Predator: Badlands

Directed by Dan Trachtenberg. Starring Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi.

Dek is a Yautja (the Predator species) and considered a runt. His brother, Kwei gives him one last chance to prove himself and Dek goes all in by vowing to hunt and kill a Kalisk, an apparently unkillable creature that lives on the planet Genna, the so-called ‘Death Planet’. Before he can leave their father arrives and orders Kwei to kill Dek. Kwei refuses and pushes Dek into his ship which he remotely launches to Genna.

Dek finds the Death Planet is well named, because everything there wants to kill him! He comes across a badly damaged Weyland-Yutani synthetic named Thia (Fanning). Thia was part of a team that had come to Genna to capture a Kalisk. The rest of the team was wiped out, though she believes her ‘sister’ Tessa may have survived.

Dek and Thia form an unlikely partnership as they go after the Kalisk, but the true enemy may be something else entirely…

In 2018 we got The Predator, which was touted as the film to reinvigorate the franchise, Witten and directed by Shane Black, a good writer and director and, perhaps more importantly for the purposes of The Predator, one of the stars of (and an uncredited writer on) the original Predator in 1987. Sadly, The Predator was a bit rubbish.

Then out of the blue in 2022 we got Prey, a prequel set in the 18^th century featuring a Comanche woman going up against a Predator and it was, pretty darn good. Three years later and Prey’s director, Trachtenberg follows up Prey with not one, but two new Predator films. The bloody animated film, Predator: Killer of Killers a few months ago, and now this, Predator: Badlands.

It’s safe to say I’ve enjoyed all three films. It’s also fair to say that all three of his Predator films have been very different. In many ways Prey was most similar to Predator, Killer of Killers expanded Yautja culture and gave us humans in three different time periods facing off against Predators, now Trachtenberg eschews everything we’ve seen before (well maybe outside of AVP) by giving us a Predator film where the funny faced alien hunter isn’t the bad guy, but is instead the protagonist. More than this the film is a buddy movie, and it’s a PG-13 to boot making it technically the most family friendly Predator film.

And it works. Yes, I took a while to warm to it, but this is an entertaining action-adventure film that I ended up enjoying immensely.

Schuster-Koloamatangi does a good job of imbuing Dek with personality under all those prosthetics. Fanning is excellent in a dual role playing very different characters, and her interplay with Dek is really good. The inclusion of Bud threatens to introduce a Groot style creature, but the film never goes full Marvel. Despite its rating it’s quite bloodthirsty, it’s just that all the violence is against creatures or synthetic humans, which allows it to get away with bloodletting it wouldn’t have done otherwise.

It is unlike any other Predator film, and your mileage may vary in terms of whether you see that as a good thing or not, but for me it’s very enjoyable and I hope we get to see more of Dek’s new clan.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

By John le Carré

It’s the Cold War, the early 1960s, and Alec Leamas is an MI6 agent who runs a large network of East German spies whilst working as head of Berlin Station. Slowly but surely Leamas’ network has been dismantled by the Abteilung, the East German secret police, led by Mundt, a man who’d tried to kill George Smiley a few years earlier. Leamas’ last agent is a man named Karl Riemeck. Leamas is waiting for Riemeck to cross the border into West Berlin, but on the verge of safety he’s shot by the border guards.

Leamas returns to London and is debriefed by the head of the Circus, Control. Control knows that Leamas is burnt out, but he wants him to stay out in the cold just a little while longer, just long enough to help enact a plan to eliminate Mundt. The plan will involve Leamas betraying his country and travelling behind the Iron Curtain, but love may well prove Leamas’ undoing.

This was John le Carré’s third novel, the third to feature George Smiley (though his role is small, though important) but the first to really make his name, an espionage masterpiece that would set the tone of what was to come. The antithesis of Bond, grim, grounded and cynical and it’s very, very good.

Yes, at times the story is mundane, but that is the point, but as the pages pass it gets more and more tense, especially when you can see certain threads beginning to dovetail together. It’s a tale of double and triple crosses, where one of the most decent characters might well be on the other side.

Leamas is a bitter, cynical man, Liz the naïve communist party member he falls in love with, Mundt is a monster and George Smiley, well he’s George Smiley.

le Carré’s prose is never less than engaging, even when he’s writing about Leamas’s drab job in the library, or the minutiae of Leamas’ recruitment by the East. The plot is a tangled web of deception and we’re as much pawns in the game as Leamas is.  

Is it the best spy novel ever written? I don’t know, I think Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy might actually be better, but you wouldn’t get there without this, and I still enjoyed it greatly.