor grass,” just in time to inform both Dek and the viewer that he’d have to find a creative way to complete this particular level.

In all honesty, the entire movie is structured like a game a fan of the series would pick up and play on a PS5 in their parents’ basement. The inciting incident plays out like a tutorial level in which we learn all the basic skills and abilities Dek will come to need later in the game. The progression of the narrative is punctuated by encounters with progressively more sophisticated adversaries with clearly defined abilities where Dek must defeat them, level up and thus warm up in preparation to fight the Kalisk, Thia’s evil lookalike and then eventually his own father, the final boss of this video game narrative. In the meantime, Thia just announces that she’d be speaking a universal language that conveniently sounds like English to us but like Predatorese to Dek, so we only need subtitles when Dek clicks and clacks in his native tongue. And he’s not that talkative either, so the movie won’t be forcing anyone’s attention excessively on the bottom quartile of the screen.

Suffice it to say, Predator: Badlands might be a serious contender for one of the most infuriatingly redundant and downright intellectually offensive blockbusters of the year. It’s one of those movies that speaks to the lowest expectations of the fanbase of the franchise as it never ventures past the initial gimmick of “what it would be like if we watched a movie from the perspective of the Predator for a change” and satisfies the requirements of the spectacle merely by showing off Dek’s cool-looking weapons and having him solve video game-type problems. It’s a certifiable pile of doodoo, if you wanted to know my expert opinion on the subject. A movie that should have been a video game, not a film projected on the big screen for paying audiences. It’s an abomination and an affront to the longstanding tradition of big screen entertainment.

And at this point I don’t know what bothers me more: the fact that Predator: Badlands is so blatantly gross and braindead that it tested my resolve to stay seated until the credits rolled, or the fact that it seems to have found an audience in spite of it all. It turns out that the masses resonated with this film’s utterly abysmal storytelling and that they enjoy being force-fed exposition through a funnel, like geese prepped to have their livers turned into foie gras by heartless French farmers. They also seem to prefer their movies when they approximate video games, that they most assuredly play at home, with their iconography, blocking and set piece dynamics. It sure looks as though we have gone a long way since Steven Spielberg and George Lucas first introduced these complex dramatic pieces in Raiders of the Lost Ark that most assuredly went on to inspire the entire industry of video game development, only to come back full circle once more.

I shudder at the prospect of having to endure more blockbusters of this sort (and I already detest John Wick movies for similar reasons) especially when their intent is to titillate with fan service as opposed to visual originality, let alone awe. Predator: Badlands is nothing but a bland piece of blockbuster filmmaking with no personality of its own and a scattershot attitude of a magpie on crack towards picking little things from the more transgressive blockbusters made in recent years, like the works of Gareth Edwards and Denis Villenueve. And it’s all an attempt to steady the course of this entire franchise becoming aggressively Disneyfied to become a sustainably profitable multimedia franchise.

I suppose, this is where its mission will most likely be accomplished. The masses will love it much the same way they love roller coasters and fast food. It’s cool and everything but unfortunately there’s nothing else hiding within this movie. It’s a carnival ride with a dubious safety profile and an inflated price of admission. With a story written to resemble a video game narrative and saturated with spikes of embarrassing unoriginality you can find in spades in any fan fiction of your choosing, a sense of humour tuned to resonate with Funko Pop-hoarding man-children and a spectacle terminally barren and bland, Predator: Badlands transcends the definition of a high-flying embarrassment. It’s a double-barreled calamity.