Predator: Badlands

Bluesky

Three rules to start with. Yautja are prey to none. Friend to none. Predator to all. After that text a play in three acts. Creature eats creature. Creature is itself eaten. Creature becomes a casualty itself, to the apex of the food chain, as incidental roadkill.

It will not be the last time that this film sets out the boundaries of possibility and proceeds to have fun with them. That is essential to the franchise. Even before anyone knew the name the Predators gave themselves we know that "if it bleeds, we can kill it".

Predator: Badlands has lashings of all of these things. Nature red and fluorescent green in tooth and claw. Conditions and their consequences. Predators, and a landscape whose hostility is as pronounced as its beauty. Shot in, among other places, a heavily augmented Aotearoa/New Zealand, this has in places the sweep of The Lord Of The Rings. The lines between magic and technology are blurry but that's not down to the sterling work of some dozen special effects firms.

There can't be many films where there are more of those firms than there are named characters on screen. It's one of several places where Predator: Badlands is singular. If it weren't for previous outing Prey then this would stand as a calling card for director Dan Trachtenberg. Working again with co-writer Patrick Aison, he's helped fulfill a common arc in creature features.

Prey gave us a different perspective, indeed a different era, for a movie monster with which we were familiar. Badlands gives us their perspective. Somewhere under some incredible prosthetics and computer-aided physiology is Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi. He's got a previous credit as 'tall guy' but Dek is the runt of his family. The tribal dynamics of the deadliest game-players have been explored in countless comics and novels and videogames but we've more here than we got in Predator 2 or Predators. Those are the only films worth mentioning, to be clear, and Badlands is comfortably among them.

I've lamented in the past that for cross-pollinated Fox franchise Aliens someone created the word 'quadrilogy' when tetralogy existed and was close enough to teratology to raise parallels of unstable development and monsters. The study of them is one of the driving forces for Weyland-Yutani, and it's their presence that will further complicate Dek's quest.

Quest, specifically, because it's mythic in the same way as Furiosa, as any number of other sword and sorcery epics. The presence of automatic weapons and ejector seats doesn't make this any less of a fable than Sisu: Road To Revenge, though qualitatively more fabulous. They're both action packed sequels, set-pieces with desperate struggles, long journeys, significant objects, even uncaring organisations in opposition. For all that one's the second and one's the seventh, it's this that feels less repetitive.

Some of that's the sense of fun. Stoic determination is one thing, deadpan humour quite another. The mandibles give the film room to have its tongue in its cheek and still roar. There are any number of nods, among them a partnership that's half C-3PO and Chewbacca and some lone wolf and cub. Martial artistry includes two different schools of Immaculate Cut In Half Technique.

That doubling includes Elle Fanning as Thia and Tess, leading an army of androids (all Cameron Brown) to increase the number of hunters on the death world Genna. Even the inhabitants of Yautja Prime are wary, it is home to the fearsome Kalisk. Why and how those before have failed, and how Dek meets these tests are trophy indeed. The bones of the story are familiar but this is new flesh upon them, a vital bit of rejuvenation and not tedious taxidermy. There are few faces on screen, though many of the handful of them, and those acts of repetition and repetition of actors all speak to Badlands' strength. "More of the same" depends on how you feel about what's come before. As a long-standing fan I'm not sure that this Predator manages to hold up as an independent entity but it comes close to that feat.

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