Cast: Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi
Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi, Thriller
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
In Irish Cinemas: 7th November 2025
In Predator: Badlands, the franchise abruptly swerves into something far more tender than its blood-drenched roots. The story centres on Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a runt-sized Yautja whose father despises him for being “soft.” Instead of leaning into macho ultraviolence, the film tilts toward sensitivity, toward found family, toward outsiders realising they are allowed to be gentle. The tonal pivot is so dramatic that the whole thing almost plays like an off-Broadway alien boy musical.
Outrage from Predator fundamentalists is inevitable. Yet Badlands proves shockingly agile at reconfiguring old IP into something emotionally buoyant. Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison openly queer the franchise’s emotional architecture not in a wink-wink gag way, but in a genuine way. Badlands suggests that the “alien” can be queer not because of orientation necessarily, but because of vibe, because of sensibility, because of rejection by his own.
This is the first Predator entry that actually lives inside the Predator brain for the entire runtime, not just watches one from the outside. Previous entries have gestured at humanising the species (Alien vs. Predator gestured, briefly). Still, Badlands is the first to commit because the studio politely cannot ask an audience to inhabit the psychology of an emotionless evisceration machine for 107 uninterrupted minutes, not when the company releasing this is, in the end, Disney.
So: welcome to a PG-13, YA-adjacent Predator.
Dek is banished to Genna, the Yautja’s “death planet,” a zoo of ravenous horrors to “prove himself” by killing a legendary creature no one has ever successfully hunted. During this trial-by-exile he meets Thia (Elle Fanning), a legless android stranded there by Weyland-Yutani. She loses her entire team and her lower body, and negotiates a pact with Dek: she helps him hunt the mythic beast; he helps her find her synth cohort (and, ideally, her legs). The two acquire a tiny monkey-adjacent creature that looks illegally imported from a Pixar B-plot, and the trio wander through Trachtenberg’s clever little ecosystem of creatures, poisons, traps, and micro-biomes.
Fanning’s presence keeps the movie light on its feet; her character constantly undercuts the old Predator grimness, forcing the film’s stakes to be emotional before they are lethal. And Trachtenberg’s direction is meticulous. Every nasty plant, beast, and gadget introduced in the first act gets elegantly recalled later; the script treats its own world like a logic system rather than a dumping ground.
Badlands is not prestigious. It’s a mid-budget, pulp-genre sequel that understands that the best possible path forward for this IP is to stop trying to cosplay 1987 and instead become the best possible version of itself now weirder, kinder, queerer, more playful.
By the end, Dek claims his victory and finally faces his father, and the film at last resolves the enormous absence of Yautja women in Predator continuity with a punchline so obviously overdue that, shockingly, no one got there earlier.
The whole thing ends not in nihilism, but in a smile. It’s a Predator movie that wants to embrace the audience, not punish them for showing up.
Overall: 7/10
Movie Reviewer
