Not every franchise can have a comeback as consistently strong as what Predator is having right now. Beginning with 2022’s Prey, the sci-fi horror series has found itself revitalized between that and this year’s Predator: Killer of Killers and Predator: Badlands, the latter of which hit theaters this past weekend.
Directing all three is Dan Trachtenberg, whose feature film debut was 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane. Along with each film giving longtime Predator fans things they’ve wanted or didn’t expect—like officially canonizing the term “Yautja” in these movies or Killer pitting the aliens against different historical factions—what binds them together are the thematic threads that run between specific pairs or the full trilogy and may define the filmmaker’s larger mission statement.
The most prevalent theme explored in Trachtenberg’s trio is masculinity. Predator has always been about this to some degree—how can it not, when it’s got that handshake and features big dudes picking fights to stroke their egos and blowing themselves up when things don’t go to plan?—and it’s all over Prey and Badlands in particular.
Badlands’ protagonist Dek is deemed a lesser Yautja owing to his small size, a status so humiliating in Yautjan culture his father Njohrr considers his son too weak to survive and wants to just kill him. Meanwhile, Prey’s Naru longs to be a hunter alongside her brother Taabe, but she’s impeded mainly by the other young men in their Comanche tribe, who try to physically or verbally prevent her from proving herself. She can’t join them because she’s a woman, but she thinks the other Comanche women’s duty of foraging and healing is a lesser act.
Prey and Badlands explore masculinity from different angles: the former posits that Naru needs to use both her hunting and foraging skills if she’s to defeat the Feral Predator, who otherwise tears through the Comanche, the French fur traders, and the local animal population with a degree of curiosity and cockiness. Yautja have always been likened to big game hunters whose advanced technology enhances the mean streak they have for killing things. But when they mess up, they really mess up; Prey’s Feral Predator almost meets his end just going up against a wolf and a bear, and there’s a similar arrogance in Dek. Despite declaring he won’t fail in killing a beast to redeem himself, he’s humbled within minutes of crash landing on Genna when the local flora steal most of his gear and nearly do him in then and there.
Of the two, Badlands’ jabs at masculinity are sharper and hit harder owing to Dek being the first Predator protagonist in these films. Like Naru, he’s positioned by Trachtenberg as an underdog, which likely wasn’t a coincidence, since the director’s mentioned almost pairing the two together. Instead, Dek’s allies are the bisected Weyland-Yutani synthetic Thia and a Gennan creature dubbed Bud. Dek takes pride in his people’s ethos of survival through strength and solidarity, which is established at the start of the film with an opening epigraph. But he also does some reconsidering when Thia asks him a simple question that challenges his whole worldview: “Who would want to survive on their own?” He eventually repays the kindness of Thia and his brother Kwei, who died protecting Dek against their father, in the film’s climax by using Genna’s wildlife to save her.
People are nothing without community, as emphasized in Killer of Killers and Badlands. The animated film’s three leads—Viking warrior Ursa, airman John Torres, and exiled shinobi Kenji—all fight their respective Predators with allies by their side. None of them have the honor of surviving, but they give the heroes a shot they otherwise might not have if they worked alone, and when they’re forced to fight each other for the amusement of spectating Yautja, they decide to work together to escape. Language barrier be damned, the three of them watch each other’s backs, and almost all get away, with Kenji and Torres flying off thanks to Ursa staying behind. She ends the film in suspended animation again, but Killers establishes that the Yautja capture anyone who’s killed a Predator, including Naru, but also Dutch and Harrigan (the respective leads of the first two Predator movies), so she’s not entirely on her own.
“It’s good to have friends, so quit being a jerk” is an interesting pivot for the Predator films to make, and it’s telling that all three films close on the promise of community. Those endings may tease ominous things for the characters—Kenji and Torres look well and truly screwed against a legion of Yautja ships, ditto Dek squaring off against his mother—but the underlying message Trachtenberg establishes here gives Predator some potentially fun new tools to play with as it continues gloriously doing its own thing.
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