“Who would want to survive on their own?”

With all the weird juxtapositions that result from our media interconnectedness, one of the funnier ones is that the new Predator: Badlands is on Disney’s streaming service. I’m imagining some unwitting family watching this watered-down, family friendly monster movie complete with wisecracking sidekick and cute little merchandise-ready critter and then throwing on Predator (1987) and/or Predator 2 (1990) and having their faces blasted off by their nihilistic brutality.

I have extreme bias against the ultra-digital environments and weightless CGI action; likewise when sequels/prequels strive to humanize and render sympathetic villains of previous films. After earning plenty of good will with the underrated Prey (2022) and the animated anthology Predator: Killer of Killers (2025), Dan Trachtenberg commits to both of these things in Badlands, presenting a bildungsroman for a young Predator who is shipped off to a hostile planet to claim the life of its most fearsome fauna—a rite of passage of sorts to go along with Predator language and culture and customs and mythology that no one was asking for (and by no one I mean at least not me).

Amidst that imaginative and well-integrated environment with all its killer flowers and lively tree roots and whatnot, our Predator outcast (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) befriends the torso of a Weyland-Yutani synthetic (Elle Fanning)—retethering the franchise to the Alien films—who helps him not only to survive but to shed his warrior tribe’s lone wolf mentality, so much so that by the end his friends and enemies have been swapped and he’s gone home with his found family to destroy the father who sent him on the initial suicide mission.

It’s a pleasant, easily digestible movie, possessing neither the tactile-digital spectacle of Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) nor the thematic and narrative depth of a classic sci-fi blockbuster. Unfortunately, Disney feels like the right place for this movie because it feels tonally akin to the modern Star Wars films if not the putrid string of Godzilla and King Kong crossovers—formulaically plotted, thematically predictable, morally smooth-edged, risk-averse in all respects. But Star Wars was never rated R. I thought Trachtenberg gave the series a breath of fresh air with Prey, but Badlands is only marginally less stale than Predators (2010) and The Predator (2018).