Fathers and Brothers, Sisters and MU/TH/UR: A Review of Predator: Badlands – Christ and Pop Culture

Spoiler Alert: This article contains spoilers for Predator: Badlands.

Unashamedly, my most anticipated film of 2025 has been Predator: Badlands—seriously, I’ve already pre-ordered the statue. It’s no secret that the original Predator (1987) is one of my all-time favorite sci-fi flicks, being subversive in all the right ways and smart without ever needing to announce it. It’s also gloriously pulpy, in a way that most blockbusters in the past fifteen years or so rarely have been. I even have a soft spot for Alien vs. Predator (2004), for all its messy ambition. But I’d long since made my peace with the idea that this franchise, like so many others, had become a machine designed to reheat nostalgia. The endless parade of soft reboots, prequels, legacy sequels, and cinematic universes have—for me, at least—drained the joy out of discovery. Every studio “event” film feels more like homework, just another brand trying to remember why it mattered in the first place.

And then Dan Trachtenberg came along. With Prey (2022), a straight-to-streaming feature, he quietly began redefining what franchise filmmaking could look like. He took the Predator concept back to its primal roots and made it interesting again, without feeling the need to “tie everything together.” It worked in the way the original worked as a lean, mean, action-adventure movie—with a monster in it. Trachtenberg then zipped in another direction with the recent Predator: Killer of Killers (2025), an animated anthology of stories that continued to drop the titular Predators into different periods of Earth’s history, expanding their lore through suggestion, and using the monsters as interesting foils for relatable human characters.

Now, with Predator: Badlands, the franchise returns to the big screen for the first time in nearly a decade—and what Trachtenberg delivers is the boldest, strangest, and most ambitious take on this material yet. It’s a story about hunting, yes, but it’s also a story about heritage, about legacy, about family. And what emerges is something mythic and weirdly intimate: a cosmic family drama wearing the skin of a sci-fi monster movie.

The film opens on Yautja Prime, the homeworld of the Predator species (the Yautja). Here, we meet Dek (played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a fierce warrior, but also a Predator runt—a little too small, a little too weak. He takes a vow to hunt the legendary Kalisk on the death planet Genna, an endeavor that even the fiercest of Yautja consider impossible. But by accomplishing such a task, Dek hopes to win the approval of Njohrr (also Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), his domineering father who sees him as a liability and source of shame among their clan.

Things take a jarring turn when Njohrr orders Kwei (Michael Homick), Dek’s brother, to kill him. His loyalties suddenly divided, Kwei attempts to intercede on Dek’s behalf, only to stir Njohrr’s wrath. The result is Kwei’s brutal execution at the hands of his own father, and Dek’s exile to Genna. Given the planet’s reputation and Dek’s lowly status, there is no way Njohrr expects him to make it off Genna alive.

What follows is a recognizable hero’s journey arc, as Dek struggles to survive Genna, take the Kalisk, and return to confront his father and avenge his brother’s death. Trachtenberg uses the familiar architecture of the Predator formula—a lone hunter versus an impossible quarry—but repurposes it here to explore the kind of generational drama you’d expect from Greek tragedy. Njohrr, towering and pitiless, is the archetype of the devouring patriarch. His law is absolute: only the strong deserve to live, and the weak are a kind of blasphemy against the natural order, deserving to be culled. The Yautja culture is glimpsed here to be so consumed by a religion of strength that it turns love itself into a test of dominance. And as much as Dek is fighting to prove himself a warrior, worthy of the mantle of a true Yautja, he’s also fighting to escape the gravity of his father’s expectations. Every confrontation on Genna becomes a small rebellion against the creed that made him.

What’s remarkable about this film is just how much traction it gets out of a profoundly human story like this without a single human character in it. Strip away the mandibles, and what you have is a drama about the things that make us (and break us): family, approval, the impossible distances between who we are and who we’re told to be. Wisely, Trachtenberg doesn’t try to humanize the Yautja through sentimentality or cheap irony. He doesn’t wink at the audience or try to make the creatures “relatable” through gooey writing. Instead, he lets their rituals, their violence, speak for themselves. The result is something surprisingly honest and sincere and—at times—quite humorous.

The film understands that the need to be seen is universal, and the hunt for the Kalisk becomes a kind of language for that particular kind of longing. It lends these non-human characters a strange kind of dignity. The irony, of course, is that the supposed “death planet” of Genna ends up being more alive than the culture that exiled Dek. It’s harsh, yes, but it allows for growth, adaptation, even mercy. The Yautja world prizes dominance, but Genna rewards cooperation.

That cooperation is made possible by Thia (Elle Fanning). A damaged Weyland-Yutani synthetic stranded on Genna, she’s the kind of character who could only exist in the Alien corner of this shared universe. Like Dek, she’s damaged goods (literally, she spends the movie trying to find her legs), caught between machine logic and something approaching empathy. Her team of synthetics was wiped out attempting to capture the Kalisk, and when she and Dek cross paths, their alliance is purely transactional at first. She needs her severed legs recovered, and Dek needs a guide who knows the terrain.

It’s worth pointing out that, through Thia, Badlands reconnects the Predator series to the larger mythology it shares with the Alien franchise. There are nods, sure, familiar interfaces and computer chirps, but these elements feel more like ghosts than continuity checkpoints. The Company doesn’t appear as a corporate bogeyman so much as a lingering idea: humanity’s old appetite for control and creation. And the return of Weyland-Yutani brings with it the iconic MU/TH/UR (“Mother”), the advanced artificial intelligence of the Alien films, responsible for monitoring and controlling the Company’s crews and their missions.

If Njohrr represents the devouring father, then Mother is implemented here as cold, maternal intelligence. Thia and the android Tessa (also Elle Fanning), another synthetic reactivated later in the film, are products of that same lineage, but they interpret their purpose differently. They are framed as something like “sisters,” and between them, the film finds its mirror to Dek and Kwei. The symmetry is elegant and intentional, and what binds Dek and Thia is recognition. They’re both trying to live beyond their makers. They’ve inherited beliefs and ideas they no longer fully believe in—him the religion of strength, her the logic of utility—and together they improvise something new.

When Thia turns against Tessa to save Dek, she’s choosing empathy over function, a created being asserting moral agency against cold determinism, a spark of consciousness that transcends design. Through Dek, Thia learns that empathy serves the broader purpose of compassion, something that Tessa and Mother could never teach her. Through Thia, Dek learns that dependence is not necessarily a weakness, but can be the greatest of strengths, an idea that stands in sharp contrast to Njohrr’s philosophy, which has deemed him unworthy. She helps him reframe Kwei’s death as a sacrifice that was meant to protect him, and not a failure of might.

That symmetry, between fathers and brothers, sisters and mothers, gives this film a kind of mythic weight. Trachtenberg is playing in a sandbox built from two of science fiction’s most recognizable franchises, and what he does here is excavate both mythologies to show that parents keep failing their children.

From a biblical standpoint, that failure isn’t new. The earliest chapters of Genesis trace a similar collapse, from Cain’s murder of Abel to Lamech’s boast of vengeance, to the spread of violence in the antediluvian world. All of this plays out in a setting where fathers pass down strength but not wisdom. The Yautja start to look pretty familiar in that light. It’s that old human creed dressed up in nifty alien armor: the belief that dominance equals virtue, that power justifies one’s existence. Scripture calls that impulse by a simple name, and it’s the same sin that turns fathers against sons and brothers against each other.

Dek and Thia, hunter and machine, are each the product of merciless systems, yet together they manage something resembling compassion. The film seems to suggest that empathy is not a weakness or a glitch in the system, but something buried deeper than programming or biology, that has to be awakened by something outside the system itself. That’s an acute observation, and a distinctly biblical idea, even if Trachtenberg never names it as such. The biblical writers understood compassion and mercy as the perfection of justice (see Micah 6:8; Zechariah 7:9), not its negation. In a universe obsessed with hierarchy, this movie insists that empathy is actually a higher form of strength.

The Yautja code and the Company’s obsession with efficiency are two facets of the same theology: the worship of control. Both Njohrr and Mother stand as divine pretenders, mistaking power for authority and order for purpose. In biblical terms, they are Babel and Pharaoh—the hands that build and the minds that enslave. What Badlands exposes is how brittle such empires are when measured against the smallest act of mercy. Such a choice is the one thing neither father nor Mother can manufacture. It’s not instinct, nor can it be coded. It’s something closer to revelation. The film doesn’t call it divine, but it behaves like it is.

That’s the paradox Badlands stumbles into almost by accident: that compassion is among the most alien acts imaginable, precisely because it runs against everything the fallen world calls strength. It’s the logic of the cross hidden in a creature feature—the weak redeeming the strong. Fundamentally, the movie is about what children do with the tools (and the wounds) their parents leave behind. And that’s the kind of story only someone like Trachtenberg would dare tell in a Predator movie, one where the most alien thing on-screen isn’t the monsters, but the moment the monsters choose compassion when violence would have been easier.