😈 Watch Out Boy, She'll Chew You Up...
Last week I had occasion to watch the new Predator: Badlands and I gotta say... it did not work for me. I'm not saying it's a bad film, just that I didn't care for it. I watched it at the insistence of my wife, who had already seen it and was itching to watch it again. She thoroughly enjoyed it. And she usually has a pretty good barometer for how much I'm going to like a movie, too. But this one was a miss, and it was a miss for reasons that I can very clearly point to. I know exactly what I didn't like about this movie.
For one thing, it barely feels like part of the franchise. They didn't bring back Martin Sheen or Sissy Spacek, there was no mention of the murders, not even a stylistic nod to Terrence Malick and... hold on, I'm being told that this is actually a Predator sequel, not a Badlands sequel. Recalibrating... Anyway, I felt like talking about what I thought didn't work, because it comes down to two things: genre expectations, and the old chestnut of show-don't-tell.
Let me be up front about one thing: I cannot dispute that it was well-executed. The movie does exactly what it's trying to do. And I will also throw out there that I really liked Prey, the previous franchise entry that was also directed by Dan Trachtenberg. I admire his willingness to try new things. Also, Elle Fanning is a compelling actor and does a great job serving as audience anchor and surrogate. And Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi's performance as Dek (the titular Predator) is incredible when you realize that he's conveying all of that using only his eyes and his physicality. There are some great things going on here.
And yet...
So, let's get into it. My first gripe is this, and it's a pretty common one: Predator: Badlands is not what I want out of a Predator film. It is a found-family sci-fi adventure with PG-levels of violence. And that doesn't feel right for Predator (or for Badlands, if we're being perfectly honest... okay, I'll drop this joke now). Dek is disconnected from his clan, Thia (Fanning) has weird attachment issues for a robot. Emotional attachment, I mean. She has physical attachment issues as well, what with her legs being missing, but that's less weird. Bud is... well, that would be a spoiler. Regardless, they're all leaning on each other and learning how to be companions. And that's not Predator.
It's also very cartoony. There's a moment where Dek spits on Bud and it's played up like this big emotional beat. There's a moment where Dek sets off an explosion and then turns to pose for the camera. The creatures all feel like sci-fi alien monsters. The blood is all vibrantly colored. Any humans that "die" are machines, and most of them have the same face. When two predators spar in the opening sequence, it turns into a CG martial arts movie where none of the characters feel like they have any weight. The Ewok Adventure felt more perilous than this! It plays, frankly, like a Disney movie, a side-story entry into the Weyland-Yutani Cinematic Universe rather than another sequel in the Predator series.
And let's talk about that opening sequence, shall we. Because my other big gripe about this movie is that it goes hard on the lore, and the lore is bad. It all raises more questions than it answers. The core nugget of the Predator franchise is that these are rich assholes who have come to Earth on safari. They have advanced technology that they use to hunt unsuspecting creatures from a place of safety. They are on holiday collecting trophies. Predator 2 showed us that they at least had a sense of sportsmanship, but the important thing is that this is a subset of a culture who are out hunting humans for sport, and that is what makes them the bad guys.
Since Badlands wants to show us a sympathetic predator, we start on the planet Yautja with Dek fighting his brother Kwei to earn his cloak and his rightful place in the clan. We learn about his relationship with his brother Kwei. We learn that Kwei was actually sent by their father to kill Dek because the Yautja cull their weak and Dek is small, if feisty. We see that Kwei thought Dek should have the chance to go on a ritual hunt on another planet to kill an apex predator, but then his father kills him for his defiance. It's what motivates Dek to voyage to the planet Genna, the "Death Planet" in order to... buh... I'm sorry but no.
This lore is bad. Rich assholes on safari is one thing, but turning this into a cultural rite of passage is just dumb. You can't build a technologically advanced society by only selecting for physical strength. You don't drill "Yautja hunt alone" into someone's mind in order to get them to join a clan... because that's literally the opposite of hunting alone. You don't kill both of your children because one was weak. I feel like there are evolutionary pressures working against that.
Now, culling the weak is definitely a thing in aggressive species, even pitting children against each other. Hyenas litter in pairs and the first thing the pups do is fight to the death. But there's an important distinction between hyena pups and the Yautja. Hyena pups are newborns! The Yautja are coded as human-ish and intelligent, and so it stands to reason that raising one to adulthood takes decades and resources. If it was clear that Dek was small from the start... why did he survive to adulthood!?
And the thing is, you don't need this scene, or the final scene that mirrors it. There is a moment when Dek is asked why he's on Genna, and he briefly describes how his father killed his brother, and that was all the backstory you needed. In that telling, his father is one individual who did wrong by his children and the survivor of them is processing his grief and trying to prove his worth. But when you include the bookending scenes, now you have an entire culture doing wrong by their children, and now all Yautja are just misunderstood victims of society. It's a the Disney Star Wars Scoundrel problem all over again. We can't just let bad guys be bad guys.
So this is an instance where choosing to "show, don't tell" actively makes it worse. We don't need to see Yautja culture because "rich assholes on safari, but this one is dealing with some trauma" is not a setup that requires a great deal of explanation. By including it, we're recontextualizing the entire franchise. And if you're going to include it, it needs to be better thought-out than this.
That's what I think anyway,
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