At some point on this here internet I started seeing people refer to the alien species from the PREDATOR movies as “Yautja.” I sure never noticed anybody calling them that in the movies. Looking it up now I have learned it comes from a 1994 book called Aliens Vs Predator: Prey by Steve Perry and Stephani Perry*, which is a novelization of the original Aliens Vs Predator comics. Okay, so it seems the word has been around for a while, but still – Yautja mind if you think I’m gonna call those things anything other than Predators. That has always been my stance.

So I laughed when the very first thing on screen in the new movie PREDATOR: BADLANDS was the word “Yautja.” They use the word dozens of times, conservatively. So it’s official now – they’re Yautja, from the planet Yautja Prime. But in this review they’re Predators.

The series started in 1987, but right now is the first time it’s ever seemed to have a direction. Usually each installment is a new team trying a new angle with mixed enough results that we’re not sure if there will ever be a next time, but if there is we know it’ll be another new team trying another new angle. That changed in 2022 when Dan Trachtenberg (10 CLOVERFIELD LANE) directed the straight-to-Hulu movie PREY – the first ever universally acclaimed PREDATOR sequel. It was so beloved they signed him up to do the animated PREDATOR: KILLER OF KILLERS that came out earlier this year (a fun movie that I didn’t review because I didn’t want to give away the clever thing they did with the anthology structure), and now he got to do an actual theatrical release. I saw it in IMAX! There’s also a 3D version.

This is a very different type of PREDATOR movie, because the Predator (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, RED, WHITE & BRASS) is the protagonist. His name is Dek , and he’s small for a Predator, introduced in ritual combat with his much larger brother Kwei (6’8” New Zealand basketball player Mike Homik), who he just can’t beat. So to officially earn his place in the clan he must choose a dangerous prey to hunt on another planet. He selects a huge bastard called a Kalisk, on the planet Genna, because it’s considered “unkillable,” and even his father (heavyweight fighter and strongman Reuben De Jong) is afraid of it. Show up Pops or die trying, he must figure. The macho idiot.

Dek quickly finds that Genna is already dangerous before you get to the unkillable beast, or even setting aside all the deadly animals. He just keeps running into plants that slash, poison or explode, all kinds of shit. I like the wide shot where you notice that hanging out under the ledge he’s on is some tentacled thing that then eats a passing bird. Random nature violence awaits in every corner.

During a particularly fraught moment when the poisonous flora is about to get him munched by the hungry fauna, Dek meets an android named Thia (Elle Fanning, MALEFICENT). She calls herself a synth, short for synthetic, because this takes place in the ALIEN universe and she’s a product/employee of Weyland-Yutani, on Genna cataloging the wildlife. She’s hanging out like the Scarecrow in THE WIZARD OF OZ because she got torn in half by the very creature he’s hunting. She offers to help him escape his current predicament and track the Kalisk if he carries her to the other half of her body.

I read that Trachtenberg compared their situation to Chewbacca carrying busted C-3PO around in THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, which hadn’t occurred to me. I was thinking of something like THE DEFIANT ONES, or some western I can’t think of where people are bound together. It’s a mismatched buddy movie where one buddy is this battle-obsessed alien monster who insists “[Predators] hunt alone” and the other is a chipper, inquisitive torso who, after one monster fight asks him “What was your favorite part?” That’s another new situation for a PREDATOR movie – it’s primarily just two characters, one speaking a subtitled language through his spider-like animated mouth.

Yeah, it’s odd at first to see such a verbal Predator. The voice is deep, the language is weird enough, the accent sounds kind of Russian to me, I like the gimmick that Thia can speak English because of universal translation technology that allows everyone to hear it in their own language. How to make the Predators talk was not really a challenge previous entries spent much time on, because generally the Predators have pretty limited screen time, popping up when they’re about to try to kill someone. Until now most of their mythology has been implication or speculation. We get excited about whatever tantalizing bits of them we see, and what our imaginations can extrapolate about what they’re all about. Here it’s all Predator, and what’s amazing is it just feels natural, as if this is what a PREDATOR sequel always has been, because it’s the one we always imagined.

None of the other movies were actually about the Predators, they were about the people who encounter the Predators. So it’s a clever touch that this one has no people in it. Dek and Thia will meet up with the rest of her Weyland-Yutani expedition, but the entire crew are synthetics like her, most of them identical drones (stuntman Cameron Brown, who also plays an Alien in Alien: Earth). There’s something kinda sad about that – it’s a mission too dangerous or too unimportant to risk humans on, so it’s the computer sending out machines. Basically automated, webcrawling the universe. Thia gets all banged up but who cares, she’s just equipment. Dek calls her a “tool,” but he’s still being more respectful of her than The Company is, because she gave him that idea to rationalize why a big macho man like him would even cooperate with somebody, let alone make a friend. ‘Cause of how he was raised.

The simple set up allows for all kinds of pulpy sci-fi fun. I don’t know why I always feel like I have to specify that there’s lots of digital effects. Of course there are. I think they’re well done, fantasy-painting-come-to-life type of shit. Like Spider-man or Blade II or anybody the Predator can sometimes turn animated to leap or swing around. But I think most of it is practical – they chose a stuntman to play Dek so he could be there in a suit, just with the face animated to be more expressive. It’s so cool to see a Predator running around and getting to do all the action hero poses. Stunt coordinator: Tom Hardy’s stunt double Jacob Tomuri; fight choreographer: Keanu’s lead stunt double in JOHN WICK 4 Vincent Bouillon.

That opening spar between brothers gave me an enormous grin, it’s so shamelessly over-the-top in its 13-year-old-boy sense of awesomeness. They’re using these light-up axes and things, the electrified buzzing and zapping sounding like a Transformer transforming in a ball pit full of light sabers. Hats off to the sound design by James Miller (NO ONE WILL SAVE YOU), as well as the very strong score by Sarah Schachner (various video games, PREY) and Benjaman Wallfisch (BLADE RUNNER 2049). I’d say there are notes of the Alan Silvestri orchestral bombast, but with more electronic textures, tribal percussion and occasionally a robotic chanting in what I assume is the Predator language. I hope some day we get a translation and it’s some kind of Survivor style inspirational jam about being forged in fire and reaching the summit and shit like that.

The screenplay is credited to Patrick Aison (Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Treadstone, PREY), story by Aison & Trachtenberg, and they keep the fun ideas coming. I love the point when the two halves of Thia begin to operate separately. There’s a real sense of absurdity to the things they do, but also it’s kinda surreal to see a pair of legs walking around by themselves. And you know, not once in the many times I’ve seen or thought about Bishop torn in half in ALIENS did I wonder if the legs could get up and walk away. (For the record this is set further into the future than any of the ALIEN movies, so we don’t have to worry about the robot technology being different.)

There’s another robot like Tessa named Thia, who she considers to be her sister, but it is not the healthiest sibling relationship. The makeup, hair and performances by Fanning are so good because it’s always instantly clear which is which. Tessa (spoiler) finds Dek’s crashed Predator ship and takes all of his weapons. When he discovers his armory is gone, he goes back through everything he’s learned about the deadly species of Genna and uses them to create an all-natural, biological version of Predator weaponry. I love that moment in a good story like this where you realize oh, of course. All the obstacles he faced before were establishing what he was going to use in the final battle. I didn’t see it coming and yet it could only ever be this. And it’s an echo of the original PREDATOR, when Dutch recognized that none of his military weaponry was doing any good and he could only beat the Predator by stripping down, covering himself in mud, making traps out of sticks and shit. Dek is going Dutch.

I didn’t mention some drama that happens between Dek and his family members, even though it’s part of the set up, because I just didn’t want to spoil it. I like the brutality of the Predator traditions and how heroic that makes the choice not to follow them. We’re humans so we feel validated when this Predator adopts the human concept of honor instead of the Predator version. When it comes down to it, this is the same basic story I love in many samurai movies: a total badass guy stubbornly believes in a macho code, it’s fun and funny to watch him live by it, but ultimately he realizes how it hurts him and moves beyond it. (That’s why I sometimes get a little annoyed with fans of The Mandalorian saying “This is the way” all the time. To me the beauty of that show is him slowly realizing that this is not the way! Question your indoctrination.)

There’s also a really interesting parallel between the Predator and the synth. Thia’s understanding of emotion is limited because she’s a machine, but she’s still more willing to express emotion than him because of his macho culture that considers sensitivity to be weakness. Ultimately both of them learn from each other and go beyond their programming to find a better way together. A theme I will never grow tired of. Movies are beautiful.

PREDATOR: BADLANDS is easily one of the best PREDATOR movies. The truth is that I enjoy them all on some level, but the first two and these last two live action ones are leaps and bounds ahead of the rest. It’s an exciting time when I assume Trachtenberg will get working on another one and I would be excited if it was these characters again but more excited if it was something totally different. If he keeps making them at this level and keeps coming up with new ways to do it each time that’s really gonna be something. Shit, it already is something. Congratulations, everybody. The PREDATOR series is legit now.

*This is not the same Steve Perry from Journey. He’s a writer and pencak silat practitioner who also wrote the Star Wars book Shadows of the Empire, where he introduced the fictional martial art Teräs Käsi, later used in a fighting video game and referenced in SOLO. So he created at least two long-lasting Nerd Shit concepts.

Stephani Perry is his daughter, who also writes under the name S.D. Perry, and she did novelizations for TIMECOP and VIRUS plus a bunch of Resident Evil, Star Trek, etc.