Predator: Badlands is Emasculated Masculinity: The Movie, complete with championing disability, taking down the patriarchy – and a cute Disney animal.
At one point in the movie, a creature spits acid at an android and completely melts it away. You know you’re watching a bad movie when you’re envious. Yes, Predator: Badlands is so bad – and will leave you with emotional trauma so acute – you’ll want to find a safe space. Hopefully one showing movies of merit – even torture porn would be an improvement.
Predator: Badlands is a thoroughly enjoyable bad movie – until you stop and think about it. And then it’s just bad. Predator (1987) was 80s machismo. Riotous fun. Endlessly rewatchable and made great by the absurdity of the premise – a group of ‘roided up Reaganite supermen get sent into the jungle to rescue the first rescue team and on the way back get attacked by a trophy hunting alien. It was endlessly quotable, cheesy fun that wore a 40-year groove in pop-culture. Flash forward to today and such grooves are sinkholes filled with the sewage leaking out of modern Disney.
Predator: Badlands is their latest corrupted discharge. The story concerns the misunderstood estrogenic runt of a Predator litter who narrowly avoids being killed by his clan’s emotionally stunted patriarch for bringing weakness and sympathy to the family. Yes, even Predators have daddy issues. Perhaps it’s an Abraham metaphor.
The clichés come thick and fast from then on. Cast adrift in a hostile environment and emotionally vulnerable, our underdog Predator must learn to fend for himself. He does this by deciding to take down the most feared beast on Planet Death – with an extendable glowing sword. Such Freudian subtlety. Unsurprisingly, the weapon he uses against the family at the end of the movie is truly impressive in both length and girth.
Of course, much of the plot is repurposed from the Alien franchise – this and last year’s Alien: Romulus exist in a shared universe. Yes, that pesky Weyland-Yutani corporation is collecting dangerous creatures for – surprise – the bioweapons division. Again. Wasn’t that the plot for the Alien: Earth streaming show too?
The twist – unsubtly signposted halfway through – kills it. The ending steals the power-loader from Cameron’s Aliens. The story even manages to revisit the wolf pack cliché from The Hangover movies. In the end, Predator finds his emotional support animal and his new tribe – the friends he makes along the way. Vomit.
The singular best line in the movie – the last one – made many in the audience laugh out loud. Yes, it threatens female Predators in Part 2 – of course it does. So, we have domineering females to look forward to that’ll no doubt make the preceding movies look like a hen-pecked boys’ golfing weekend.
When it’s over, you’ll want to applaud the awfulness of what you’ve just seen. The biggest weakness is letting the Predator speak. The filmmakers have turned the character from the Ed Gein of sci-fi into something with human motivations – current year safe space culture motivations – and it is thoroughly boring. Its language seems only to express patriarchal platitudes. It’s not alien if it has your emotional drives, now, is it?
The film does have some technical merit – as the saying goes, it’s at least in focus. The environment and the hostile creatures are functionally done – a bit like a holiday in Australia. However, the Predator design is terrible – the crab-like original is iconic and, of course, someone thought they could improve on it with cheap CGI. Could they not just have used Sora? The Predator home world is dull – they seem to live in a desert that’s less convincingly alien than Vasquez Rocks – which goes no way to explaining what shaped their hunting culture. So, everyone’s hometown sucks? The Predator body suit looks like a cheap Halloween costume.
The two redeeming parts of the film are Elle Fanning playing the goofy over-optimistic android Thia and the more callous Tessa. Thia has literally been torn in two. Her legs still managed to kick-ass though. She gets all emotional at the thought of her duplicate being her sister. Predator takes her along on his hunt for company, referring to her as a tool – scissors, presumably.
So, Predator becomes another classic property reduced to 2025-standard slop. We keep hearing this is the worst decade for movies since they began and on the strength of this film, that is hard to refute. The original film was a textbook example of pacing, creativity and tension. This film has had the adrenaline gland removed, replacing fun and clever with coincidence and feelings. Perhaps studios could stop trying to make everything “relatable” and rediscover spectacle instead. For the art of filmmaking — and for whatever’s left of the audience’s dignity — Predator: Snowflake’s First Hunt really shouldn’t exist. Seeing this on the big screen feels like going back to your abuser for another predictable beating.
Lee Russell Wilkes 