Predator: Badlands (2025) (blu-ray film review)
Oddly, the way the story as presented on blu-ray looks like a three-parter than a single film so I watched it that way, watching it over three nights. Whether it will feel that way on a western release remains to be seen. Fortunately, blu-ray players do remember when you stopped so can continue that way the next night.
There’s no way to work out just when in the timeline this is being made. Certainly, Weyland-Yutani have been making synthetics for some time and Thia is fluent in Yautja so has to be beyond Ripley’s time because the xenomorphs were the only know aliens in that time period. In the extras, actress Elle Fanning confirms it is beyond the ‘Alien’ films time period.
In this one instance, leave the sub-title text on, unless you can read or understand spoken Yautja easily. When I got it, I assumed it was episodic as there were opening divisions on the menu. As such, the opening episode could be regarded as an alien movie as we see how the Yautja educate their warrior children. When I first saw photographs of Dek (actor Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), I though he had weird dreadlocks at the front of his head but really more of the hunters have male pattern baldness at they get older.
His father, Njohrr (actor Reuben de Jong) thinks of him as the runt of the litter, despite having big ambitions to kill a Kalisk. When the father orders his elder son, Kwai (actor Mike Homik) to kill him, he fails and gets killed instead. Dek escapes to the planet Genna to achieve his ambition or die, his father isn’t fussy and doesn’t pursue him.
On the planet, after doing a weapons check, Dek meets or really bumps into Thia (actress Elle Fanning), a legless android after an encounter with the Kalisk. She is fluent in the Yautja language and convinces him he needs her to track the Kalisk down. Dek sees her as a tool and carries her on his back in his pursuit.
Too much more is definitely spoiler as we follow their adventures. Even more so when they encounter Thia’s people who want to take Dek as a specimen and turns Thia off.
When it came to the ten minutes or so of credits, don’t just stop. Looking at the length left, I persevered, although you might want to wind forward, and got a twenty minutes extra with interviews with the key cast and director/co-writer Dan Trachtenberg who explained that this was the first time a predator was placed in a heroic position. I suppose that depends on which species you belong to. The hunters must have won a lot in the past but we haven’t seen against who to decide if they were put in a heroic position. There is then a spell at the film’s premiere in London and the full soundtrack of the film. You definitely get a good deal with these disks. It’s a shame that we have to depend on listening to the soundtrack through the TV than being able to play it through a CD player.
From a review perspective, we get the opportunity to see more of the hunters homeworld and brutal customs that builds them up to being what they are. Presumably, their weapons are made elsewhere. They also pursue other species than humans, which is to be expected but no sign of the dissidents as witnessed in ‘The Predator’ film, although that would have to be much earlier in their history. We only get a glimpse of their technology here. I’m less sure of Dek as a hero as he’s only doing what he does to survive and conquer and this adventure certainly toughens him up. Can the Yautja develop friendships, even with synthetics, probably needs another story.
GF Willmetts
January 2026
(pub: 2025 Productions, 2025. 1 blu-ray disk 107 minute film with extras. Price: varies but bearing in mind it’s an import from China, the price is actually reasonable. ASIN: LG-D5712)
