You don’t expect a meet-cute in a “Predator” movie, but that’s just one of the surprises in this latest edition. Space is the place in “Predator: Badlands,” specifically a planet where an android researcher, Thia (a delightful Elle Fanning), meets Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a Predator who’s on the hunt. He’s tall, has fearsome mandibles and a face to match. She’s bubbly, talkative and has been severed in two, leaving her upper half stuck in a nest and her lower half M.I.A. He frees her and promptly hauls her off on an odyssey filled with dangers, including from a venal corporation, the gold standard in contemporary villainy.
Three years ago, the writer-director Dan Trachtenberg pumped new red and acid-green blood into the “Predator” franchise with the kinetic thriller “Prey.” Set in 1719 in the Northern Great Plains, that movie is essentially a stripped-down underdog story in which a Comanche heroine with an adorable pooch and serious tomahawk skills goes up against a Predator, an extraterrestrial that’s hunting humans. Streamlined and tense, “Prey” expanded the series’ overarching timeline with a story of anticolonial resistance. Trachtenberg sweetened the whole thing with the usual violence but also by incorporating elemental satisfactions like distinct characters, visual coherency, modulated pacing and even beauty.
“Prey” was a shrewd shift for this franchise, which began in 1987 with “Predator.” Enjoyably blunt and absurd, the inaugural film introduced its title enigma — a far-out alien with Rasta-esque dreads, exotic tech and a thirst for trophies — and the hunting narrative that became the series’ template. Set in a Central American rainforest, the original hunt pits a lone Predator against assorted hardbodies led by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s and Carl Weathers’s bros-in-arms. Part of the movie’s appeal is its purity. It doesn’t search for meaning yet nonetheless finds it by distilling the ethos of hypermasculine American warrior cinema of the period into homosocial bonding, bulging muscles, macho posturing and totalizing violence.
With “Predator: Badlands,” Trachtenberg continues to expand the series by flipping the customary antagonist role of its unfriendly beings, also called Yautja, and establishing Dek as a renegade hero with sensitivities as well as ambitions beyond deboning prey and even his own language (created by Britton Watkins). It’s Trachtenberg’s third contribution to the series, following “Predator: Killer of Killers,” an unspeakably ugly animated feature that leaps across time, from the ninth century onward. (It started streaming in June.) “Badlands” is entirely watchable, even if it also features some similarly unfortunate-looking visuals, most ominously in an opening fight inside a cave that introduces Dek in his embattled element.
Once Dek exits the cavern, “Badlands” improves considerably. In short order, he crash-lands on the planet, meets some amusingly hostile snaky vines and then finds Thia, who brightly chatters her way into his gruff graces by pointing out her utility. He initially carries her like a suitcase then straps her to his back, creating a dynamic that Trachtenberg exploits thematically and humorously. Dek and Thia seem like opposites, yet while he’s tough, he also has issues; her initial defenselessness, in turn, makes her as dependent on him as a newborn. The characters’ vulnerabilities shrewdly ingratiate them into your sympathies in a movie that, scene by scene, conversation by conversation, insistently humanizes the nonhuman.
Written by Patrick Aison (“Prey”), “Badlands” tracks Dek and Thia on an episodic journey filled with wittily designed snapping and swooping threats, oh my. At times, the planet seems like a bizarro Pandora, the otherworldly orb in “Avatar,” while an action scene includes a nod at “Aliens.” (James Cameron inspired the mandibles in Stan Winston’s original Yautja creature design.) In classic genre fashion, the filmmakers here are refreshing the franchise with both new ideas and elements from older installments and other touchstones, from the beast in “King Kong” to the flowers in “The Wizard of Oz” and the corporate evildoers in the “Alien” cycle. (That series and “Predator” have been combined for some monster mash-ups.)
In the end, what is most surprising about “Predator: Badlands” is also the most obvious, which is that filmmaking matters even to formulaic, apparently indestructible franchises. From one angle, it seems improbable that anything more could be wrung from a warhorse of a series like this one, which includes some risibly shoddy movies that are perhaps best enjoyed in an altered state. Yet: It lives! That’s partly because of the staying power of its pop-iconic characters, which have inspired those filmmakers who are smart about genre. The machine world in “Predator: Badlands” — including its nonhuman protagonists — points to an ever-nearer future that’s spooky, even if, for now at least, it is still the people who make it work.
Predator: Badlands
Rated PG-13. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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