Predator: Badlands (2025)

Predator: Badlands arrives as the seventh entry in a franchise that has spent four decades teaching audiences to fear a clicking, mandible-faced hunter, and it now asks those same audiences to root for one. Director Dan Trachtenberg, who already dragged the series toward respectability with Prey, hands the lead to Dek, a Yautja runt exiled by his own clan for the crime of being insufficiently large. The film is a survival adventure set on a hostile planet, populated by flora with opinions and fauna with teeth. Elle Fanning plays twin synthetics, one helpful and one not. A creature named Bud is befriended. The whole thing moves briskly and looks expensive.

Where the film brushes against contemporary sensibilities, it does so lightly and without much conviction. Weyland-Yutani returns as the villain, capturing the apex predator and experimenting on Dek to harvest regenerative science for profit, which is the oldest corporate-greed arrangement in the Alien playbook. It plays as set dressing, not as an argument about late capitalism. Dek's arc concerns honor, combat, and the rejection of a cruel father, and the fact that he is small matters only insofar as it makes his eventual victory satisfying. The casting of a Māori performer in the title role is a genuine and welcome bit of screen presence, though the film itself has nothing to say about it.

The picture is refreshingly free of sermonizing. Its themes of chosen family and self-worth arrive through action beats and creature combat, not speeches. The result is a lean, well-made monster movie that flips a franchise's perspective and mostly earns the trick. We are left with the distinct impression of having been entertained, which in this genre is no small achievement.