Predator: Badlands – Elle Fanning’s Thia Teases Darkest Future in the Alien Universe

“Whoever wins, we lose.” Not much was good about the Alien vs. Predator movies, but that tagline for the first entry is an all-timer. Conversely, Predator: Badlands is much, much better than either of those crossover flicks. Even so, it doesn’t have a tagline like “Whoever wins, we lose.” But then again, there is no “we” in Badlands.

Not a single human being appears in a frame of the latest Predator flick. Instead most of the movie features the the eponymous Yautja, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), fighting against the various beasties on the dangerous planet Genna. And the characters who do appear human-like, most notably the sisters Thia and Tessa (both played by Elle Fanning) are in fact synthetic androids, specifically synths made by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. With Badlands also being set further into the future than any previous Alien-adjacent flick, the new movie shows us something scarier than any of the previous xenomorph films: a world without humans.

This isn’t to diminish Alien or Aliens, still two of the best sci-fi movies ever made. Rather, Badlands fully realizes the dystopian vision of the future that RIdley Scott and James Cameron began in those pictures. In Scott’s Alien, the crew of the star-freighter Nostromo lives in the shadow of the Company, a faceless organization that deems them expendable when there’s an opportunity to make money. Their interests are even stated plainly and coldly by a secret robot the corporation planted on the ship, so as to protect Company interests. Aliens gives that Company a face in the form of Burke (Paul Reiser), but he best represents Weyland-Yutani in his willingness to, in one character’s words, “fuck each other over for a goddamn percentage.” Simply put, the Company doesn’t care about the humans involved.

When Scott returned to the franchise for Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, he raised that point to apocalyptic levels. Not only do those movies show that the Engineers who created humans also hate the people they made, but also that the synths the humans created are ready to displace us at the first opportunity. In short, the Alien universe has repeatedly warned that human beings are on the verge of becoming an endangered species due to the machines and artificial intelligences we make.