Badlands is the Disneyfication of an iconic sci-fi horror franchise

When Disney completed the acquisition of 21st Century Fox in 2019, movie fans mostly focused on how the deal would impact Marvel. But the purchase gave Disney access to more than just the X-Men and Fantastic Four, and now the company is bending one of Fox’s longest-running franchises to fit its mold of teen-friendly entertainment. Predator: Badlands eschews horror and bloodshed in favor of a wholesome Star Wars-style film, complete with its own version of Baby Yoda.

Director Dan Trachtenberg has made far gorier Predator films with the lean Prey and the stylish animated anthology Predator: Killer of Killers, which were both released as Hulu originals. But his first theatrical film in the series maintains a PG-13 rating by avoiding anything but neon-green Yautja (aka Predator) blood, milky synth fluid, and some monster guts. While there’s plenty of CGI-packed action, there’s no real tension.

Part of that is because Badlands flips the usual Predator script by centering the film on a sympathetic Yautja rather than humans being hunted by a relentless killer. Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) is a young, runty predator deemed too weak to live — unless he travels to the extremely hostile “death planet” Genna and kills a legendary beast called the Kalisk.

Upon arrival, Dek quickly teams up with Thia (Elle Fanning), an overeager Weyland-Yutani synth missing her legs. He also encounters Bud, a sort of armadillo-monkey hybrid with Baby Yoda vibes: cute, useful, and extremely plot-relevant. Rather than focusing on fear and violence, Badlands goes for laughs through the odd-couple dynamic of chatty synth and stoic hunter. In another funny scene, Bud irritates Dek by mimicking everything he does to prepare for bed. Thia tries to persuade Dek that the most elite hunter isn’t the lone wolf but the alpha who protects his pack. It’s all surprisingly wholesome for a franchise that began with a terrifying stealth hunter murdering paramilitary soldiers.

Badlands feels less like a Predator movie and more like part of the Avatar franchise, another property Disney got in the Fox merger. It deals with the same themes of questioning what you will sacrifice for your family — biological or found — and environmental exploitation, richly rewarding characters who appreciate the beauty of nature and learn to use it in a respectful fashion. Just like in Avatar, none of these themes are especially deep, and the villains are cartoonishly evil. But while Avatar delves further into its exploration of grief and loss, Badlands quickly moves on to more whimsical fare. There’s a whole fight scene involving Thia’s disembodied legs that adds a distinctly cheesy beat to what’s otherwise the film’s best action sequence.

Like Avatar, Badlands mostly exists to deliver a lot of impressive CGI. The creature design is excellent: Bud and the Kalisk are extremely expressive and there’s a wide variety of other critters eager to eat or kill Dek. Genna is a deathtrap, but a well-engineered one, where animals use the lethal terrain to find creative new ways to devour each other (there’s always something eating something else in the background).

A few of the monsters are reminiscent of creatures in Alien: Earth, though the destruction they unleash in Badlands is far more perfunctory than anything on the FX show. The similarity is a reminder of the horrifying setting that Badlands takes place in and how odd it is to see a practically family-friendly version of it. Badlands isn’t a bad movie, but it is a fundamentally Disney-fied one, a horror story that still has plenty of fangs but has been stripped of all bite.