Dan Trachtenberg is the Steve Miner of our time. Both directors have a speciality for taking franchises and inflecting them in new, eccentric directions. Steve Miner worked mainly in horror, with Friday the 13^th Part 2, Friday the 13^th Part III and Halloween H20 offering fresh interpretations of Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers and their respective worlds. Dan Trachtenberg, by contrast, has worked mainly in science fiction, directing the best film in the Cloverfield franchise with 10 Cloverfield Lane and reinventing the Predator franchise with 2022’s Prey. Whereas Miner worked within the strict franchse trajectory of 80s horror, Trachtenberg has directed within an era of more provisional seriality, and so his output envisages more oblique, emergent and unexpected connections between films set in the same universe. So it is with Predator: Badlands, an even more audacious reinvention than Prey, which asks us to take a Predator, or Yautja, as its main character and empathic focus.

In some ways this continues on from Prey, which revolved around the uneasy alliance between a young Comanche woman and a Yautja at the cusp of European colonisation. However, Badlands is much more aligned with the Yautja’s perspective and dwells in some detail on the indigenous culture of the Yautja. We open with an excerpt from the Yautja codex, which cements the role of hunting in the species’ culture, and our protagonist, Dek, played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, is charged with a kind of spirit quest, a hunt in which he has to bring back a trophy to his home planet of Prime to be accepted into the clan. From the outset the film, and Dek, are quite critical of Yautja culture. In the opening scene, Njohrr, Dek’s father, orders his brother Kwei to kill him, because he is too weak for the clan, and Dek only narrowly escapes after Kwei sacrifices himself so that he can access a spacecraft. In response, Dek travels to the planet Genna, where he seeks out the ultimate trophy – the Kalisk, an enormous organism that has defied all previous Yautjas, and which Dek hopes will prove his worth enough for him to finally resist the clan’s honour system. Once Dek arrives on Genna, he comes across Thia, played by Elle Fanning, the torso of a “synth” created by the Weyland-Yutani corporation as part of a program to harvest the Kalisk as a bioweapon. Genna is a kind of cosmic anthropologist, with a specialty in exotic and  predatory organisms: “I’ve studied Yautja extensively: it’s a very impressive culture.”

Together, Dek and Thia take on a cosmic nomadic quality, as they set out to find the Kalisk, him carrying her on his back, since she has no lower body following an earlier attempt to harness the giant beast. It’s at this point that Badlands really comes alive, as Trachtenberg and screenwriter Patrick Aison present us with an alien bestiary, a panorama of exotic species populating the planet of Genna. This second act reminded me of the incredible ecological imagination of Dune, and its inspiration in Frank Herbert’s trip to a Department of Agriculture site operating in the Oregon Dunes. It’s also redolent of the original Star Wars trilogy in its rich tapestry of life, its vision of a picaresque universe brimming with creatures – some big, some small, some scary, some cute. Trachtenberg replaces the food chains of the earlier Predator film with food webs, escalating complexities that defy easy thresholds between predator and prey, evoking a symbiosis so complex that it defies all distinction between animal and vegetable, or even between animal, vegetable and mineral; as in the animated series Scavenger’s Reign (and Badlands often feels like an animated film), the whole planet is a single sentient being, converging on the Kalish’s lair. The landscapes are gorgeous, like old matte prints in Powell and Pressburger, and detailed enough that this cries out for the IMAX screen – you really want to see the ecology of the world in as much detail as possible. That scale is also needed for the Kalish, which is like a landscape or planet in itself, so enormous that seeing it, in its entirety, is the biggest impediment to catching it.

Against that backdrop, Dek and Thia’s rapport plays as Sense and Sensibility in outer space. While he is searching for a line of flight from Yautja culture, Dek is still embedded in some of its core aphorisms, which reflect the brutality of MAGAmerica in their zero tolerance for weakness: “To forgive is to show weakness.” “Weakness must be culled.” “Grief is weakness.” Thia, by contrast, is a “higher-sensitivity” synth and explains to Dek that he doesn’t have to be a lone wolf: “The alpha isn’t the one who kills the most – the alpha is the one who best protects the pack.” Yet Thia’s sensitivity is also a line of flight from her institutional background, the Weyland-Yutani corporation, the other MAGAmerican pole of the film. At heart, Badlands proposes an eccentric Weyland-Yutani expanded universe, encompassing both the Predator and Alien franchises, but not driven first and foremost by monsters so much as the imperatives of corporate biotechnology: “We truly are building a better world.” Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth hammered this home but Badlands does it with more panache, producing a terrific third act in which both Dek and the Kalish are harvested as possible bioweapons: “You are now property of the Weyland-Yutani corporation.”This is the film’s refracted version of contemporary America, caught between sigma masculinity and galactic bioweaponry, as Tessa, a “low-sensitive” synth, also played by Fanning, reiterates the Yautja philosophy as corporate motto: “The weak must be culled.”

Badlands is ultimately interested in what line of flight Dek and Thia, Yautja and synth, might fashion from these horizons. Since the galaxy now exists at the organic-synthetic cusp (even Yautja themselves are both abjectly embodied and ethereally holographic), they have to mobilise this cusp instead of attempting to escape it – and discovering their shared nemesis in Weyland-Yutani allows them to do so. Hence the final sequence, in which Dek builds an arsenal, dons his mask, uses Thia’s knowledge to harvest the Genna bestiary as allies, and liberates the Kalish, whose bioweaponry appeal comes from precisely the way it occupies this cusp between organic and synthetic, since it is capable of regenerating whole limbs, or reconnecting severed body parts, in a matter of seconds. In an echo of Aliens, Tessa, the “bad” synth, dons an enormous robot, but our sympathy is now with the alien, the Yautja, that she is fighting. While Dek eventually brings Tessa’s skull back to Prime as his trophy, he doesn’t do so in the spirit of assimilation. Instead, he tells the elders that “I have my own clan,” before turning back to Thia, who greets him as “Dek of the Yautja,” with a cute baby Kalish behind her. It’s exactly the motley crew of cosmic nomads that we see in Star Wars, the same sense of a warmly inhabited universe, despite the presence of true evil, and that tone alone makes this every bit as original as Prey in reshaping the Weyland-Yutani world.