I made it a mission to watch Predator: Badlands (2025), disregarding the numerous online detractors, and I was not disappointed!

By Emad Aysha

Dan Trachtenberg did it again, crafting a top-notch sci-fi action romp with many other redeeming features. (Please check my video reviews here and here; spoiler warnings.)

The trick to appreciating and enjoying this movie is to understand what a sci-fi movie is all about, let alone a sequel or prequel in a franchise that has been done to death.

NOSTALGIA INC.: Dek using company property. The sound effects likewise are borrowed from 'Aliens' (1986)!

A proper sci-fi movie (Dune, Part One, not included) focuses on dazzling you with alien landscapes and alien physiology. Even in horror, the more weird, otherworldly, and remarkable the beast's biology, the better, with surprises along the way.

Prey, as cool as it was, was a bit too much of the same, with a grey tinge to the cinematography. Here, you have exotic, incredible worlds, as well as weird and shockingly nasty plants and animals.

Remember how James Cameron inverted the first Terminator movie, making Arnold the good guy in the sequel, while ramping up the action and emotions? The same here.

There are callbacks to everything from the original Predator to Alien: Romulus and even Prometheus. But it's all done in an independent and self-confident way, upping the ante and telling a different story.

Now for the details. The story begins in the predator world with a young Yutanja, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), being shown the ropes by his elder brother, Kwei (Michael Homick), when their father decrees that Dek is too weak to live and tries to kill him.

Kwei saves him but is killed instead, and Dek is banished to the planet Genna, which he wanted to go to anyway, to prove himself by hunting the ultimate beast on that world. While there, he almost becomes dinner for a dragon-like creature, only to be saved by a Wayland-Yutani android Thia (Elle Fanning).

ALIEN EXTRAVAGANZA: Dek walking to his own doom on Yautja Prime. Now 'this' is what Denis Villeneuve's Dune 'should' have looked like.

She needs his help, too, being split in half. It turns out the company is after the same beast for its bioweapons division, the dreaded Kalisk. And she was with her twin robot, Tessa, who gave her life to save Thia – or so she thinks.

Then a weird, monkey-like little alien hitches with Dek and Thia after saving them from a giant tree beast. Thia calls him Bud and describes them as a trio. Sadly, Tessa gets repaired and captures the beast, using the predator’s own technology against them.

Fortunately, Dek left Bud behind, still being too much of a lone wolf. (Thia tells him the alpha wolf looks out for his mates, to no avail.) This helps Dek escape, and he regroups with Bud, arms himself from the nature around him and comes back for her, and to free the Kalisk!

I don’t want to spoil it for you, but this is masterful storytelling, using new alien terrains, creatures, challenges and threats to create a new and familiar narrative at the same time. A predator working with a woman isn’t new or bad, since it was one of the few redeemable features of the entertaining but pointless Alien vs. Predator (2004). But there’s more to it than that.

There is a strong fairytale undercurrent to this movie, along with some garnishings of Nordic myth. The Kalisk and its offspring are reminiscent of Grendel and his much worse mother, and Dek’s father wears a helmet with Viking-like horns.

FREUDIAN NIGHTMARE: Reuben de Jong plays daddy dearest here. Did the costume department take a page out of Nordic myth, I wonder?

Tessa is an ice queen, reminiscent of Vickers (Charlize Theron) in Prometheus, to be sure, but both are reminiscent of evil witches and queens in fairy tales. Not least of which is Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen (1844).

Thia teaches Dek to have a heart and work with others, including nature, just like Gerda melts the piece of ice/shard of glass in Kai’s heart in the fairytale. (Why else would you have a ‘dragon’ in an SF movie? And the dragon, incidentally, works symbiotically with the poison thorn plants to catch Dek.)

The contrast between Thia and Tessa is profound. The now sumptuous Elle Fanning plays both, but they’re almost different people. Thia is cheery and innocent, almost like a child, thrilled at discovering everything as new and different. She’s both the comic relief and the heart of the movie. And Dek’s better half – especially after losing his brother.

Tessa is as cold as ice, again, but also aloof, resourceful and ambitious; she lies to MUTHER and marshals her android army like lambs to the slaughter. Her skin is pasty white, as is her outfit, and her hair is very bleached blonde. This, by contrast, has darker clothes and rosy cheeks, and a pinkish, slightly Elfin nose.

I’ve liked Elle Fanning since I first saw her in that J.J. Abrams movie, Super 8 (2011), a facsimile of a Spielberg movie minus the charm and triumph. In one scene, she plays a Zombie, and for a second there, you thought she was going to rip the protagonist’s throat out!

She’s that good. Same here. The look of hurt and disappointment in her eyes when Tessa rebuffs her is palpable, yet subtle and understated. Some of the best scenes of the movie are between her and Dek.

MAKEUP TOO FAR: Elle Fanning in one of the few original scenes in 'Super 8' (2011). There's something to be said for natural beauty!

Other notable aspects include the soundtrack, composed by Mongolian folk metal band The Hu. The pacing is excellent for a movie that is actually quite long, featuring cool technologies like laser-tipped swords, exploding slugs, and razor grass.

Then there’s the humour too, with Bud’s rollerball antics and Thia’s tag-team action with her missing legs. Even Dek makes a joke or two and learns to loosen up.

Badlands is a three-course meal that combines moral storytelling with rip-roaring excitement and super-cool special effects (some practical). The concept art is also great, featuring snazzy spaceships that are original to both the Predator and Alien franchises.

It’s not a nostalgia piece, believe it or not, and it also has a nice environmental message, balancing male and female energies. (MUTHER is still the ultimate culprit, along with Tessa.)

That might explain the ending, with his mom’s battle cruiser, now that Dek has his own clan with Thia and Bud. A holy trinity, no less. (Dek outsmarts his father, using a sand storm to expose the invisibility cloak; his brother’s idea).

DISNEY PRINCESSES: Elle and Dakota Fanning. It's good to see men 'still' have a part to play in a woman's world.

Who could think that Disney could actually do something true to its fairytale heritage, for a change? Hope springs eternal indeed!!