A few years ago, we didn’t know the Predator series had a possible timeline as a prestige object among science fiction franchises, borrowing from many but imitating none. Because of Dan Trachtenberg, here we are. In 2022’s Prey, he set the titular alien’s battles against the Comanche of the early 18^th century; earlier this year, he gave us Predator: Killer of Killers, a trio of animated shorts where other warriors from human history do battle with these gnarly creatures with their fist fangs and their knack for cloaking themselves.

Predator: Badlands breaks the mould again, such that we can no longer say there is a mould. Although it does introduce an English-speaking cyborg – well, half of an English-speaking cyborg – in the form of Elle Fanning, Badlands is an immersion in a foreign landscape in which the Yautja, as they are called, speak in a guttural language that can only be translated through subtitles, and the main one we follow is actually the film’s hero. It’s got the wild imagination of an Avatar, the sophistication of a Dune, and just for good measure, a little overt cross-breeding with the Alien franchise, reminding us of the best instalments of that series as well. Fanning’s Thia, you see, is a Weyland-Yutani creation – half of one, anyway.

We’re brought in with a Dune vibe to the introduction of the Yautja home planet, with its craggy rocks and its subterranean score that sounds like grunge music played by dying robots. (Sarah Schachner and Benjamin Wallfisch are the composers here, and they deserve mention.) It’s unsettling to be in the subjectivity of these aliens for the first time in their history on screen, as Badlands utterly transports us into a world where two brothers – the one we will follow is called Dek – are engaged in a combat that is somewhere between sparring and an actual attempt to kill each other. Such is the moral relativism of these pitiless warriors.

Except one of them is about to show pity. Dek’s brother Kwei is ordered to kill Dek by their father, since the weakest member of any Yautja clan must be culled. How Dek’s combat skills make him the weakest of anything is a mystery, but again we’re talking relativism here. When Kwei chooses another path, their father chooses to kill him instead, and Kwei manages to launch Dek in a ship toward the destiny that may redeem him – to return with the trophy of his hunt, a mysterious creature called the Kalisk, on the distant and dangerous planet Genna. If he can’t return with the Kalisk, he shouldn’t return at all.

The planet starts trying to kill Dek straight away, and wouldn’t let up were it not for the help of a very helpful cyborg tied up in a nearby nest. She needs him to free her, he needs her to intervene when he’s about to become the food of a very large bird, after getting struck by a poison dart from a native planet that also emits exploding plumes of purple dust. Even though he assures her that Yautja hunt alone, she needs a ride back to where her craft was destroyed by the Kalisk, separating her from the twin cyborg who is her partner, and from her legs. He strikes the uneasy agreement because no one has ever returned alive from trying to fight the Kalisk, and he’ll take all the help he can get.

Remember that mould Trachtenberg shattered until there were only crumbled bits of debris remaining? What if I told you Predator: Badlands was also one of the funniest movies of the year? That’s all thanks to Fanning in the role of Thia, though Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi also gets off some clever one-liners, whose impact is all the more surprising given that they are delivered in a made-up language. As Thia rides on Dek’s back, the pair develop a dynamic similar to the disassembled C3PO yelling out quips over the shoulder of a grunting Chewbacca as they run through the cloud city in The Empire Strikes Back. Most of what she says is a riot, and considerable laughs are also won from a runty creature who looks a bit like a monkey, who joins them on their journey.

Within all this there is a level of craftsmanship so exceptional that it is almost casual. Given that we are seeing only half of Elle Fanning almost any time she’s on screen, we’re constantly looking to where the lower half of the actress’ body should be, to figure out how they’re doing it. Except we’re not quite as naïve as that – we know they can do this much and more in today’s digital landscape. Perhaps one of the miracles of Predator: Badlands is that its visual effects are used so organically, as part of such a defined time and place in the universe of our imagination, that they give us back the sense of wonder most of us have lost when looking at what a computer can create on screen. If all computers were serving the creativity of the Predator: Badlands team, maybe we wouldn’t hate them so much.

Predator: Badlands is not breaking new ground from a story perspective, as this is a fairly typical hero’s journey. What it’s doing, though, is giving us something simple enough to follow within every new and foreign thing it’s offering us. There’s a moment at the start where you think “How am I going to be able to tell which of these Yautja is which?” Well, screenwriter Patrick Aison, who also wrote Prey, lowers the degree of difficulty there, introducing us to only three, and only one who is going to spend any significant time on screen. Smartly, the film plunges us into the deep end and then throws us a life preserver, only steadily introducing the sorts of twists that would keep our interest on any hero’s journey.

Keeping our interest is not even the faintest glimmer of a problem here. As essentially the only human in the film, Fanning does double duty playing Thia and her counterpart Tessa, the latter a less benevolent, more mission-focused creature. If we have any experience with Weyland-Yutani from the Alien films, we know that mission isn’t savoury.

In between the more humane moments, in which we get the baby steps of Dek becoming a more empathetic creature, we get dazzling fight sequences using all the weaponry in a predator’s arsenal, and then of course all the natural weaponry from all sorts of alien species on this deathtrap planet. And then there’s the x-factor of what ass can be kicked by half of a cyborg – though which half becomes more of a question as the film goes on.

The thing that kept us engaged with Predator’s sister series, the Alien franchise, was the way it kept giving the raw materials to a new creative visionary, at least through the first four films. Those movies were not always successful, but they kept the approach fresh. Trachtenberg has somehow done the same thing here over the past three films, only without needing to vary up himself as the creative constant. Whatever he gives us next, there’s no doubt it won’t be a retread of Predator: Badlands, but there’s some doubt whether it could possibly be better.

 

Predator: Badlands opens today in cinemas.