Predator: Badlands

In Predator: Badlands find a kind of sangam for a great many of the former 20th Century Fox's science fiction and fantasy properties. Of course there's everybody's favourite invisible hunters with an added army of disposable synthetics, on loan from the corporate wing of the Alien franchise, not far behind. Such intermingling isn't new but the cross-pollination doesn't end there. Hanging on a trophy room wall in a derelict space craft there's a skull from one of Independence Day's locust-like Harvesters and, in creating a extraterrestrial environment seemingly dedicated to stripping outsiders to the bone in record time, there's more than a little of Avatar's Pandora in the mix for these bad lands. The film's approach to storytelling differs from previous Predator installments as well, harkening to the armoured, near-mute leads seen in Star Wars television spin-offs. The Volume VFX of The Mandalorian is obvious but, as well, there's something of Genndy Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars at play, certainly in terms of the deft touch for character-based action that director Dan Trachtenberg demonstrates here. The centering of an uncommunicative, vengeful berserker as he traverses an unmapped environment isn't a million miles away from Conan the Barbarian either. Sadly, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi's Dek, the outcast Predator of Badlands, never quite gets enough space to voice the bitter introspection afforded to Schwarzenegger's orphaned reaver. Really, all that's missing is a good, hard nod towards the Planet of the Apes. Although, having said that, there's something a little stark in play with Weyland Yutani's busy little mechanoids. Several layers of artificial hierarchy plot and probe without any clear input from a flesh and bone master. For all we know, Elle Fanning's crumbling androids toil in a far future were the post-human dreams of David (from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant) have been fully realised.