- UK release: November 2025
- Director: Dan Trachtenberg · Writers: Patrick Aison, Dan Trachtenberg
- Studio / distributor: 20th Century Studios; Davis Entertainment
- Genre: Science fiction action adventure / alien survival · Runtime: 107 minutes (BBFC 12A)
- Main cast: Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi as Dek; Elle Fanning (Super 8, The Great) as Thia
- IMDb: 7.2 / 10 · Rotten Tomatoes: 86% critics / 95% audience · My rating: 8 / 10
Three years ago Dan Trachtenberg took a franchise that had spent two decades lurching between sequels and crossovers and quietly made the best Predator film since the original by stripping it back: one hunter, one Comanche warrior, no clutter. Prey worked because it trusted a simple idea and a strong lead. Badlands is the opposite gamble. Instead of paring the world down, Trachtenberg cracks it open, hands the camera to the monster, and dares you to root for the thing that has spent forty years skinning Arnold Schwarzenegger’s commandos. It is the kind of swing that usually ends in tears. This one connects.
The setup
Dek is a young Yautja, runt of his clan and written off by a father who measures worth in kills. Exiled to prove himself, he lands on Genna, a death-world where the wildlife is engineered to be unkillable and the apex predator is a creature his own people could not bring down. There he falls in with Thia, a damaged Weyland-Yutani synthetic with her own reasons for wanting to reach the planet’s interior, and the two strike an uneasy alliance: he needs a trophy, she needs her missing lower half, and neither will last a night alone. What follows is a hunt told from the wrong end of the spear, with the audience for once standing behind the mask.
The cast
Asking newcomer Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi to carry a blockbuster from inside a prosthetic head, speaking subtitled Yautja, is a big ask, and he meets it. Dek reads as proud, frightened and stubborn through posture and clicks alone, which is a real feat of physical performance. The film’s secret weapon, though, is Elle Fanning, who plays Thia and a second synthetic with a deadpan wit that keeps the whole thing from curdling into solemnity. She is the warmth and most of the jokes, and her timing gives the bond at the centre of the story a charm the script could easily have missed. The two of them, one all menace and one all banter, carry the picture between them.
The craft
Jeff Cutter shoots Genna as a genuinely alien place, all bruised skies and predatory flora, and the design work commits hard to showing Yautja culture from the inside rather than as a glimpsed curiosity. Trachtenberg stages the action with the clarity that has become his signature; you always know where you are and what is trying to kill whom, which in a modern action film is rarer than it should be. The score from Sarah Schachner and Benjamin Wallfisch nods to the franchise’s clicking, percussive past without leaning on nostalgia. At 107 minutes it moves, sets up its rules, and gets out before the novelty thins. The restraint that made Prey sing is still here, even in a far bigger sandbox.
How it stacks up
The obvious touchstone is Prey, and Badlands is the looser, stranger film: warmer, funnier, less tense. It also owes a clear debt to The Mandalorian, another story about a masked, near-silent hunter softened by an unlikely companion, and the odd-couple road structure echoes that more than it echoes the original Predator. The decision to fold in Weyland-Yutani and the synthetics ties the picture into Alien territory, doing in passing what the laboured Alien vs Predator films never managed: making the shared universe feel like a place rather than a marketing deck. Against the wider franchise it sits comfortably in the top tier, just below Prey and the 1987 film, and well clear of the crossovers.
Critics versus the rest of us
Critics are warm, around 86%, with the praise landing on the audacity of the perspective shift and Fanning’s performance. The reservations are predictable and not unfair: this is a Predator film with very few humans in it, the threat is fantastical rather than visceral, and some of the old survival-horror tension is traded away for adventure and heart. Audiences are running hotter, near the mid-nineties, the strongest reception the series has had. That gap tells you what kind of film this is: not the lean, frightening hunt of the originals, but a crowd-pleasing creature adventure that knows exactly how much fun it is having.
Verdict
I came in sceptical that a Predator could carry a film as a hero rather than a horror, and left won over. What sells it is the world-building, which is the thing I always value most in science fiction; Badlands makes the Yautja a culture with rules and shame and history rather than a stalking gimmick, and that is the richest the franchise has ever felt. Fanning is a delight, the planet is a proper character, and the whole thing is built for a rewatch. It loses a little for trading away the suffocating dread that the best entries trade on, and Dek’s arc hits beats you can see coming. But it is inventive, generous and a great deal of fun, and it leaves the series somewhere genuinely new. 8⁄10.
Availability: On general release in UK cinemas now, including IMAX and 3D, where the death-world looks its best.
Update
Added since this review first appeared: Badlands has gone on to be the franchise’s highest-rated entry with audiences and a commercial success, confirming that Trachtenberg’s reinvention of the series with Prey was no fluke and that there is real appetite for more from the Yautja’s side of the hunt. It is now available on digital and disc, and streams on Disney+ depending on your region.
BBFC content advice
Rated 12A by the BBFC for moderate violence, threat, injury detail. The notes below may contain spoilers.
Violence: There are frequent scenes of fantasy violence in which aliens and robots fight, and aliens attack fantastical monsters intent on harming them. The violence is sustained and includes a focus on bladed weapons. Occasionally bloody injury detail occurs as characters are stabbed, decapitated or have their limbs severed, but it’s unrealistic in appearance and lacks strong gory detail.
Threat and horror: There are frequent scenes in which characters are attacked or hunted by fantastical monsters and aggressive plant life.
Injury detail: Bloody detail is visible during violence and medical procedures, although this is unrealistic in appearance.
Rude humour: A character calls another a ‘tool’.
Language: Mild bad language (‘shit’) is used (ScreenX version only).
Source: British Board of Film Classification (bbfc.co.uk).
