Dan Trachtenberg
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Connections, in both directions
Hell, the climax is reminiscent of Avatar's creature v. big mech showdown, fueled by your Alien nostalgia.
This standalone installment decisively links the Predator mythology with the insidious and relentless corporate monster of the Alien franchise.
When Thia’s crew of other Weyland-Yutani (the corporation from the Alien franchise) androids returns for their bioproducts, the exploration of what becomes a web of exploitative relationships makes Badlands a better Alien movie than the last Alien movie we got.
This is not to say Predator: Badlands feels like a prototypical return to the 1980s roots of the Predator or Alien franchises, with Fanning’s loquacious android hailing form the latter.
The Alien films at least tried to mix things up.
Thia (Elle Fanning, in one of 2025’s coolest performances), an android created by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, linking this story to the Alien universe.
Goodman’s performance lulls you into a false sense of security with his endearing teddy bear demeanour (still in currency from his Rosanne days) that cracks during fits of rage to reveal a frightening villain channeling a little of Kathy Bates’ Annie Wilkes from Misery but with less sadism.
No, you should stay focused on the matter at hand: a masterfully suspenseful mystery thriller set in a doomsday bunker, with a story that conjures “Misery,” “Alien,” “The Twilight Zone,” several Steven Spielberg movies, and at least one episode of “Breaking Bad.” (YOU’LL KNOW THE ONE.) Directed with astonishing confidence by first-timer Dan Trachtenberg, the film uses a deceptively simple premise, carefully scripted (by Josh Campbell, Matthew Stuecken, and Damien Chazelle) so that no information is wasted and each new piece of it furthers the mystery.
At different times during its 105 minutes, "10 Cloverfield" recalls H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds," Stephen King's "Misery" and Steven Spielberg's "Jaws."
One moment, Goodman is channeling his old playbook while playing every man Dan Conner on Roseanne , the next he’s borrowing plays from Kathy Bates in Misery .
There are shades of Misery here, though Howard’s obsession is not as much with Michelle as it is with the correctness, the prescience, of his own preparedness.
Starting out as a cut-rate Misery , this first feature from Dan Trachtenberg quickly comes to resemble an old Twilight Zone half-hour padded to feature length, partly through a climax that, well, spoilers!
Avatar’s pandora with the emphasis on flora and fauna…
Hell, the climax is reminiscent of Avatar's creature v. big mech showdown, fueled by your Alien nostalgia.
He’ll need those gadgets to survive the planet, which is designed like Pandora if it was created by Sam Raimi and not James Cameron.
It wouldn’t work if we only followed Dek’s solo hunting trip across Genna, which is creatively brought to life as a nightmarish take on Pandora from Avatar (2009), where everything has evolved to kill or hurt you.
The alien death planet is populated with ravenous flora and fauna and, while they compare unfavorably to the creatures of Avatar, for example, they are better than most.
…to borrow a line from Avatar — every living thing that crawls, flies or squats in the mud wants to kill him and eat his eyes for jujubes…
…whether this brutal sci-fi sequel lives up to Prey and the 1987 original…
What made the original Predator work and what made Prey work is that the audience connected with our heroes in their own right, with the events of each film only getting more engaging and exhilarating when we saw the terror of the stalking Yautja.
This is not to say Predator: Badlands feels like a prototypical return to the 1980s roots of the Predator or Alien franchises, with Fanning’s loquacious android hailing form the latter.
…the best Predator movie since the first one back in 1987…
That does mean there’s none of the suspense or terror that came from the ’87 original, or Prey for that matter.
Once Thia arrives in the story, they take a page out of Predator star and legendary screenwriter Shane Black’s book and make Badlands into something of a buddy movie.
Trachtenberg seems more interested in turning the Predator franchise into a brand akin to Star Wars or the MCU…
Badlands is a teen-friendly adventure movie in the vein of the original Star Wars and Pirates of the Caribbean trilogies.
…you can’t help but laugh as he carries her around on his back as Luke Skywalker did Yoda on Dagobah…
It alternates between having a “Star Wars” aesthetic and embracing the cuteness of creatures like Falkor in “The NeverEnding Story” (1984).
The other thing Predator: Badlands evokes – and it’s impossible to miss – is Star Wars.
Aliens (1986)
Directed by James Cameron
influenced Predator: Badlands (2025)
Visuals Themes Characters Plot
There are also echoes of James Cameron – Avatar’s sense of discovery, Aliens’ grit, and T2’s scale and heart.
I've lamented in the past that for cross-pollinated Fox franchise Aliens someone created the word 'quadrilogy' when tetralogy existed…
Rather than another female action hero in the “Predator/Alien” canon along the lines of Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) or Naru, Thia has more in common to Bishop (Lance Henriksen) from “Aliens” (1986)…
Closer to the vein of Aliens’s Bishop and Romulus’s Andy than, say, Prometheus’s David, she’s the film’s beating heart…
“Predator: Badlands” cribs from across the sci-fi galaxy, especially with a nod to “Aliens.”
…there’s a bit with a pulse rifle (yes, the pulse rifle from Aliens) that will surely blow the mind of any child of the ’80s…
Jaws (1975)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
influenced Prey (2022), 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), Predator: Badlands (2025)
Visuals Themes
The answer was to avoid showing it for as long as humanly possible, a la Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
At different times during its 105 minutes, "10 Cloverfield" recalls H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds," Stephen King's "Misery" and Steven Spielberg's "Jaws."
In “Prey,” he shows the Predator’s infrared point-of-view juxtaposed with overhead shots of tall grass moving in a field, a reminder that what we can’t see is scarier like “Jaws” (1975).
Cinematographer Jeff Cutter gorgeously and harrowingly accents predatory instincts reminiscent to Jaws, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, and—picturesquely—the live-action The Lion King.
It’s a lesson that Steven Spielberg learned in making Jaws, and Trachtenberg paid attention.
But in general, the tone is a throwback to many of the old school kind of thrillers that took larger-than-life concepts and fears, and grounded them in a cynical psychology; films like Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach where most of the world ended in nuclear explosion, yet Australians are forced to quizzically carry on as if nothing happened while radioactive fallout inches closer every passing week.
Michelle is on the highway, fleeing her normal life in a sequence that, in its tone and scoring, recalls the opening scenes of Psycho — and turns out to be as much of a red herring.
These opening scenes are clearly designed to be reminiscent of another story of a woman who left the city for a dangerous countryside, as Michelle packing her bags and Bear McCreary’s overheated, Hermann-esque score will make anyone who’s seen "Psycho" think of Marion Crane in the opening act of Hitchcock's classic.
In an opening sequence that eerily echoes Marion Crane’s flight from justice in “Psycho,” an emotionally distraught Louisiana woman named Michelle (Winstead) packs her bags and drives out into the night.
Her trip has a whiff of Janet Leigh busting out of town in Psycho .
The spiritual sequel to "Cloverfield" has been shrouded in mystery, but can the final product live up to the hype?
While producer J.J. Abrams describes “10 Cloverfield Lane” as being very different but in “the same wheelhouse” as the 2008 film “Cloverfield,” it still needs to be stressed that this intense, continually gripping and extremely engrossing movie is not a sequel to the equally excellent earlier film, also produced by Abrams.
There’s an adequate thriller in “10 Cloverfield Lane” – 60 year-old man saves (or abducts) 30 year-old woman and stashes her in his doomsday shelter, claiming a world-ending chemical attack – but it doesn’t deserve to share a name with 2008 cinematic theme park ride “Cloverfield.”
★★★½ Not so much a sequel as a sidebar to the 2008 "found footage" monster movie "Cloverfield," this ingenious and claustrophobic thriller is compact enough to be almost the movie equivalent of a black box theater production: For most of its length, it needs only three characters and a single location -- a well-stocked survivalist bunker -- to keep audiences on edge.
John Goodman and Mary Elizabeth Winstead in 10 Cloverfield Lane.
The Cloverfield Paradox (2018)
Directed by Julius Onah
influenced by 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), Prey (2022)
Plot
In 2016, a film initially titled The Cellar got branded 10 Cloverfield Lane and was released to critical plaudits and financial success; the movie had little to do with the original Cloverfield but had the same winking, self-aware approach to sci-fi horror (and the same production team).
A trainwreck of a sci-fi flick bent on extending a franchise that should have died a peaceful death almost exactly one decade ago, Julius Onah's The Cloverfield Paradox follows the lead of the far-superior 10 Cloverfield Lane in imagining a Cloverfield spinoff whose genre ingredients have little to do with the original found-footage, giant-monster flick.
It's a far cry from 2008's fun, inventive Cloverfield and 2016's smart, intense 10 Cloverfield Lane.
But like 10 Cloverfield Lane, the monsters are kind of an afterthought with the meat of the story and conflicts focused elsewhere.
While its predecessors, 2008’s Cloverfield and 2016’s 10 Cloverfield Lane , thrived on pre-release mystery, this was starting to feel less like calculated secrecy and more like a panicked flight.
While 10 Cloverfield Lane left us in the dark throughout the movie, The Cloverfield Paradox continually cuts back to Earth to show us that the monster is there, somewhere, doing something.
Expertly blending action and thriller elements with a superficially absurd sci-fi-horror high concept – a technologically advanced alien big-game hunter stalks American special-forces soldiers for sport – the film ingeniously inverts the right-wing fantasy of Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985).
Knock at the Cabin (2023)
Directed by M. Night Shyamalan
influenced by 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016)
Themes
It’s weird, traumatic, and violent, borrowing ideas from “Knowing,” “10 Cloverfield Lane,” and “The Mist” as it explores thought-provoking themes of destruction, salvation, and sacrifice.
That allowed the story to stand more on its own than exist solely as a Shyamalan property, hitting a balance between Funny Games (2007) and 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), particularly the latter in the big question of “Are these people full of shit?
Knock at the Cabin felt a lot like 10 Cloverfield Lane , since both were claustrophobic, locked-room films with an apocalyptic edge.
A guilty part of us might hope that this turns into Don’t Look Up or even Roland Emmerich’s 2012 , or even 10 Cloverfield Lane which used a similar sense of claustrophobia and guesswork.
Alien: Romulus (2024)
Directed by Fede Álvarez
influenced Predator: Badlands (2025)
Themes Characters
…other universe expansions like Alien Earth and Alien: Romulus…
Predator: Badlands may struggle to replicate the commercial success of another ageing Disney sci-fi property, 2024’s Alien: Romulus ($351 million).
Both this and Alien: Romulus represented big-time theatrical returns for their respective stories, and neither has seemed to break through beyond their respective fanbases, of which I am a part.
Andy (David Jonsson) from “Alien: Romulus” (2024)…
Closer to the vein of Aliens’s Bishop and Romulus’s Andy than, say, Prometheus’s David, she’s the film’s beating heart…
However, Trachtenberg seems to disagree it’s a wholly bad idea, despite the Alien franchise undergoing its own rebirth with Alien: Romulus (2024) and Alien: Earth—which have both never once mentioned the Yautja.
Esoterically and ambiguously mentioned earlier that 10 Cloverfield Lane borrows much from Hitchcock, the one movie that almost immediately comes to mind is The Birds .
With her commanding screen presence, Midthunder spends much of the movie in natural landscapes, accompanied only by her character’s rather adorable dog, Sarii—and the combination of hero-and-dog versus aliens recalls a similar dynamic in Riddick (2013).
In a moment when unpretentious genre-savvy craftsmen like David Twohy have receded from view, Trachtenberg, whose background is in commercial and video-game work, has similar gifts: At times, Prey displays some of the same ornery virtuosity as Twohy’s Riddick films, especially the underrated 2013 third installment, with its mostly dialogue-free opening passages pitting Vin Diesel’s loner against a host of carnivorous monsters.
Since it’s as lifeless as The Mandalorian, in its structure, photography, and storytelling…
Despite the film’s violence, it often feels more like The Mandalorian than a movie in the Predator franchise.
…the concept of “stoic warrior partners with unlikely allies and hilarity ensues” truly feels like the entire story is just an abandoned The Mandalorian script.
It will remind the savvy cinephile of works such as Wait Until Dark and Rope , the single setting used to evoke as much fear and horror as the potential apocalypse promised outside.
…a gorgeously photographed cross between King Kong’s Skull Island in its creepy crawlers and giant monsters…
Whereas those other films flirted more with horror or suspense elements, Badlands is a “survive the island” movie to the hilt, and does the concept better than the last decade’s worth of Jurassic Park and King Kong flicks.
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
Directed by James Cameron
influenced Predator: Badlands (2025)
Visuals Characters
There are also echoes of James Cameron – Avatar’s sense of discovery, Aliens’ grit, and T2’s scale and heart.
…algo similar a lo que hizo Cameron entre «Terminator» 1 y la 2, donde el villano pasa a ser un héroe o antihéroe para que la audiencia pueda conectar…