Editor’s Note: Freeline Media’s movie critic, Mike Fried, offers his thoughts on the latest in the Predator franchise, so all you fans of those killer aliens, read on!

By MIKE FRIED

PREDATOR: BADLANDS (Hulu)

****

So if you are tuning into Predator: Badlands without having seen Predator, Predator 2, Prey and Predator: Killer of Killers, just STOP.

Watch those first as they give you a good background leading into this one, which redefines the franchise. 

IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THOSE, STOP READING NOW AND WATCH THEM! 

As we know from Killer of Killers, the Predator comes from the planet Yautja Prime.  Dek is an outcast of his clan because he is a runt and he attempts to get his father’s approval by hunting a creature on the death planet Genna. The father, right out of the 1920s mafia, orders Dek’s older brother to kill him but the older brother sacrifices himself so that Dek can escape.  Arriving on Genna, Dex finds that the plant and animal life on the planet are as dangerous as the Kalisk he is hunting is supposed to be. He encounters and teams up with Thia, a legless wiseass android who is the sole surviving member of her team, who offers to help Dex kill the Kalisk which killed Thia’s team. 

This really is terrific filmmaking and an ingenious way to continue the series. As the opening card says, “Yautja are prey to none. Friend to none. Predator to all.”  As we know, the Predator has gotten its ass kicked in every previous installment and as we learned from KoK, the Predators do not take this effrontery lying down.  

This is about Predators going against other Predators, much as Humans kill other Humans.  There appears to be no credo like Planet of the Apes’ “Ape shall not kill Ape.” 

Complicating matters is that Thia has an identical twin android “sister” named Tessa, damaged but operational, who has been retrieved by none other than the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, which nicely incorporates the Alien Universe into the Predator Universe.  And of course MU/TH/UR has told Tessa that her mission is still outstanding and that the Yautja stands in the way of recovering the asset for the Bio-Weapons division, you know — Carter Burke’s employer.  So Tessa and her new team set out to intercept the threat. 

And what Dan Trachtenberg has done is making one of sci-fi cinema’s great antagonists into a protagonist that you find yourself cheering on, which is no small feat.  

The planet Genna is a bleak, hostile world that is very unforgiving. And Dek could not navigate it without Thia, meaning that the Yautja’s “predator to all” credo might be on the line. 

Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi is absolutely terrific as Dex — he is a badass Predator even if he is a runt, and his willingness to partner up with Thia goes against everything his race stands for.  He does a great job mimicking “Dutch” of the first film, leveraging the hostile territory of Genna much as Arnie did in Val Verde.

But it is Elle Fanning that is the heart of this film. She adds a great deal of  humanity to the film as Thia and a great deal of soulless evil as Tessa. She is more than up to the task of playing the double roles and she is potentially poised to be the next Ripley in the Alien/Predator world.  One can hope. 

The action scenes are exciting and the story reminds me of the movie Jabberwocky where Michael Palin’s Dennis Cooper, a skill-less peasant searches for the horrible beast that threatens the countryside.  But the screenplay also goes deeply Shakespearean as well. 

This is a heavily laden CGI film that creates a new world like Avatar but unlike Cameron’s so-so films the effects are seamless and don’t beat the audience over the head. The cinematography is compelling and is symbiotic with the CGI effects.  

This is the third best film in the franchise after the original and 2022’s Prey. 

And that’s no small achievement, considering how much the franchise devolved. 

It’s a lot of fun. 

WATCH IT!

Michael Fried has no formal training in movies, except having watched over 26,000+ movies — if not more — in his 60-plus years on this planet, starting with Goldfinger as his first cinema experience. He knows what he likes and he knows what he doesn’t like, and it’s quite often different from the conventional wisdom. He knows that the best franchise is Godzilla and he loves action movies and comedies. He has not been nominated for any awards except some boring insurance awards which has no applicability to movies (with the possible exceptions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and John Cassavettes’ Big Trouble). He is part of a team that won the 1980 SUNY Albany Trivia content by correctly guessing the question, “Who played the president of Klopstockia in Million Dollar Legs?” So he has that going for him, which is nice.

Contact Mike at moviemike3@yahoo.com and mike.fried@yahoo.com.