Since when is the Predator just a dude with an abusive dad?

A Predator:Badlands review (contains spoilers)

The Predator franchise has given us a lot of things: mud-covered Schwarzenegger, spine-ripping trophies, and that iconic clicking sound. What it’s never given us before is an actual look into the Predators lives.

In Predator:Badlands, our main character is Dek – a Predator™, the runt of the litter, malformed and sickly. His father tries to kill him as per their customs, but his brother saves him and sacrifices himself to get Dek sent to a very deadly planet, Genna. Once there, Dek meets Thia (Elle Fanning), a synth (an android from the Alien™ franchise) and a cute merchandising-friendly alien (not ™). Together, they start hunting the biggest predator (not ™) of the planet, so that Dek can go home with a trophy and earn his place as a warrior in his father’s Predator™ clan.

So here we have it: the first Predator movie told from the Predator’s perspective. I was so excited!¹

Before I get into the parts I didn’t like, let’s take a moment for the few things that worked – I don’t want you to think I’m a baseless hater. As an entertainment device, it was quite good! The first half of the movie is a xenobiologist fever dream! Someone definitely had a blast designing planet Genna – imagine if the plants from Little Shop of Horrors had babies with the creatures from Annihilation, then gave them all rabies. There’s a scene where Dek steps on what looks like moss, only for it to release spores that attract flying predators, which in turn lure out a camouflaged beast that makes the original Predator look cuddly. Everything on this planet has evolved to murder everything else, and the film revels in showing us exactly how. This is what Pandora should have been² – not just beautiful, but genuinely alien and terrifying.

After the Discovery channel documentary, the second half goes back to the very well trodden path of an action movie. There’s a training montage, lots of fighting,³ a big boss, a sacrifice…it’s predictable, but has the good taste of ending rather quickly so as to not bore us out. The relationship between Dek and Thia keeps things moving along, with enough light banter to be fun without being cringe. Overall, solid high-budget action movie!

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🤡 What’s wrong with my face?!?

⁴The original Predator films worked because the creature was alien. Not just in the literal sense, but in the way it moved, hunted, and thought. It was genuinely other – a walking, clicking nightmare that followed its own incomprehensible logic. You couldn’t reason with it, nor understand it, and that’s what made it terrifying.

Badlands tosses all that out the window and gives us Dek: a Predator who walks, talks, and emotes like a sad human in a rubber suit.

Let’s start with the prosthetics: the original Predator design was iconic as the perfect balance of humanoid and strange, with mandibles that clicked and a face mostly hidden behind. Dek’s prosthetic on the other hand is half-decent, at best. I get that he’s supposed to be a weakling, so maybe some of the mandibules had to go, but he still looks like a severe letdown. I get it: from the producers’ point of view, having a non-human in the main role is a risk! What if the audience leaves the theater when there’s not a single human face in the first 30 minutes? But I don’t think an ultra-humanized face, complete with the worry and sad contemplative boy features, is the way to go. We’re not dumb, we know we signed up for a scifi-fantasy⁵, we saw the freaking trailer!⁶

He’s got a full head of dreadlocks, sad-upset-angry brows, and humanly-set eyes

This humanization also extends to the bodysuit: Dek moves like a person. He walks upright with human gait patterns. He gestures with human body language. He even runs with that infamous Tom Cruise trick. There’s no mystery in his movement, no sense that this is a being with different musculature, different instincts, different anything. The original Predator moved like a predator – all economy and threat. Dek moves like an actor trying not to trip over his own feet.

Second: the language. The clicking, the guttural sounds – those were part of what made the Predator feel mysterious. At least half of the problem was that you couldn’t communicate with them in any way! But in Badlands, Dek speaks full sentences in his native tongue, which is then helpfully translated for us via subtitles. Now, credit where it’s due: at least they committed to him speaking Yautja⁷ throughout instead of giving him a magic universal translator. But here’s the problem: the language sounds like human language. It’s got the same cadence, the same emotional inflections, the same pauses for dramatic effect. It could’ve been Old Norse or Klingon and I wouldn’t have known the difference. There’s no sense that this is how an entirely different species would communicate.

This is the fundamental problem with Dek’s characterization: he’s just a human wearing Predator skin. The original Predator saga was about confronting the unknowable, the dangerous, the other – something that operated on completely different rules and saw us as prey rather than equals. That mystery, that otherness, that horror? It’s been sanded away. We’re not exploring what it means to encounter a truly different form of intelligence; we’re watching a guy with daddy issues who happens to have mandibles.

en garde!

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😤 I will avenge my brother!

This sanding away of the alien-ness doesn’t stop at the physical attributes⁸. Dek’s inner life is entirely human too – his motivations, his fears, his emotional arc could all be lifted straight from any number of coming-of-age stories. How to train your dragon, Thor:Ragnarok, Avatar⁹. Hell, even Billy Eliott fits the bill¹⁰ – can you get any more modern-world-problems than this?

There is a dire problem when in your movie introduction, 2 out of the 3 aliens are behaving like drunk Vikings. No, a Predator – a solitary alien that works alone and puts violence and war above all – can’t be sacrificing himself to save his brother. That’s just not it!

Whether or not we agree with alien morality isn’t the point. The question is: how does their culture actually work? Show me the mechanics before asking me to judge them. Instead, this movie promises to reveal an alien civilization while actively hiding it from us.

Dek’s motivations?

1. Revenge for his brother

2. Proving himself to his father

3. Earning his place in the clan.

These aren’t alien concerns – they’re the backbone of every hero’s journey ever written. “I must prove my worth to my disapproving father” arc is a well-worn trope (and this movie doesn’t even offer a fresh exploration of it).

And let’s talk about that father for a second: he’s presented as your standard antagonist dad, but that’s exactly wrong. This isn’t some abusive human patriarch – he’s a Yautja elder operating within his planet’s cultural, spiritual, and moral codes. He shouldn’t be an antagonist at all. The original Predators didn’t have human problems. They didn’t angst about daddy issues or yearn for acceptance. They hunted, collected trophies, killed all kinds of random creatures (including humans) with a cold face. They followed their own incomprehensible code of honor. We could project motivations onto them – pride, perhaps, or a warrior’s code – but we were always guessing. They were other.

The thing is, you don’t even need the brother’s sacrifice to launch this story. Want a more interesting version? Make Dek someone completely embedded in Yautja culture – someone who doesn’t question their values or codes at all. He’s judged as weak, a failed Yautja, and condemned to ritual death. And here’s the kicker: he accepts it. Think of it as a kind of seppuku, but administered by another. Honor demands it, and he’s ready. But then something interrupts the ritual – an attack, a malfunction, whatever – and he’s catapulted off-world, crash-landing on this hostile planet. His only wish is to get back home, to finish the ritual and restore honor to his clan. Now you’ve got your reluctant hero without the tired revenge plot, and we’ve actually learned something about how their society works.

Dek’s character could have had (should have had) a deeper, more strongly held, relationship to violence. He starts out bitter and isolated, sure, but through the power of friendship™ with Thia and the cute alien sidekick, he learns to open up. Problem is: we don’t really see much of that. There’s an interesting scene at the start when Thia convinces him to keep her along, because she’s “a tool he can use” – he wouldn’t hear the usual “let’s collab we can be useful to each other” speech. But this was the only scene that touched upon the Predator’s specific way of life. Everything else – the gearing up ritual, preparing weapons, the training montage, eating food over the fire, … It’s all human in nature!

Dek is just a guy who happens to have mandibles. His struggles are our struggles. His emotional journey is our emotional journey. The film takes an alien and makes him relatable by stripping away everything that made him alien in the first place.

I know where this comes from: the producers looked at the Predator and thought: “Do you really think Martha, 45, who’s taking her little boy, is going to stay the entire length?” “Nah, I don’t think she’ll ever take that kid to another Predator movie…” And that was it. The greed for captive audiences makes for dumbed down, useless movies. But still, I’m sad (and upset I spent 10 bucks for it!)

Have you watched any Predator movies? What do you think? Don’t get me started on how Alien:Earth did the exact same thing but worse with the alien, but please tell me below which is your favorite of the Predator saga!

1. I’m consistently amazed at my capacity to hope that those big blockbuster movies will be not only fun (and that’s not even a given) but also deep and that they will live up to the original ideas of their franchises

2. The Avatar (blue people) planet, also supposedly the most deadly dangerous planet in the entire known universe

3. Fun fact: since everyone bleeds either white (robot), green (Predator) or doesn’t (the cute baby creature), the movie stays pg-whatever to make a max of money!

4. Please forgive the emojis, i promise i’m not chatgpt, i just thought it looked kinda cute?

5. Ahh the old-as-time debate of what is science-fiction and what is fantasy… I put this one as both because there’s (technically) encounters with aliens and the question of what it is to be human (scifi?); and also random beasts and sword fights (fantasy?)

6. You might have lied on the trailer, but that’s not my problem then, is it?!

7. The name Predators give themselves

8. I’m not superficial, i also care about what’s inside your heart!

9. The air-bender one: Zuko is exiled on a quest to kill the avatar and regain his father’s approval, ends up befriending the gang instead, and comes back to kill his daddy, to take his rightful place as a warrior and leader of the clan

10. Complete with an ending where the hero subverts expectations of masculinity set by his father (getting good at dance / adopting the thing he came to kill) and getting a found family to call their own (does Billy also get to keep a cute murder-kitten as a pet?)