Movie review: Predator Badlands
Dec. 2nd, 2025 07:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gs_silvaPredator: Badlands was...
CUTE!!!!
It was a retelling of Alien Romance, which doesn't bother me because Alien Romance is a retelling of Top Gun, Robotech Macross Saga, Starman, and dozens of other stories. It's a simple plot. It's not derivative so much as universal.
It's the story of a short guy without much going for him, who succeeds after great effort, and makes friends along the way. Predator even ends with a merry band of misfits!
There were some worldbuilding plotholes, and of course, at the end, the MC was better at fighting a group of trained warriors than he should have been at that point. He'd spent the entire movie doing difficult things to survive and get the girl, and those things made him stronger and more experienced for sure, but not a lot of them were hand-to-hand combat.
The warrior society was a little/lot too one-sided and gimmicky. There's no way a group of fighters could live in such close quarters without non-combat dynamics taking a front seat sometimes. They have to learn to get along sometimes. Even tigers and sharks learn how not to be bitey all the time, if they need to.
Also, the merry band of misfits was entirely made of bitey, untrustworthy members. They are going to bite each other sometime. It's inevitable. And there was a very clearly dominant member that could crush the other two. Hint: it wasn't the short guy.
Ultimately, I love that the predator was just a short guy. He probably had some medical condition; I guess his society isn't big on medical diagnostics, and that's fine if a diagnosis just means you have to kill them. I think they would have to steal technology from another culture. I've thought about this a great deal already, because I was going to make a graphic novel years ago about the baddie warrior aliens, but it was going to be a sophisticated deep dive into the nuances of their society that made society possible. They do actually need a lot of nuance. Otherwise, they're essentially just sharks with better reasoning skills.
The movie ended with a punchline, and I classify it as an action-comedy. I've never seen a Predator movie before. I wasn't expecting it to be so humorous.
CUTE!!!!
It was a retelling of Alien Romance, which doesn't bother me because Alien Romance is a retelling of Top Gun, Robotech Macross Saga, Starman, and dozens of other stories. It's a simple plot. It's not derivative so much as universal.
It's the story of a short guy without much going for him, who succeeds after great effort, and makes friends along the way. Predator even ends with a merry band of misfits!
There were some worldbuilding plotholes, and of course, at the end, the MC was better at fighting a group of trained warriors than he should have been at that point. He'd spent the entire movie doing difficult things to survive and get the girl, and those things made him stronger and more experienced for sure, but not a lot of them were hand-to-hand combat.
The warrior society was a little/lot too one-sided and gimmicky. There's no way a group of fighters could live in such close quarters without non-combat dynamics taking a front seat sometimes. They have to learn to get along sometimes. Even tigers and sharks learn how not to be bitey all the time, if they need to.
Also, the merry band of misfits was entirely made of bitey, untrustworthy members. They are going to bite each other sometime. It's inevitable. And there was a very clearly dominant member that could crush the other two. Hint: it wasn't the short guy.
Ultimately, I love that the predator was just a short guy. He probably had some medical condition; I guess his society isn't big on medical diagnostics, and that's fine if a diagnosis just means you have to kill them. I think they would have to steal technology from another culture. I've thought about this a great deal already, because I was going to make a graphic novel years ago about the baddie warrior aliens, but it was going to be a sophisticated deep dive into the nuances of their society that made society possible. They do actually need a lot of nuance. Otherwise, they're essentially just sharks with better reasoning skills.
The movie ended with a punchline, and I classify it as an action-comedy. I've never seen a Predator movie before. I wasn't expecting it to be so humorous.