Predator: Badlands is the franchise's second consecutive creative success and confirmation that Prey was not an anomaly. Dan Trachtenberg's follow-up takes the franchise in yet another new direction, following a Predator protagonist rather than a human one, and the gamble pays off more completely than the premise might suggest. It is a film of genuine formal ambition and considerable craft, and its willingness to centre the franchise's iconic antagonist as a character rather than a threat gives the material a freshness that the human-focused sequels had largely exhausted.
At a Glance
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Runtime: 102 minutes
Starring: Dimitri Abold, Elle Trahan, Raphael Luce, Michelle Thrush
Release: 2025
Critics Rating: ★★★★ (4/5 stars, a bold and largely successful formal experiment)
Audience Rating: ★★★★ (4/5 stars, a worthy successor to Prey)
Review Breakdown
Plot
A Predator, exiled from its clan for reasons the film reveals gradually, must navigate a hostile alien world while being hunted by both its own kind and the world's indigenous creatures. The decision to follow the Predator as protagonist rather than antagonist is the film's most significant creative risk, and Trachtenberg handles it with a confidence that makes the premise feel less experimental than it sounds. The film's structure mirrors the original's in reverse: where McTiernan's film systematically stripped Dutch of his advantages, Badlands systematically reveals the Predator's vulnerabilities, giving the creature a dramatic interiority the franchise had not previously attempted. The plot's gradual revelation of the exile's backstory gives the film a narrative patience that rewards attention.
Characters
The exiled Predator, designated Dek in the film's promotional materials, is the franchise's most formally challenging protagonist, a character communicated entirely through physical performance and the film's visual language rather than through dialogue or conventional characterisation. Trachtenberg's direction gives Dek a legible emotional arc without anthropomorphising the character to the point of undermining its alien nature, which is a more difficult balance to achieve than it sounds. The human characters the Predator encounters are deliberately sketched rather than fully developed, which is a defensible creative choice given the film's perspective but one that limits the emotional range available to the film's second act. Michelle Thrush's elder, encountered in the film's most affecting sequence, is the film's most fully realised human creation.
Tone
Trachtenberg pitches the film at a register of alien isolation that is unlike anything else in the franchise, using the hostile world setting to create an atmosphere of environmental dread that gives the Predator's vulnerability a physical immediacy. The film is less interested in action spectacle than in the experience of being alone and hunted in an unfamiliar environment, which gives it a contemplative quality that distinguishes it from every other entry in the franchise. The action sequences, when they arrive, are staged with a physical clarity and a spatial intelligence that makes them among the franchise's most effective, but they function as punctuation rather than as the film's primary register.
Meaning / Themes
Badlands is the franchise's most explicitly philosophical entry since Predator 2, using the exiled Predator's situation to examine the relationship between identity and community, between the individual and the culture that formed them. The exile's violation of the hunt's code, and its gradual renegotiation of what honour means outside the context of the clan, gives the film a thematic depth that the more purely action-focused entries do not attempt. The film's most interesting dramatic thread is the parallel between the Predator's exile and the human communities it encounters, each of which has its own relationship to belonging and exclusion.
Direction
Trachtenberg's direction is the franchise's most formally ambitious since Scott's original, a film of considerable visual intelligence that gives the alien world a physical specificity and an atmospheric density that makes it feel genuinely inhabited. The film's use of the Predator's perspective, including sequences shot from the creature's thermal and electromagnetic vision, gives the audience an experiential access to the protagonist's perception that the franchise had not previously attempted at this sustained length. Brian Tyler's score is the franchise's most distinctive since Schachner's Prey, drawing on the alien world's sonic environment to create a musical identity that reinforces the film's formal ambitions.
Cultural Reception
Predator: Badlands received strong reviews on its release, widely regarded as a worthy successor to Prey and confirmation that the franchise had found a new creative direction after the disappointment of The Predator. The decision to follow a Predator protagonist was the film's most discussed creative choice, with most reviewers finding it more successful than they had anticipated. Trachtenberg's formal ambition was cited as evidence that the franchise's future lay in giving distinctive filmmakers genuine creative freedom.
Final Verdict: A bold formal experiment that succeeds more completely than its premise might suggest. The exiled Predator is the franchise's most formally challenging protagonist, Trachtenberg's direction gives the alien world a physical specificity and an atmospheric density that makes it feel genuinely inhabited, and the film's willingness to centre the franchise's iconic antagonist as a character rather than a threat gives the material a freshness the human-focused sequels had largely exhausted. Predator: Badlands is not the film anyone expected. It is a better one.