Predator: Badlands (2025) Review

This film sees us ask a fundamentally different questions to the other films: what if the Predator was the good guy?

Kieran

Nov 10, 2025

Predator: Badlands (2025)

Director: Dan Trachtenberg

Screenwriters: Dan Trachtenberg, Patrick Aison (story by)

Starring: Elle Fanning, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, Mike Homik, Rohinal Nayaran, Reuben De Jong, Cameron Brown

by Kieran Judge

Somehow, Dan Trachtenberg has managed to bring out two Predator films in the same year. This film, the eighth live-action feature film in the franchise (including the crossover films Alien vs Predator and Aliens vs Predator: Requiem), sees us ask a fundamentally different questions to the other films: what if the Predator was the good guy?

The runt of the clan, predator Dek (Dimetrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is saved by his brother from the wrath of his father, who wants to kill him for being too weak. Determined to prove himself, he flees to Genna, the most dangerous planet in the system, in order to track down a creature even his father is scared of, and bring back its head as a trophy to prove his worth. On the planet he meets Thai (Elle Fanning), a cyborg from the Weyland-Yutani corporation, missing her legs, who teams up with the unlikely travelling companion to journey across the unforgiving world on their quest.

As much as the film looks glorious (which it should do, given the amount of CGI that has gone into making it), one just can’t get past the glaring issue that the monstrous Youtja (which is what the Predators are now called) are meant to be, you know, monsters. Terrifying and predatory and yes, they do have their own civilisation and culture and technology, but at the end of the day their job is to be terrifying and hunt and kill and be as alien as the xenomorphs they fought all those films ago.

This isn’t to say that they aren’t menacing; Dek the Youtja does do a lot of stalking and hunting and killing in the film, and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi does a great job at bringing him to life, but it is a different kind of threat. Right from the beginning of the film he is a character seeking to be seen by his brother, father, and clan, as worthy of being part of them. There’s a lot of dialogue between them all. They talk about childhood memorabilia. He even cracks the odd joke, later in the film. And what it all unfortunately does is undermines everything the original film was going for; trying to get you believe that it wasn’t just a guy in a suit.

In Shane Black’s failed 2018 reboot The Predator, one of the many issues was that it could have been any other alien monster instead of Predator and the film would be realistically the same. Here, if we make our Predator just any human from another colony, all we do is change the iconography around and nothing changes. Our Predator has had to become much more human in order to work with the need for the film to have someone to tie us as a viewer to the storyline, and by doing so it takes away the power of the beast. Humanising it destroys anything Predatory about it, and when you have such an iconic monster, it is something to be revered, and this feels as if it’s lost.

In this sense, perhaps the film would have worked better if it was fully animated, rather than live-action. Taking a step away from the films in terms of premise might be represented by a more fantastical filmic mode. Predator: Killer of Killers, the anthology animation from earlier this year, showed it could be done incredibly effectively. The amount of strange creatures and effects that the film demands anyway means that there’s not too much difference for the amount of animation work as it is. It would have felt like a novel, or comic one-shot, and would have suited the material better, a more off-brand story with an off-brand storytelling mode.

Despite this, what actually comes to the screen, is a decently fun time. The action sequences are well put together, well directed for the most part (there’s a few dodgier moments near the end in the dark but it’s mostly good), and are efficiently choreographed by Vincent Boullion. The big wide landscapes, whilst being fairly par for the course in terms of interplanetary sunrise design, are glorious. The cast are great, the music loud when it needs to be and quiet when it has to, and everything seems to click into gear. Even if it seems to have succumbed to Disneyfication - and by this we mean that it feels it has to present us with a merchandise-able creature sidekick, a lack of (non-alien or synthetic) blood in order to get that 12A rating (PG 13 in the USA), and everyone has to give big spouts of exposition about not being alone and working together and being a happy family - you can’t fault the production team for putting together a very good piece of filmmaking.

But in the end, for different reasons, we ask the same questions we had to ask with Shane Black’s film. Is this really a Predator film, or is it a story that has worked for predator because we already have that as a known IP? Whilst technically marvellous and undoubtedly a fun time on the big screen, the film misses something, giving us a hollow victory. It’s got no bite to it, and if Predator, of all the franchises, which started with blood and guts and skinning people alive, hasn’t got any bite left, then you have to ask yourself if this is really a trophy to be truly proud of, even if it is impressive.

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