Not so long ago, I would have deemed it absurd that any admirable cinema could be generated by the screen franchise that launched in 1987 and centered on interstellar hunters who collected forcibly removed spines with a fervor akin to Swifties amassing friendship bracelets at different Eras Tour stops. I’ve long thought Predator and its many sequels and offshoots were, well, just plain dumb. Then came Prey, the inspired variant on the theme directed by Dan Trachtenberg and released in 2022. I was forced to reconsider.

The novelty of Prey came from setting it in the Great Plains in the early seventeen-hundreds and showing how Indigenous Americans might have reacted to the arrival of one of these interstellar killers. There is more to it than that, of course. The film has a thematic heft thanks to considerations of sexism, colonialism, and other flavors of cultural oppression.

For the new film, Predator: Badlands, Trachtenberg is back in the director’s chair with other repeat collaborators, most notably Patrick Aison. He shapes the stories for these films with Trachtenberg and claims the screenwriting credit. In this instance, the creators change things up by making the title huntsman into the protagonist. The film follows a Yautja named Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi). He’s been dismissed as a weakling by his domineering father (Reuben de Jong) who strictly adheres to the warlike culture of the Yautja. After a particularly messy family confrontation, Dek decides he must try to redeem himself in his father’s glowing eyes. The solution he settles on involves traveling to the distant planet Genna that is home to a fearsome creature called a Kalisk. Dek plans to kill the Kalisk as a rite of passage and present his bested quarry to his father and entire clan.

Genna is imaginatively constructed. Every corner of the terrain holds an unorthodox danger, such as meadows filled with grass that cuts like razors and growths that bubble up and explode. Faced with peculiar threats he’s never encountered, Dek is in dire need of help. He gets it from Thia (Elle Fanning), a synthetic humanoid who’s missing the lower half of her body when Dek first encounters her. She’s a chipper chatterbox, in direct contrast to Dek’s surly demeanor, and Fanning plays her with winning energy.

The film borrows enthusiastically from other iconic science-fiction films, most notably the Alien series. It appropriates those elements with wit and style, though. Predator: Badlands takes slyly satiric shots at toxic masculinity and corporate callousness as it celebrates the construction of found families. These thematic elements are enhancements to an effectively entertaining movie that goes for bright, booming spectacle. Odd as it is that Trachtenberg has so thoroughly committed to being the Yautja auteur, he shockingly makes the choice seem worthwhile.