Elle Fanning is unbreakable in the dystopian new Predator film

Predator: Badlands
★★½
M. 110 minutes

Perhaps it was inevitable we’d eventually get to see the universe through a Predator’s eyes. After all, there are only so many changes that can be rung on the simple plot of John McTiernan’s 1987 action classic, which saw Arnold Schwarzenegger battling a hulking, highly intelligent, mostly invisible alien who’d travelled to a Central American jungle to hunt humans.

Thia (Elle Fanning, left) and Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) in Predator: Badlands.Credit: AP

Officially the seventh feature film in the series, Dan Trachtenberg’s Predator: Badlands follows a comparable hunting expedition on a planet far from Earth, undertaken by Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) a youthful Predator who’s left his invisibility cloak behind.

In case of doubt about whether we should be cheering him on, his underdog status is spelled out in a prologue set on his own home planet, where we meet other members of his species including his stern father – also played by Schuster-Koloamatangi, although without looking at the credits it’s unlikely that anyone would guess.

If you went into Predator: Badlands with no advance warning of what to expect, you might spend the first quarter-hour wondering if the whole movie was going to be Predator-on-Predator violence, interspersed with solemn dialogue in the clan’s own guttural tongue.

This opening gambit feels like a risk, for a couple of reasons: not only does it dispel whatever remains of the Predator mystique, but it’s questionable how far these butt-ugly aliens can command the screen all on their own.

The character design has been toned down, so they come off a bit like nastier Klingons. But I kept getting distracted from the subtitles by the orthodontic nightmare that is the Predator mouth, with upper and lower incisors curved inward and a second set of teeth behind. It may look cool and scary, but how do they actually eat?

Thankfully there are eventually other things to focus on, especially Elle Fanning’s comic turn as an empathetic android named Thia, manufactured by the sinister Weyland-Yutani corporation from the Alien films, part of the same film continuity since Alien vs. Predator in 2004.

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Thia is the kind of chirpy, wisecracking character who can quickly become annoying in a story meant to be taken even halfway seriously. But she has some excuse for her breeziness, since she’s basically impossible to kill: the lower half of her body has gone missing, but this bothers her no more than the Scarecrow is bothered when his limbs are torn off by the winged monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.

That sets the tone for the rest of the film, which starts out as a dystopian nightmare and morphs into a comic fairytale about learning to reject the lessons of your upbringing (Fanning too plays a second role, as another android whom Thia considers her “sister”).

A Predator who learns to care: it seems like a bit much. Still, Dek softens only to a point – and the moral message of the climax is as jumbled than everything else, bringing home that finding your chosen family frees you to slaughter anyone who isn’t part of the gang.

In cinemas from Thursday

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