She’s a happy-go-lucky corporate android! He’s a space hunter with a grudge! THEY FIGHT CRIME!

The Predalienator Cinematic Universe is in full effect, or whatever we’re calling it! Fans of the formerly standalone IPs never expected 20th Century Studios would use the two Alien vs. Predator crossover films — one a mediocre slog with a decent Final Boss Battle; the other, amateurish drek — as the foundation of a unified transmedia empire a la Marvel and DC. After both lay fallow for years except in licensed comics, they’ve been called back to active duty and merged into a single science fiction canon through the magical power of Easter eggs.

For me, the past decade’s results have been mixed. Shane Black’s The Predator was a strutting edgelord throwback, Ridley Scott’s own Alien: Covenant was a middling midquel with nothing new to add, Fede Álvarez’ Alien: Romulus was a Space Branson tribute act, and Noah Hawley’s recent, thoughtfully madcap FX series Alien: Earth needs its expectations better managed by deleting the word “Alien” from the title and admitting its downplayed xenomorphs are just guest stars, like that time the Brady Bunch ran afoul of Vincent Price in Hawaii. (I have other peeves about the show, least of which is the studio’s adamant prequels-only fixation, because heaven forbid the big-screen timeline move a single millisecond forward beyond Alien Resurrection.)

More successful installments of late have come from the Predator side, the longtime underdog of the two. Thanks go largely to writer/director Dan Trachtenberg, who parlayed the unexpected regard for 10 Cloverfield Lane into his current gig as Primary Predator Purveyor, in charge of delivering uniformly good sci-fi popcorn flicks, mixing familiar ingredients with a few surprise herbs ‘n’ spices. His excellent 18th-century prequel Prey and the animated anthology Predator: Killer of Killers were both sent direct-to-video but fared better on Hulu than they might’ve if “direct-to-video” still meant “grade-F, but hey, Blockbuster can get customers to rent anything“. Trachtenberg scores a quality trifecta and finally reaches theaters with Predator: Badlands, which is mostly MONSTERS FIGHT! It’s the sort of undiluted superdrug spectacle that theaters need now more than ever if no one’s gonna turn out for the weightier fare.

Whereas Trachtenberg’s first two stuck to the series’ usual structure — i.e., advanced big-game hunter kills unsuspecting Earthlings till the cleverest one takes it down — with Badlands he and Prey screenwriter Patrick Aison change up the narrative focus: this time a Predator is the protagonist. Our first extended look at the homeworld of the Yautja — the species’ name in their own language, a term used in the licensed comics and novels years before Killer of Killers canonized it — introduces us to a dysfunctional royal family of them. New Zealand native Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi plays Our Hero — Dek, who at a mere six feet tall is a runt among their kind. His disappointed father (wrestler Reuben de Jong, from Spartacus: Blood and Sand) orders his demise lest he bring shame upon their house, but big brother Kwei (basketball player Mike Homik, also a Hobbit stuntman) steps in to protect li’l bro. They’re practically Peacemaker’s family recast with Klingons.

Nearly as single-mindedly aggro as his dad but a bit shorter, Dek resolves to prove his worth in accordance with Yautja tradition: he shall travel to the neighboring untamed planet Genna (think Gehenna minus “he”) and track down the apex of its apex predators, a reputedly fearsome beast called the Kalisk. He’s never seen one before and puts zero effort into researching them, but the lack of reference materials might be because no one’s ever encountered one and lived. Or if they did survive, they never bothered to journal about it. For all we know, maybe they can’t write sentences. We’ve yet to see if the Yautja have developed their written language beyond the bare minimum needed to label the weapons on their control panels. Regardless, Dek aims to find a Kalisk — assuming he can discern which unlabeled critters are which — slay it, craft a trophy from its remains, prove his Yautjahood and roar “SO THERE!” in King Dad’s face. And considering this is the first Predator film to provide full subtitles for all their guttural snarls and growl, his bragging will be totally translated.

Such a fetch-quest is easier said than done, of course. Anyone who got a kick out of that rollicking sequence in The Wild Robot when ROZ crash-lands on the island and its entire ecosystem immediately launches a synchronized attack against the intruder will feel déjà vu when Dek faces the same on Genna, which is nowhere near as gorgeous and its inhabitants all spar in much, much higher weight classes. Every critter of every size has innate defenses to fend off the next critters up the food chain, and a lot of them outclass Dek. Even the trees are out to get him, ten thousand times angrier and more lethal than Oz’s crabby talking apple-chuckers. Life in Genna’s environment is so nonstop frenetic that it’s a wonder we see any scenes of characters resting, though the artifice is occasionally indulged because sometimes an audience needs as much of a breather as characters do.

The native survivors of berserk natural selection aren’t Dek’s sole concern. He soon stumbles over another outsider getting slapped around — Elle Fanning (I last saw her in A Complete Unknown) as the remains of an android named Thia. First contact went similarly screwy for her, leaving her upper half trapped yet conscious, her legs missing and her mental circuitry damaged. As a possible robo-concussion side effect, she’s manifestly the cheeriest, chirpiest synth ever owned by Weyland-Yutani, those dastardly corporate tyrants that are the greedy, blackened heart of the Alien saga. As we’ve seen throughout the series (explicitly so in Alien: Earth), their primary objective above all others is acquiring and developing bioweapons from across the galaxy to tame and sell for space-military profits. Not once has the “taming” part ever gone well for them in a single film, but hey, if at first you don’t succeed, just keep doing the same things the same way and expect different results!

Thia is so happy to be rescued and so addle-pated by battle damage that she’s happy to team up with him and not overly concerned about any programming directives. Dek and Thia have their odd-couple moments in between death-matches and narrow escapes, at times so lighthearted that it’s hard to be mad when Trachtenberg adds a cutesy alien-animal sidekick to the party that screams “plush toy”. Thankfully it doesn’t speak English in a cringey ethnic accent, and like the rest of Genna it’s more than what it seems. But anyone who’s seen enough Alien movies knows two things about Weyland-Yutani employees and properties: they never travel alone, and “betrayal for big bucks” is their awkward middle name.

Like the increasingly dilapidated Jurassic series, sometimes plot barely matters anyway when what’s important is MONSTERS FIGHT! Our Dolby Cinema screening was an ideal format to feel every nerve galvanized by Trachtenberg’s perpetual-commotion engine, and in particular to make sense of the numerous nighttime knockabouts. (Condolences to viewers in smaller theaters with poorly managed lighting setups that may have flattened those set-pieces into screeching shadowy blobs.) Unlike the Jurassics, the trappings and incidentals in Badlands are kept lean and mean, forfeiting as little margin as possible to Idiot Plot contrivances and risible character bits so we can better concentrate on the thrilling race to catch the mega-Pokemon MacGuffin.

Some concepts are overtly nostalgic riffs on stuff we’ve seen before (what if Ripley’s super awesome exoskeleton loader were even bigger?), quite a few plot-turns are visible from a light-year away, and jaded viewers who’re bored with Easter eggs may scoff at the sight of an entire exhibit of alien monster skulls that may or may not belong to preexisting pop-culture creatures. Hardcore horror-SF fans doubtlessly chuckled at the absurdity of Predator: Badlands being the very first film in either series to be rated PG-13 because all the free-flowing blood geysers are totally non-red alien monster blood and therefore it’s all practically “all ages” misadventure. (No, there’s nary a single ordinary human character in sight — none of the customary human casualties by acid-spray or super-strength laminectomy.)

But in between the cool MONSTERS FIGHT! and all the EXPLOSIONS!, Trachtenberg deviates even farther from the simplistic Predator template with a not-so-cheesy determination as Our Heroes cope with possible life lessons along the way. As everything rushes headlong toward the inevitable showdown — the evil intergalactic company versus the plucky independents! so their lives are just like ours! — Dek slams head-on into the differences between his dysfunctional real family and his motley found-family. To live free in that absolutely crazy world, he’ll have to deny his very nature and learn new skills besides hunting and killing. Luckily for us, Trachtenberg has likewise brought better ideas to the Predator series so it stands a chance to keep going despite its past penchant for devolution.

…

Meanwhile in the customary MCC film breakdowns:

Hey, look, it’s that one actor!: The only other human face we see belongs to stuntman Cameron Brown (Alien: Earth, The Rings of Power) as another Weyland-Yutani synth model. Voice actors for monsters and ships’ computers are Ravi Narayan (Netflix’s Sweet Tooth, various Hobbit noisemakers), Alison Wright (TNT’s Snowpiercer), the film’s own editor Stefan Grube (who also edited 10 Cloverfield Lane and Killer of Killers), and — fun trivia time! — Stranger Things creators Matt and Ross Duffer.

How about those end credits? No, there’s no scene after the Predator: Badlands end credits, though the “Cast” section is an eye-blink long. In fact, I literally named all the cast members up above, apart from other stuntpeople. Alien Mother Nature’s CGI multitudes vastly outnumber them.

The credits confirm the role of Genna was played by Canada and New Zealand. And the short Special Thanks section includes “Jim Cameron”, possibly the same “Jim Cameron” who was also thanked with overfamiliarity in Frankenstein‘s end credits and who has his own li’l alien world project coming soon.

(His guest consultation begs a question: has Weyland-Yutani ever had any dealings with the Na’vi’s foes in the RDA? Sure, space is big, but in this Silver Age of IP crossovers, Movie Space isn’t nearly as big as it used to be. Avatar is set thirteen years after Romulus and 25 years before Aliens. They also share a studio distributor. Weirder overlaps have happened.)