Predator: Badlands Review – Hunt and Heart

Led by Elle Fanning’s dual performance, Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator: Badlands delivers brutal action, stunning visuals, and unexpected emotion.

The film opens with two Yautja brothers, Dek (suit: Reuben de Jong, voice: Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) and Kwei (suit: Mike Homik, voice: Stefan Grube), locked in ritual combat in a cave. The fight is fierce and visceral. When Dek falls and his father demands his death, Kwei’s refusal to strike him down leads to tragedy: the father kills Kwei instead. Dek’s silent reaction which brings him horror and rage carries more weight than dialogue ever could. From that moment, his exile feels less like a punishment and more like a burden he chooses to bear.

Dek decides to do what no Yautja of his clan has survived: journey to the planet Gemma, aka the Planet of Death, a world known among the hunters as the ultimate proving ground. To conquer it is to face not just the deadliest life forms but the truest reflection of one’s nature. For Dek, it’s not merely a trial of strength; it’s to avenge his brother’s death and prove he isn’t the weakest son of his father.

Once Dek arrives on this planet, he quickly realizes why it’s called the Planet of Death.  Trachtenberg’s world-building here is astonishing. This planet feels genuinely alien and a landscape designed to kill. Plants shoot spikes, causing you to get paralyzed by Grass that is as sharp as knives and glass. Even the trees seem predatory, their roots shifting and writhing when Dek gets too close. The moment he steps out of his ship, he’s attacked by the planet itself. It’s a sequence that immediately establishes tone and danger, and it’s some of the best visual storytelling in the franchise to date.

Elle Fanning steals the movie in a dual performance as the androids Thia and Tessa. As Thia, she brings the kind of energy that this universe has never really seen before with a lot of humor. She’s funny and strangely fascinated by Dek’s silence. Their scenes together are the best in the film: Thia trying to understand him, Dek trying to hide that he’s starting to care. You can sense the faint echo of something tender forming between them, though the film wisely never pushes it into romance. Instead, it becomes a story about empathy and friendship and how even a being that was built to kill can recognize a soul in someone else.

Then there’s Tessa, Thia’s twin and the film’s antagonist. Fanning makes her unsympathetic, but the writing doesn’t give her the menace she deserves. She’s meant to embody the opposite of Thia – someone who has cold logic and no empathy – but she comes across more like a plot device than a true threat. Her scenes work because of Fanning’s sheer control over her physicality, not because the script does anything fresh with her. It’s a shame, because she is almost like a female version of The Terminator. 

That script, by Patrick Aison and Brian Duffield, often teeters between profound and predictable. It nails the big emotional beats, such as Dek learning that strength isn’t just domination, but the broader story follows familiar rhythms. The idea of an exile proving himself by confronting his own nature isn’t new, and Badlands doesn’t reinvent that arc. Still, it feels more layered than the average franchise entry, especially in how it explores masculinity through alien culture. Dek’s understanding of “the hunt” changes; it’s not about trophies or victory, but endurance and self-definition.

Visually, the film is a knockwork. The action scenes are edited cleanly, and the camera never loses sight of geography. When Dek fights, you feel every movement and it pumps you with adrenaline. Every sequence where Dek has to go against the creatures on this planet is just a blast to watch, because it’s so well made and it all feels new.

If there’s a real weak spot, it’s in how thinly written the human (or humanoid) characters are outside of Dek and Thia. Tessa never becomes the intellectual match she’s meant to be. There’s also a predictability to the ending: you can see Dek’s final choice coming from a mile away. Still, the way Trachtenberg frames it with restraint, not spectacle still gives it resonance.

What stuck with me about Predator: Badlands isn’t the kills or the action, but Dek himself. Beneath the armor and the rage is someone trying to make sense of what strength really means. The movie might follow a familiar path, but the heart underneath it feels new. I firmly believe the Predator franchise is in safe hands with Dan Trachtenberg.

Predator: Badlands will be released in U.S. and Canadian theaters, in U.K. and Irish cinemas, and globally in theaters and IMAX on November 7, 2025.