Why Didn’t Anybody Tell Me ‘Predator: Badlands’ Is Star Wars Minus Politics and Space Magic?
The best Star Wars film since Rogue One
This is how Predator: Badlands begins.
A lone wolf type rides a futuristic speeder bike across a bleak, one might say desert-y, landscape. He’s dressed in battle armor with all sorts of gizmos and gadgets. On the “I come prepared for all possibilities” scale, it falls between Batman’s utility belt and Inspector Gadget’s entire body. As usual, Boba Fett did it better.
He walks into a cave right out of House Hunters: Geonosis.1 Stalactites galore, chasm-front views, enough sand to drive Anakin Skywalker a little mad.
There’s no dialogue. Not even subtitles. All mood. We don’t need no stinking words, a truth the writer in me grudgingly accepts. Some things you just innately understand. If the only open urinal is between two guys, you use a stall, or the sink.
This guy is on the hunt, and he’s not looking for space bison.
He has a brief exchange with an unseen person in the cave, our first dialogue. It’s tense. Weapons bristle. One of them calls the other ‘brother.’ Family drama expressed via deadly combat is Star Wars 101. Though perhaps it’s a different sort of ‘brother.’ Maybe the hunter tracked Desmond Hume to a wasteland cave where he’s been riding a stationary bike while jamming to a “Mama” Cass Elliot record.2
It’s neither, unfortunately. I could use more Desmond Hume energy in my life.
The unseen speaker is the hunter’s brother, for real. They chop it up, Star Wars style: they have an actual laser sword fight.
They don’t use lightsabers because of IP infringement. And also reasons of aesthetics; if a lightsaber is 90% light, 10% sword, the Badlands equivalent is the exact opposite. Swords edged in lasers. It’s ridiculous but also awesome, which is an encapsulation of the Badlands experience.
Imagine a commercial selling these swords to bright-eyed Predators to-be; the tagline: when sharp isn’t sharp enough.
Those are just the Star Wars things I noticed in the first 3 minutes.
Predator: Badlands doesn’t steal from Star Wars so much as it obliquely references it almost constantly, to the point that I couldn’t help but notice all the similarities. Granted, it’s probably impossible to be truly innovative in the action sci-fi space now, almost 50 years after Star Wars created the mold. Even when Badlands attempts to do something unique, Star Wars got there first.
That’s not to demean Badlands. The story isn’t new or fresh, but it is very fun. (Another unintentional Star Wars callback?) Allowing for the fact that I can’t help but see the world through Star Wars colored glasses, I think even casual Star Wars fans—people who still call Grogu ‘Baby Yoda’ and don’t understand why people are upset about the order in which Han Solo shot his blaster—will recognize the familiarities. Even if they can’t articulate it as such. Like when you hear a few notes of a song you vaguely recognize but have no memory of.
As I see it, the reasons for this are two-fold.
Star Wars owns this corner. Any other film in the action-space genre is either borrowing from it (intentionally or not) or goes so far out of its way to not be Star Wars that the not-Star Wars of it takes on outsized importance. Star Wars is living rent-free in a lot of genre movies’ heads. (Someone somewhere is about to ‘what about Dune’ me. They’re not the same. Dune is hard sci-fi with enough action to satisfy the plebs. The only thing hard about Star Wars is its unseemly dietary practices; as in—hard to watch.3)
Predator: Badlands is the least Predator movie in the Predator franchise. It’s a light-hearted action romp. A far cry from the first film, which systematically slaughtered the cast while also introducing us to fresh concepts like the sexual Tyrannosaurus. Badlands doesn’t feel like a continuation or extension of canon. You know what it is—a Kidz Bop rendition of Predator. Approachable, safe, familiar yet oddly different, good chance it’ll ruin the original forever.4
That second point is doing most of the work. By abdicating its very nature, Badlands settles in as a quasi-generic sci-fi action movie, which makes it uniquely vulnerable to the first point.
That’s a lot of backhanded compliments and shots across the bow for a movie I enjoyed. Badlands is a good time movie. And that’s the problem, if there is one with a movie I genuinely liked. It’s too easy of a watch.
A Predator movie should evoke a certain amount of dread. The title itself suggests the natural state of things. I love the 1987 classic, a sure-fire top 5 all-time action movie, but it is also quietly scary. Not in the same way that The Hills Have Eyes or Magic Mike is terrifying.5 It’s just that a movie in which a space alien harvests the skulls and spines of grown ass men is not messing around.
Predator: Badlands keeps the basic premise—galactic big game hunters—but jettisons everything that makes for a satisfying Predator experience. Instead we get a pleasantly bizarre blend of Predator, Star Wars, and Alien. It’s like drinking kombucha. Weird, but the weirdness is strangely appealing and its own kind of pleasure.
The root of all this is structural. Badlands makes the predator a protagonist. It goes to pains to make us sympathize with him—runt of the litter, daddy issues (hello Star Wars my old friend)—and it works. We like him and want good things for him, even if that means one day he’ll travel to earth and casually separate people from their skeletal structures. Badlands has cake and eats it, and grins with frosting smeared all over its mandibles. But you can’t do that without irreparably changing the original terms of the deal.
Star Wars alone offers two notable examples of this.
Boba Fett. His mystique was his greatest asset. We lost most of that when we got his full backstory. The rest was jettisoned when he came out of the Sarlaac looking like he’d been stealing most of the monster’s meals.
Darth Vader was cinema’s greatest villain. You can’t tell me with a straight face that some of his ruthlessness wasn’t lost forever when we discovered he a) was once a snot-nosed kid with a kink for space angels; b) grew into a rat-tail wearing teenager with serious stalker-perv vibes; c) had his balls burned off.
Previous Predators weren’t even characters in the traditional sense. They were forces of nature cloaked in mystery and invisibility. You can remove the mask, but there’s no putting it back on once you do. Badlands sacrificing the thing that made Predators interesting in exchange for more time in front of the camera is the most Star Wars thing ever.
Badlands makes Predators safe.
I loved it. But I’m also a coward who hates scary movies and loves Star Wars. I’m 100% the target audience. You may feel differently about it.
Geonosis is the planet with the spindly bug-people. They’re basically flying ants with a boner for gladiatorial games and constructing super weapons.
Now imagining a scenario where Benjamin Linus hires a Predator to kill the people trapped on the island. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t watch it because that would make you a liar. Also: this is now the second Lost reference in a single piece. New record.
Gross foods in Star Wars: blue milk; green milk straight from the hairy tap; blue noodles; calamari that latches onto your face, Alien style; Cap’n Crunch-looking cereal in blue milk. The only decent food I can think of are those breadstick-looking things Yoda busted Luke’s balls about. (“How you get so big, eating food of this kind?”)
Kidz Bop is an abomination. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, consider yourself lucky. Nothing has been ripped from you by cloying, bubbly pubescent singers.
The Kidz Bop business model involves producing kid-friendly covers and ruining the song completely. I don’t even know how that accursed CD ended up in our house. It was like it was always there, somehow, just waiting for my daughter to be of the right age, and then revealed itself to her. I can picture her playing with dolls when she noticed the corner of the cardboard sleeve poking out from under her bed; neon purple, covered with shooting stars. She never had a chance.
She played that CD endlessly, each rotation eroding my love for the original songs.
The Kidz Bop dark magic is twofold: not only does it worm into your mind and take up permanent residence—my daughter hasn't listened to the CD in a decade but I still remember—but it completely eradicates the original song from your mind. When I think of “Pump It,” I don’t hear The Black Eyed Peas. I hear some fuzzy-lipped teenager trying to sing-rap. I know the superior version exists. I just can’t hear it anymore. And if I actually put on the original, the Kidz Bop rendition quietly asserts itself, like brain malware waiting for this exact scenario, intercepting the signals my ears receive and injecting its poison.
Kidz Bop is devil music.
All the hip thrusting in Magic Mike reminds me of Kristen Wiig talking about aggressive penises in Bridesmaids.
I have to admit, I went to see it in the theater... and I loved it! And the ending left it open for a sequel, which I'll definitely see on the big screen!
Great review. I really enjoyed the movie. I even watched without subtitles so I have no clue about predator dialogue but I tracked every bit.
But I hope they don’t make a habit out of this. If Dek turns up again I hope he’s ripping spines from people like a proper Predator. Maybe he has an arc with one of us noble savages. But full on killer of men.