Franchise villain becomes unlikely hero in bold sci-fi adventure Predator: Badlands

Predator: Badlands (NC16)

107 minutes, opens on Nov 6
★★★★☆

The story: On a planet filled with ferocious creatures, the warrior Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) has landed. He is a Yautja, or Predator, a member of a race that hunts the most dangerous prey on any planet to gain status within its culture. His smaller physical stature has made him a clan outcast, so he is determined to track down the Kalisk, the animal that has killed every Yautja that has tried to take it as a trophy. Dek then meets Thia (Elle Fanning), a badly damaged android in need of help.

American film-maker Dan Trachtenberg is a Predator savant. Both his prequel Prey (2022) and animated film Predator: Killer Of Killers (2025) took the sci-fi franchise into bold new directions.

This streak of creativity continues in Predator: Badlands. The seventh film in the series imagines the Predator as the main character, not the monster; and it is set not on Earth, but on an alien planet.

Yet its pairing of Fanning’s chatty, naive sidekick and Schuster-Koloamatangi’s gruff adventurer feels strikingly familiar. It is C-3PO and Han Solo from the Star Wars franchise, or Short Round and Indy in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom (1984), and a million other movies.

Thia is an android from Earth, so she offers a way into Dek’s otherwise impenetrable character. An opening scene set on the Yautja home planet fleshes out Dek’s backstory, making his quest not just about trophy-hunting but also vengeance, raising the stakes considerably.

Trachtenberg’s Yautja works remarkably well as an anguished antihero – like Batman, he is agile, carries cool gadgets and is driven by psychological pain.

Perhaps it took the recent maturation of digital facial modelling to make a head like Dek’s visible for the whole movie. Granted, most of the time, Schuster-Koloamatangi’s facial expressions run the gamut from sullen to surly, but the fact that his emotions are visible at all is a gobsmacking achievement.

At no point does Dek’s face fall into the uncanny valley, the way digitally de-aged actors’ do.

The pair’s quest builds up to an action-filled third act that also packs in callbacks to earlier Predator movies, especially in the use of iconic weapons.

It might end on a trite message – the real quest is the friends people make along the way – but that bum note is a forgivable point.

Hot take: Trachtenberg’s bold reinvention of the franchise makes the Predator a relatable antihero with genuine emotion.