Predator: Badlands Review: How to Keep a Long Franchise Fresh? Play It for Laughs.

In season 6, episode 24 of The Simpsons, “Lemon of Troy,” bully Nelson Muntz begrudgingly rescues nerd Martin Prince from an ass-kicking, and Martin insists they are now friends, much to Nelson’s chagrin.

It’s not hard to imagine that Predator: Badlands director Dan Trachtenberg and writer Patrick Aison just showed the memorable scene of Martin cavorting and singing around Nelson, and just said, “This, but Nelson is a predator alien, and Martin is a synthetic from the Alien films.” Because, unexpected as it may seem, the turn that the beleaguered and often belittled Predator franchise needed was away from its sci-fi action roots and right into goofy buddy comedy territory.

Unexpected, because Trachtenberg took the franchise back to its survival horror roots for 2022’s period bloodfest, Prey, a film that dropped the infamous crab-faced Yautja warriors into Colonial-era America and added a rich vein of indigenous politics to the narrative. The ninth film in the franchise, Predator: Badlands flips the whole Predator equation on its severed head from moment one by, for the first time, really concentrating on the Yautja rather than on humans.

Moreover, the protagonist can only be described as the littlest predator: Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), the runt of his family’s litter, who sets off to Genna – known as the Death Planet – to kill the unkillable Kalisk. This is where he picks up his Martin Prince: Thia (Elle Fanning), a synthetic from the Weyland-Yutani corporation sent to study the deadly species of Genna. However, unlike Martin, Thia can’t dance around because the Kalisk took her legs, and then a flying lizard stole her upper torso and kept her body in its nest which is just wonderful for the insufferably upbeat and inquisitive robot. Strapped to the back of the terse and increasingly infuriated Dek, she babbles happily as they get eaten, beaten, fall off and into things, and even pick up an adorable alien she dubs Bud (Rohinal Nayaran). It’s basically Abbott and Costello Meets the Predator.

If this sounds stupid for a series that began as a sweaty descent into a green hell, then that’s because it is, and that stupidity is absolutely what the franchise needed. Badlands at no level betrays the Yautjas’ story but instead approaches it from a sillier angle. After all, the Predator films and the interlocking Alien franchise have often found space for humor, and just as Jean-Pierre Jeunet added a Jacques Tati twist to the xenomorphs for Alien: Resurrection after the dour existential nightmare of Alien 3, so Trachtenberg seemingly realized that Prey was the revamp it needed, but going further down the hyperviolence path would be repetitive.

If anything, Badlands feels like it’s in conversation with the latest addition to the Alien franchise, Noah Hawley’s TV show, Alien: Earth, since both are about the possibility of strange and dangerous creatures in the cosmos. The FX series presented them as hideous threats, while Badlands has them as a menace for Dek to overcome with sporadically useful advice from Thia. (Plus, for the squeamish among you, since everything is an alien or a synthetic, there’s no red human blood to be seen.)

Of course, the other connective thread between the two stories is the most evil corporation in the cosmos, Weyland-Yutani, which has sent out cadres of identical synthetics to scoop up all the available bioweapons. This leads to Fanning getting to play Thia’s evil twin Tessa as the walking embodiment of the company line, but that’s never as much fun as the Thia/Dek double act. Having a Predator that’s kind of dorky is just hilarious, especially with the perky Thia constantly asking him why he’s so short and, well, useless. Schuster-Koloamatangi plays Dek with a certain pompous exasperation that, even under layers of latex and CG, is undeniably and deliberately hilarious. If it bleeds, you can laugh at it.

This article appears in November 7 • 2025.