The Predator franchise comes to its seventh incarnation (nona, if we count the two Alien vs. Predator), and tries a little to reinvent itself, putting for the first time the creature holder in the shoes of the protagonist. Predator: Badlands makes his debut on Disney+ Thursday, February 12, 2026 (after the release in the hall in November 2025), directed by Dan Trachtenberg, who for the franchise has already directed Prey and the recent animated film Killer of Killers, but will he be able to bring back the hype?
Predator: Badlands: il fallimento non è un’opzione
Dek is a young Yautja, smaller and weaker than the others, who can’t wait to complete his first hunt to earn the cape of Predator. But, you know, the company Yautja does not tolerate weakness, and Dek is marginalized and braised by his own father. To prove its value Dek will travel to the planet Genna to hunt Kalisk, an almost legendary beast of which even his father is afraid. Genna will be revealed, however, a deadly jungle in which every form of life is hostile: to survive Dek will have to form an unexpected alliance with Thia, an android of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and with a small and mysterious autochthonous creature named Bud.
Nulla di specifico
Predator: Badlands has nothing wrong. The story reflects the structure in three acts so dear to Hollywood and speaks of universal values, of ‘building a clan’ as a way to find themselves. The finding of using the Predator as the protagonist is if nothing else stimulating. Visual effects are generally of good quality, apart from some sort of action a little too fast and ‘vaporous’ to be ‘sentite’ really. But then, why is it a film that is so incisive to the vision?
Tracotanza tecnologica
Predator: Badlands reminds me a lot of the games of the early 2000s: a somewhat arbitrary premise to throw the protagonist in a new and hostile environment, which follows a thread of free and chaotic moments of action against a variety of monsters and creatures, only symbolically united by a plot that could be summed up on a napkin. So much movement, I mean, but with a work on the characters that remains very basic. It certainly does not help the fact that our protagonist has a CGI face, a distorted voice and speaks an alien language — and in fact the highlight of the film is the double interpretation of Elle Fanning, which is so good at interpreting the two twin androids but with incredibly different personalities that more than once I asked myself if it was not another physically similar actress.
All this does not want to be a boring and reactionary anti-CGI speech, anti-film action and anti-all: technological tools in cinema are powerful amps of human creativity. We must not forget, however, that the reason why we look at films — all movies, even the stupidest ones — is because they make us build an empathic connection with the characters and stories they tell. And it is precisely in this that lies the technological tracotanza of Badlands: in forgetting that even in its most fantastic forms, cinema is basically something that speaks of human beings. And that everything else is pure dressing.
Il cast
The stuntman Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi plays the young Predator Dek but also his father Njorr, the ruthless leader of the Yautja clan. Double role also for Elle Fanning, who plays the “gemelle” Android Thia and Tessa, shipped to Genna by Weyland-Yutani to do research on a rare biological weapon. Mike Homik is Kwei, Dek’s older brother, ready to defend him at any cost. Among the vocalists who lent themselves to the minors we write Alison Wright and the brothers Duffer, showrunners of Stranger Things.
L’articolo Predator: Badlands is pure technological tracotanza – The film review on Disney+ comes from Dituttounpop.it.
