[COLUMN] Badlands Asks What It Means to Make the Predator the Hero of a Predator Movie | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Predator: Badlands, which is in theatres now and is one of the better franchise films of the year. It’s another really impressive film from Dan Trachtenberg and is worth seeing, if you’re at all interested.

Part of the magic of Predator: Badlands is that director Dan Trachtenberg doesn’t just create a Predator movie where the Predator is the hero, he also fundamentally understands what a Predator movie is and what it would mean to create a version of that story where the eponymous alien gets to be the hero.

Badlands is the first movie in the Predator franchise to feature an alien protagonist. To this point, the series has largely focused on human characters being targeted and tracked by the interstellar big game hunters, with the audience rooting for characters like Alan "Dutch" Schaefer (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover), Royce (Adrien Brody) and Naru (Amber Midthunder) as they faced down that extraterrestrial threat.

Badlands is instead told from the perspective of the alien hunter Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a member of the species known as the Yautja. To give a sense of how abstracted these alien hunters have been, Badlands marks the first time that that a theatrically-released Predator movie used the longstanding name “Yautja” for the species, and is only the second film in the series to employ it after the direct-to-streaming Killer of Killers earlier this year.

Dek is the “runt” of his clan, and an embarrassment to his father (also Schuster-Koloamatangi). Dek’s older brother (Mike Homik) refuses to cull Dek, instead sending him on the ritual coming-of-age hunt that all of this species must endure on the path to adulthood. After watching his father kill his brother for this display of weakness, Dek is effectively cast out to the incredibly hostile planet Genna, with a name that suggests “Gehenna”, a Hebrew term synonymous with hell.

Dek arrives in the jungle and tasks himself with tracking down and killing a creature known as the Kalisk, “a creature that can’t be killed, the definitive apex predator.” Dek hopes to accomplish what no previous member of his species has been able to pull off, and in doing so prove his worthiness among his people. It’s a classic coming of age story, a very straightforward narrative which makes sense for a story largely built around an alien central character who cannot speak English.

Part of the beauty of Trachtenberg’s management of the Predator franchise has been his willingness to embrace high concepts. Prey originated in carpool rides that Trachtenberg took to karate tournaments as a kid, hearing the plot of the original Predator described to him and thinking that it would be incredible to see Native American character Billy Sole (Sonny Landham) fight the Predator (Kevin Peter Hall) one-on-one. Prey is an extrapolation of that childish imagination.

Each of Trachtenberg’s ideas for the Predator franchise feel like they originated with a bunch of twelve-year-olds riding a sugar high. Prey drops the monster into the American West. Killer of Killer is an anthology film that pits the monster against a Viking (Lindsay LaVanchy), a samurai (Louis Ozawa Changchien) and a fighter pilot (Rick Gonzalez), and then throws those three characters into a battle royale. “What if there was a Predator movie where the Predator was the hero?” is a similar pitch.

And, to give credit where it’s due, these films work in large part because Trachtenberg has a very firm grasp of storytelling fundamentals, understanding what an audience needs in order to latch on to a movie. The rhythms and structures of these movies are very clearly communicated and articulated, allowing for Trachtenberg to take what are big risks on paper, to the point that the second of the three stories in Killer of Killers is effectively a silent movie and there are no humans in Badlands.

Badlands work hard to maintain a consistent thematic throughline. This is a film about dysfunctional and abusive families, so Dek’s relationship with his father and brother is parallelled with a similar dynamic between the synthetic Thia (Elle Fanning) and her “sister” Tessa (also Fanning) and the computer to which they report, M/UTH/UR (Alison Wright). Dek and Thia adopt an alien child they name “Bud” (Rohinal Nayaran), which turns out to be the child of the Kalisk.

Trachtenberg’s visual storytelling is consistently on-point. Thia spends most of the movie torn in half, having been dismembered by the Kalisk. Not only does that set up a really satisfying set piece in the final act, it’s also a none-too-subtle visual metaphor for the idea of these characters being cut off from their families: Dek from his brother, Thia from her sister, “Bud” from his mother. This choice gets a nice pay-off when Dek realizes that the Kalisk can’t be cut in half; that’s why it’s undefeatable.

Badlands is so thematically consistent, with such a strong central throughline of mother and child relationships between M/UTH/UR and Tessa and Thia or the Kalisk and “Bud”, that the film’s post-credits scene works as a thematically satisfying punchline. After Dek returns home and kills his father, a large group of craft appears on the horizon. Thia asks whether these are friends of Dek. Dek responds, “It’s my mother.” It’s a good joke, but it also ties a bow on one of the film’s big recurring fixations and dangling threads. It’s a much more satisfying post-credits scene than some lore tease.

However, Trachtenberg’s knack for these storytelling basics can make it easy to overlook his deeper understanding of the Predator franchise. Trachtenberg understands what the Predator series is “about” at its core, and not in terms of lore and trivia like Shane Black’s The Predator. Trachtenberg grasps what made the first film so enduring, why it resonated so strongly in its moment and how it spoke to contemporary American culture.

To put it bluntly, Trachtenberg understands that Predator is fundamentally a Vietnam movie. Not in a literal sense. In a literal sense, Predator is more directly in conversation with American foreign policy during the Reagan era, in Central and South America. Predator is not a Vietnam movie in the same way that, say, Apocalypse Now, Platoon, The Deer Hunter or Coming Home are Vietnam movies. It belongs to a more abstract and fantastical offshoot of the genre.

Predator is of a piece with other films of the era like Star Wars, Die Hard, Red Dawn and First Blood. These are films more about capturing the feeling of the war than any concrete reality. These are movies in which the protagonists are ultimately cast as scrappy rebels waging a guerilla war against a numerically and/or technologically superior force with dominance in the terrain – often in forests or jungles to reinforce the parallel.

These are big crowd-pleasing blockbusters that offer an affirmative response to John Rambo’s (Sylvester Stallone) infamous query, “Do we get to win this time?” In these spectacles, audiences got to watch all-American characters or actors triumph using the same mechanisms that the Viet Cong had employed against American armed forces during the Vietnam War. Sometimes, this metaphor was buried, as in Star Wars. Sometimes, as in Predator, it was extremely overt.

At the start of Predator, an elite military unit crosses a border that they shouldn’t cross into a country that they shouldn’t be in, to complete a mission that is off the books. The film opens with Dutch leading a well-oiled and well-honed team that easily cuts through the local rebels. However, then the eponymous alien arrives – an even more efficient and technologically advanced party that is also operating where he shouldn’t be – proving just as lethal to them as they were to the rebels.

At the end of Predator, Dutch defeats this outside force by shedding the trappings of modernity. He covers himself in mud. He uses torches. He fires bows and arrows. He crawls through the dirt. He turns his enemy’s technological superiority against them, in much the same way the Viet Cong outmaneuvered the American army. There’s a very compelling irony at play in this, right down to the casting of Austrian Schwarzenegger as a stand-in for American derring-do.

Trachtenberg clearly understands this. Prey and Badlands feel like the two truest sequels to Predator in the larger franchise because they understand that the Predator films were always about colonialism and imperialism. After all, what is the Predator but a science-fiction veneer applied to the classic colonial cliché of “the great white hunter?” Prey unfolds against the backdrop of the colonialization of North America, and understands that the Predator is just another colonial arrival.

Badlands does something similar. Trachtenberg leans heavily into the Vietnam imagery. In Predator, Poncho (Richard Chaves) translates one survivor’s account of an attack by a creature as if “the jungle … just came alive and took him”, which is a sentiment that certainly resonates with the experience of American soldiers in Vietnam. In Badlands, as soon as Dek arrives on Gehenna, he is attacked by what looks like a sentient tree stalk – like the jungle came alive and tried to take him.

One of the smarter choices in Badlands is that the central conflict is not ultimately between Dek and the Kalisk. It is instead between Dek and the colonial ambitions of the intergalactic conglomerate Weyland-Yutani, a company with goals that are so explicitly colonial in nature that their vehicles are branded with the slogan “building better worlds.” Weyland-Yutani have also set their sights on the Kalisk, hoping to capture it and exploit its unique properties.

Weyland-Yutani come pre-loaded with their own Vietnam iconography. Although the company is essential to the lore of the first Alien film, it was only officially named in James Cameron’s Aliens, in which it sent a bunch of colonial marines on a “bug hunt” that Cameron has openly admitted was a Vietnam allegory. In fact, Cameron was bouncing between the scripts for Aliens and Rambo: First Blood, Part II at the same time, so that sort of cross-pollination was inevitable.

Badlands puts Dek in the same situation that Dutch found himself in the original Predator. Dek arrives on Genna with his advanced technology to target an enemy not operating with those advantages, only to find himself caught in the maw of something much more technologically advanced than he is. Weyland-Yutani sends an army of synthetics (Cameron Brown) with flamethrowers and armored personnel carriers, establishing a military outpost on the planet's surface.

Just as the climax of Predator found Dutch shedding his technology to use the jungle against his enemy, the final act of Badlands finds Dek weaponizing Genna against the numerically and technologically superior imperial force. He employs guerilla tactics, setting ambushes and preparing improvised explosive devices. He uses his knowledge of the natural environment to his advantage. The Predator essentially gets to be the hero of his own Vietnam fantasy.

Badlands is just a really well put together movie, in a way that demonstrates how profound Trachtenberg understands the franchise, not just in terms of lore and continuity, but in terms of actual substance. Prey and Badlands are not the work of a writer browsing online listicles for franchise trivia, but instead reflect the care and attention of a filmmaker who has clearly thought a lot about Predator.

Badlands really is the platonic ideal for a franchise like this. It is, narratively and tonally, a hugely ambitious swing for the series. In terms of texture and plotting, there is no Predator film like Badlands. It offers something new and fun and interesting. However, while doing all of that, Badlands is still fundamentally a Predator movie. Like Prey, it demonstrates a more fundamental understanding of the series than many of the prior sequels. It’s out of this world.