4th November 2025 at 5.00pm Original Title: Predator: Badlands Since taking over the Predator franchise , Dan Trachtenberg has been like a kid in a grisly candy store. Not content with merely repeating the age-old formula — a band of humans face down an alien warrior — he’s gone buck-wild with the possibilities, first sending the Predator back in time to battle a female Native American in Prey , then chucking in Vikings, samurai and World War II pilots in animated anthology Killer Of Killers . For his latest trick, and his most ambitious by far, he’s headed into space. Oh, and this time, the spine-ripping creature with mandibles is the good guy. The latter alone is a truly audacious swing, taking an iconic ’80s villain and asking the audience to root for him (imagine a movie told from the POV of Gary Busey’s Mr Joshua from Lethal Weapon ). Not only that, but the Predator speaks entirely in a grunted alien tongue, helpfully translated via subtitles. But here, somehow, it works — and gangbusters. A prologue introduces us to young Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), who may be eight feet tall and bristling with futuristic weaponry, but is considered a shrimp by his burly dick of a dad. Dek is quickly dispatched to an even more death-happy world, where — to borrow a line from Avatar — every living thing that crawls, flies or squats in the mud wants to kill him and eat his eyes for jujubes. Cue the start of a thoroughly entertaining adventure, which feels like a particularly pulpy sci-fi novel from the ’60s brought to life and beamed into your eyeballs. A geeky commingling of lurid sci-fi, comedy and rowdy action. Dek’s objective is pleasingly simple: to kill the most badass thing on this planet, namely the “unkillable Kalisk”, a giant beast that chomps anything it sees. But achieving this is complicated not only by the fact that even the grass in this place is deadly (Trachtenberg has particular fun conjuring up fatal flora), but that he is soon forced to team up with a perky Weyland-Yutani synthetic (Elle Fanning), or at least half of one, since her legs have been taken by the Kalisk. What seems like the kind of daft double-act that would be dreamed up by a sci-fi-giddy 14-year-old boy — a Predator teams up with a robot! — quickly becomes extremely winning, with the surly star-beast the straight man and the android his yappy foil. And before long they’re joined by a blue, monkey-like alien sidekick to complete the gang. Die-hard Predator fans might be choking with indignation by this point — the creature once hyped up with the words “There’s no stopping what can’t be stopped, no killing what can’t be killed” made softer, gentler and even the butt of jokes? There’s a possibility some berk might even be inspired to write a think-piece lamenting that the Predator has gone “woke”. But there’s no doubt that Trachtenberg is steeped in love for this green-blooded action icon. And he comes up with one cheer-worthy moment after another for both of his lead characters: there’s a bit with a pulse rifle (yes, the pulse rifle from Aliens ) that will surely blow the mind of any child of the ’80s, while Fanning gets an inspired action sequence involving her top half and her legs independently battling goons. More than anything, though, Predator: Badlands has heart. Not something anyone was necessarily expecting from a film featuring this character, but it works: there are shades of Guardians Of The Galaxy here, as a truly misfit team take on impossible odds. The Guardians parallels extend to the visuals, with pumped-up battles against alien beasties. Here, the film is a little less successful — Badlands lacks the we’re-in-space wow factor of the Avatar films, with a slight feeling of numbness setting in when blobby CGI monsters take centre-stage. This, though, is a relative quibble, when our unlikely heroes make for such surprisingly delightful company, learning to work together and master their environment while still racking up a kill-count higher than any in the franchise. (Throwing synths into the mix allows Trachtenberg to indulge in his most bloodthirsty tendencies — since that blood is white, not red — while still allowing the film to come in as a 12A.) Throughout its runtime, Badlands is big popcorn fun, a geeky commingling of lurid sci-fi, comedy and rowdy action that gets high off its own supply. Put it this way: if you’ve ever wanted to see a tooling-up sequence featuring a Predator, Christmas has come early. If you can get on board with the paradigm change, this is an amped-up rock-gig of a movie and the most fun Predator since the original. People: Source: https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/predator-badlands/