By Joel Williams 08/11/2025
Identity is a franchises best friend and here at least we continuing to find some footing. World building to the max give us pure entertainment for 2 hours and yet I’m lacking any long term love that I was hoping for but the competency taken into filming means I’ll happily come back for more.
Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi and Elle Fanning in “Predator: Badlands” Photo Credit: Twentieth Century Studios
“Predator: Badlands” follows Dex a Yatuja who is cast out from his clan and embarks on a dangerous journey forming unlikely allies on the way.
Directed by Dan Trachtenberg and is his third directorial credit in the Predator franchise after animated film “Predator: Killer of Killers” from 2025 and “Prey” from 2022. “Predator: Badlands” stars Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi as Dex and Elle Fanning as his unlikely adversary in Thia.
I’m on board for anything Sci-Fi all the time and watching a runt of the litter Predator slicing up monsters was pretty damn cool and I can’t deny I was thoroughly entertained by that. There’s a competency to the shots and there wasn’t any detail spared in trying to build a cohesive world that lives, breaths and is as dangerous as advertised keeping the planet as a threat (I’ll come back to this point). Fight sequences felt close and intimate whilst still giving us a sense of scale when the threats are far larger in size than our runt Dex and everything was shot in a structured chaos that helped sell the survival story. Fairly CGI heavy in places yet I was never taken out of the film, it was well done with physical and CG sets that meshed well overall. What benefits the film here is sticking Dex into the situation he gets into, no help and having to figure out how to survive and complete his hunt whilst being the hunted. We don’t see a truly over powered character here, he struggles and that helps give some sort of stakes when Dex is trying to survive the planet. Dex is a highlight as we see him grown through the film, as he goes from trying to prove himself to forging his own way
Photo Credit: Twentieth Century Studios
Stakes are built in a film and they help to sell the impending peril of a character and make their actions feel like they matter. We begin to lose these as we get further through. We are introduced to the main villain of the film, a race of synthetics. Their motivations never seem too clear, we understand a mission of theirs but never the true goals and their story takes a back seat here to the point of little care where I was enjoying watching synthetics heads be ripped off but I just wasn’t interested in their story. The largest take away I had here doesn’t entirely lie within the film itself but rather the business side of film. I want a Predator film to hit hard, show me that they are lethal, violent aliens and are not to be messed with, and yet it holds itself back. From a box office standpoint having the decision for this to be a 12/PG-13 will help bring this to the masses which I’m all for as I want film to always be successful but selfishly I wanted this to be even more intense. The planet felt like a threat but the synthetics never gave me any sort of feeling of impending doom or peril, they are just robots without emotions or understanding bar a couple of them and yet our villain isn’t complex enough to get you to invest in fighting against her.
Pure entertainment with flashes of a coming-of-age story through our main character of Dex as he finds his own way. Some cool fight sequences and visuals that try to save a script lacking in anything more than action. You won’t find anything profound here but that’s kind of by design it’s still a great time in cinema.
Releases in UK cinemas November 7th
