There wasn’t a lot that was particularly great about the 1980s, but one by-product of that ridiculous decade was big, dumb action movies. Inevitably starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, they were the sorts of movies you could cheer at. There aren’t so many big-budget movies like that today, which is why I’m so completely taken by the trailer for Predator: Badlands.
No delays, enjoy the trailer first:
Let’s figure out how we got here. 1987's Predator took the then-current U.S. obsession with special forces and commando units fighting in the jungle, and added an alien. And Arnie. And it was goofy-ass perfect. The astonishingly po-faced approach to such a ridiculous concept was directed by the soon-to-be mighty John McTiernan, the movie he made before Die Hard (and just 16 years before his career would collapse in a heap of abysmal flops, and 19 before criminal proceedings would begin that would end with him spending a year in prison for wiretapping and perjury). Predator was a massive success despite an inevitable critical mauling, but has one of the weirdest legacies of the era.
Rather than spawning a run of rinse-and-repeat sequels, it instead saw the fantastically incongruous and amazingly terrible Predator 2, a Danny Glover vehicle directed by Stephen Hopkins (Lost in Space), which is basically Babe 2: Pig in the City but with killer aliens. That put the kibosh on the franchise for over a decade, until the satanic deal was struck that allowed spin-off universe Alien vs. Predator to become a movie in 2004. In 2010 we got the almost entirely forgotten Predators directed by the almost entirely forgotten Nimród Antal, then in 2018 The Predator from the occasionally brilliant Shane Black (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Iron Man 3). That too got slaughtered by critics, and despite making back its money is considered a failure, including by Black himself. (It didn’t help that he cast a sex offender friend of his in a minor role, and then defended this.)
With all variants of the “Predator” title worn out, this finally brings us to 2022's Prey, from director Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane), which heads back to 1719, focusing on the predator/prey relationship between an alien hunter and young Comanche woman, and boom, someone had finally figured out a way to make a new Predator movie that didn’t suck. Then just last month, animated feature Predator: Killer of Killers was released, set across four disparate timelines, and again won critics over to a long-struggling franchise.
So how is Trachtenberg following up this far calmer, far more composed approach to the alien hunter franchise? By going batshit ‘80s crazy, and I am delighted.
Straight away, we get a shot of a synthetic woman, and a view through a camera with the text “WEYLAND-YUTANI BIO-WEAPONS DIVISION” stamped on screen. Yes. YES. We’re straight away declaring this is now, surely, in the Alien vs. Predator timeline—one completely erased from existence by Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels—and this time we’re on the side of the Predator.
Set on the Predators’ home planet, we’ve got a young Predator, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), thrown out of his clan to become prey, who teams up with the synth remains of Thia (Elle Fanning) to survive. Then we have flying ships, behemothic monsters, somehow a bunch of armed humans, and then the closing image of what I’m pretty sure is a P-5000 Powered Work Loader mech suit—the thing Ridley uses at the end of Aliens.
Apparently an entire language has been developed for the Predators, which stuntman-actor Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi learned for the part, and clearly everyone involved has gone wonderfully, spectacularly mad.
The only thing that could make this better would be an Arnie cameo
We only have a few months to wait, the film releasing to theaters November 7.
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