I’ve always enjoyed the Predator movies, starting with the incisive and thrilling first film released in 1987. Nobody could have appreciated more than me the fresh life writer-director Dan Trachtenberg injected into the franchise with Prey, released on Hulu back in 2022. Trachtenberg has continued to push the franchise’s narrative boundaries with the boldly designed animated anthology Predator: Killer of Killers, another straight-to-Hulu release from earlier this year.

Now his Predator: Badlands is actually pulling crowds into theaters. It’s an amazing feat, coming up with a hit film in these box-office doldrums that are once again inspiring think pieces about the death of the movies as a popular entertainment form.

Though Predator: Badlands is earning some opprobrium among die-hard fans who hate the way Trachtenberg keeps striking out into increasingly remote territory plot-wise. The concern is he’ll save the franchise only by destroying everything that defined the Predator films in the first place.

And it’s true that this time he seems to have gone right to the outermost edge of what’s tolerable in Predator narratives. With Badlands, he does the unthinkable and actually brings us inside the society of the franchise’s alien race, the Yautja, that until now we’ve always loved for its terrifying otherness: that towering height, those tentacles on the head pulled back Rasta-fashion, those yellow eyes and four-corner mandibles, the iridescent green blood and the futuristic tech cloaking them with an eerie, transparent shimmer as they move through jungle canopy!

Such a perfect killer to emerge suddenly from the treetops to slaughter you before you know what’s happening! How dismaying to make its social organization manifest and even its psychology familiar to us, thus breeding a contempt we could never feel for a true apex predator that remains fundamentally unknowable.

But as with many beloved genre characters, it’s amazing how far you can stretch them and still maintain their appeal. Dracula? Sherlock Holmes? Jane Austen heroines? You can pull them into wild shapes like Silly Putty, and they spring back unharmed. So it all goes down surprisingly smoothly here. Trachtenberg first introduces us to Yautja society with a simple title card: “The Yautja are prey to none. The Yautja are friend to none. The Yautja are predator to all.”

Uncompromising declarations like that seldom stand up, and this one is quickly undercut when Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), the runt of his clan, declares that he’ll go through his mandatory beast-killing rite of adulthood by destroying the supposedly unkillable Kalisk on the “death planet” Genna. His brother, Kwei, tells him it’s impossible — even their scary father, Njohrr, fears the Kalisk.

So much for being prey to none and predator to all!

Before the adventure can even begin, Njohrr makes clear he regards Dek’s chances as so hopeless, he wants to execute his youngest son on the spot, in ruthless Yautja fashion, for being the weakest member of the family.

Kwei saves his brother from being “culled” in order to give him his chance to prove himself, and Dek flies off to one of those wonderfully hostile planets where everything on it tries to kill you in a wide variety of ways. Nature’s bounty provides huge vines that attack anaconda-style, plants that shoot out paralyzing toxin darts, “razor grass” that cuts you to ribbons, and enormous insects that look like one of H. P. Lovecraft’s unfathomable Elder Things. And then, of course, there’s the Kalisk, a dinosaur-sized chimera that combines the qualities of a maned lion and a black lizard and recovers from every wound up to and including beheading with swift regenerative powers.

The only reason Dek doesn’t perish within the first five minutes on the planet is that he runs across a Weyland-Yutani Corporation “synthetic” named Thia (Elle Fanning), embedded on Genna to study its deadly flora and fauna and left behind because she’s so badly damaged. Only the top half of this android-like being remains, severed at the waist by the Kalisk but unfailingly cheerful and eager to help. Thia offers Dek constant unasked-for advice about how to navigate the planet, as well as a running commentary on how much danger he’s in at any given moment. When he gets hit with a paralyzing toxin dart, leaving him open to lethal attack by a Kalisk, she notes sympathetically, “Oooh, that’s not a good thing for you.”

Fanning is charming as Thia and shows her chops by playing a dual role as Tessa, Thia’s sister synthetic who is terrorized by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation into carrying out the most destructive orders in cold, evil-twin fashion.

Dek has no interest in joining forces with Thia until she points out that she’d be a helpful “tool” for him to use in his hunt. And the Yautja love new tools. Soon he’s fashioned a vine into a strap and lashed her to his back, so that they become an odd, two-headed being thrashing through the jungles hunting the Kalisk. This arrangement gives Thia plenty of opportunity to try to persuade Dek to rethink Yautja values. When they run across a small but deadly and alarmingly cute animal in the jungle that saves them from yet another predator, Thia is all for bringing this helpful cutie along with them. She uses the example of the superior hunting abilities of the wolf pack, working together for the good of all. And with a shrewd eye toward what Dek really cares about, she expounds on the case of the alpha wolf, which becomes the alpha not because it kills the most prey but because it’s the best at protecting the pack.

“I will be the alpha wolf that kills the most,” says Dek, who is not exactly the sharpest knife in the drawer.

But of course, Thia will be proved right in the end. What we have here is a motley crew story — and in America at least, we love motley crew stories. Give us three or more creatures with no traits in common, and we aren’t happy until they undergo a dangerous journey or a series of trials together and become ever more united by using their disparate strengths to fight off countless enemy attacks.

So much of Predator: Badlands is delightful entertainment in spite of its notable weaknesses. Certainly, it’s got cuter characters and more sentimentality than we generally like to see in Predator movies. Other than Alien vs. Predator (2004), it’s the first in the series not to receive an R-rating for violence. And though there are a few good flourishes in the climactic action sequence — such as the two halves of Thia fighting a platoon of Weyland-Yutani synthetic guards — much of it is oddly confined to what looks like a big warehouse set and so underlit that you can hardly track what’s going on. How long must we endure these total-eclipse-of-the-sun lighting schemes in Hollywood movies? It’s not as if these movies offer bleak yet eloquent Caravaggio-esque visuals meant to convey a critical attitude toward a world gone mad, as in much of film noir. What we have here is just visual mud.

Still, if you like Predator movies, you’ll want to see this one, especially if you’re craving action films. They’re so bracing in hard times, when you find yourself at odds with much of humanity and its institutions. And it’s always fascinating to track the revival of seemingly played-out narratives. In keeping this franchise going, Dan Trachtenberg has done some insightful work in assessing what aspects of Predator keep a grip on our imaginations.

Forty years later, the towering Predator — mandibles and all — still finds a way to keep audiences in the hunt.