Predator: Badlands
Nov 18 12:10 pm - film, recension
Went to see Predator: Badlands yesterday and was not exactly impressed. It has received very high ratings, a full 86% on Rotten Tomatoes with an insanely high 95% audience score.
The premise isn’t really that bad, the first Predator film where a Predator (Yautja) plays the lead role and protagonist of the film, and even though that’s an interesting angle in itself, the first problem is that we have to have Yautja dialogue and a Yautja language. And with one small detail we take away all the mystique of the Yautja, now they are brothers, sons, clans, and talk about memories, honor, and all that. Predator as a silent killer is now gone and their worry, fear, sorrow, and character-building must take up space to create a character we can relate to and root for.
But at what cost? The main character, Dek, is built up as a typical “underdog” from the start where he was supposed to be killed by his brother, and when his brother doesn’t kill him, his father kills his brother instead. Luckily, his brother manages to send him off on a spaceship to a planet that Dek had chosen as the target for his rite of passage. Genna, the planet with the terrible “calyx,” a monster that Dek’s father is even afraid of.
It’s insanely stereotypical, and instead of gaining more insight into a prime Predator, the premise is that we follow a weak and incompetent Predator in his attempt to redeem himself as a Yautja and earn his camouflage. We’re supposed to root for him and hope he returns to his homeworld with his prey and prove that he is a worthy Yautja.
And even though the premise is weak, it is from the start set up as a character arc for Dek where the end goal is not the point, but the friends we made along the way. Sigh. And in his adventure on Genna, he meets Thia, a Weyland-Yutani (interesting how the Alien universe often appears in Predator films but never vice versa) android who is stuck on Genna and needs Dek’s help. She is the most annoying character in a long time, she talks all the time and never has anything interesting to say. I would have easily preferred the film to be dialogue-free while we followed the Yautja silently and methodically adapting to the new conditions, but of course, we can’t have that.
Dan Trachtenberg, the director, tries to weave in aspects of the original 1987 film by giving us obviously planted events in the first act that come back in the third act, every single one of them, where Dek revisits and uses the threats he encountered to his advantage to the degree that instead of his shoulder-mounted cannon he has an acid-spraying snake as a pet sitting on
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