Storytelling is always a matter of perspective. In Predator, the classic 1987 science fiction film, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a man confronted with an alien like none we’d seen before on screen – a hyper-intelligent apex warrior from a technologically advanced planet.
From the man’s point of view, it’s a horror story. A monster is stalking him in the woods, taking his compatriots out one by one. From the monster’s point of view, a being of great dignity and skill, it’s a hunting trip.
Predator: Badlands marks the starkest departure from anything we’ve seen so far in the franchise precisely because it finally switches perspective. In director Dan Trachtenberg’s follow-up to Prey, now in cinemas across the Middle East, we follow the Predator on a hunting trip on an alien world – turning him into a stoic hero and the story into a rip-roaring adventure.
“It’s funny, because this story was always lying in plain sight,” Trachtenberg tells The National. “Even from the original ’87 movie, what the Predator was wearing spoke to a culture, and its actions spoke to having a code. I thought a lot about hitman movies and gangster movies – movies about bad people that, if we encountered them in the real world, we’d think they should be in jail. But inside the world of those films, we root for them.”
That notion – the idea of rooting for the monster – lies at the heart of Badlands. Just as Dutch in the first film said, “If it bleeds, we can kill it”, Trachtenberg has turned that phrase inward. The Predator bleeds, too. It can be wounded, humiliated, even outcast – and that humanity, for lack of a better word, makes for a compelling character. “It’s a culture with a code,” he says. “A very Spartan-like culture, a brutal culture, but a code nonetheless. And despite doing bad deeds, there’s probably a way we can find root-ability in a character like that.”
But in Badlands, the creature – played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi through a combination of motion-capture and man-in-a-suit tradition – is not defanged. “It’s about him being up against things that are far worse than him,” Trachtenberg says. “Being put down, being outcast, and feeling the need to prove himself to the clan, but also inward. That’s all very universal, and all of us can find ourselves in those things.”
It’s the most emotionally ambitious Predator film yet – a strange thing to say about a franchise once defined by biceps and bullets, but it works. “We needed him to have a reason for us to care,” Trachtenberg says. “We needed him to have something to prove.”
If Prey redefined the myth through a stripped-back survival story, Badlands goes operatic. It’s a hero’s journey, but one told through a creature’s silence and stoicism. The Predator, often mistaken for mindless, is suddenly the centre of a tale about exile, family and purpose.
Here, his name is Dek and he's the "runt of the litter" of a powerful family. His father wants him dead, viewing him as a weak stain on their bloodline. His brother dies defending him – allowing Dek to escape to an alien planet, where he can capture its most deadly beast, bring it home, and prove he is the true warrior his brother believed him to be.
Trachtenberg likens it to the morally complex crime sagas he grew up on. “Like The Godfather, True Grit, Midnight Run,” he says, “those are movies about characters with codes, who are intense and intimidating, but whose aggression is often a mask for deeper feelings. That’s where our story lives.”
It’s not just cinema that shaped Badlands but art, too. “Conan the Barbarian, and the Frank Frazetta paintings – that all felt like the energy of the Yautja,” he says, referring to the name given to the Predator species in the expanded universe. “Mad Max: Road Warrior was in there, too – the idea of the lone wanderer. And Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name. A terse leading man who’s really intimidating and intense, but often paired with someone who tries to scratch away and dig that stuff out. That was where the need for our robot character came from.”
The new film pairs the Predator with synthetic companion Thia played by Elle Fanning – part droid, part conscience. She's a part of the mysterious Weyland-Yutani corporation of the Alien franchise, which trawls the universe looking for monsters it can turn into biological weapons. When Dek meets Thia, they realise their goals are the same, and they need each other to conquer the beast.
It’s an unexpected inverted echo of the Ripley-and-Bishop dynamic from Aliens, and deliberately so. But to make it work when there's so many Alien and Predator films around, Trachtenberg had to set the film in a part of the timeline that wouldn't affect the other ongoing storytelling.
So, what year is Predator: Badlands set in the timeline? This move means that it's further than we've ever seen the Predator franchise go –and further than even Alien: Resurrection, which would put it past the year 2379.
“We’re far enough in the future that we can play with those things,” Trachtenberg says. “I didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes. When we started, I didn’t know exactly what was going on with Romulus or Alien: Earth. So we just went way into the future. Whatever happens in those things can have happened – and we’re doing what we’re doing.”
The collaboration between the Alien and Predator timelines has long been a point of fascination – and occasional frustration – for fans. But Trachtenberg hints that this new era of shared storytelling may finally achieve harmony. “Now that we all exist in the world, we can go forward more aware of each other,” he says. “Maybe hold hands and all that stuff.”
His approach reflects the restraint that made Prey stand out: a careful rebalancing of myth and meaning, brutality and beauty. The original Predator may have ended with Dutch staring into the jungle, battered and haunted, but Badlands looks outward – to new worlds and new ways of seeing.
It’s fitting that one of the final lines in the 1987 film was: “What the hell are you?” Nearly four decades later, Trachtenberg seems to have answered it. The Predator, at last, is someone worth knowing.
Predator: Badlands is in cinemas now across the Middle East
