After the Hunt: PREDATOR: BADLANDS

Since 1987 we’ve had six and three-fourths Predator movies about the eponymous alien big game hunter coming to Earth and hunting, and one and one-fourth Predator movies about humans going to another planet and getting hunted. The nice thing about Predator: Badlands is that, despite being the ninth movie to feature the hulking, dreadlocked, toothy aliens, it finds something new to do. This time it stars the predator. He’s a runt hoping to prove himself, so he blasts off to the most dangerous planet in the galaxy with the goal of bringing back the head of a hitherto unbeatable beast. This means that most of the movie we’re listening to a grunting alien language and watching a performance buried under makeup and CGI augmentation running through special effects. The fun thing is that it works. 

Writer-director Dan Trachtenberg is here making his third in the franchise, which makes him the first filmmaker to do so much with the material. Turns out he’s a great steward for this series. His first attempt, 2022’s straight-to-streaming Prey, was a period piece with the alien fighting a tribe of indigenous Americans. That had a great concept and modest charms. His second, another Hulu original, was this summer’s Predator: Killer of Killers, a vibrant splash-panel animated triptych that put the hunters up against first vikings, then ninjas and samurai, and then World War II fighter planes. That movie’s a ton of stylish action fun, using its animated form to draw creative skills and kills that never wear out their welcome. It’s clear that Trachtenberg is enjoying an impulse to unleash a fan’s imagination. His every effort with the Predators stems from the simple questions: who haven’t they fought before, and what would be cool to see. It’s a playground conversation—who’d win in a fight?—done on a pleasing, modest studio budget. 

Badlands ends up Trachtenberg’s best Predator movie yet because of its high-gloss, yet economical, use of convincing effects and an underdog story so bone-deep basic that it’s hard not to root for the main character, toothy uncommunicativeness and all. It helps that the performance is actually charismatic and sympathetic under all the fakery. (One gets the sense that for Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, the relatively unknown 24-year-old New Zealander actor in the role, this would have big star-making potential if anyone could recognize him.) It also helps that the warrior alien is teamed up with a chatty robotic woman (Elle Fanning), who just so happens to have been torn in half and therefore carted around by our lead for information in her head crucial to this particular planet’s dangers . This gives the movie a relatively sweet and uncomplicated dynamic, and a straight line from setups to payoffs, that gives the movie a modest matinee charge. It’s has all the lasers and creatures and ships and decapitations you’d want from a Predator movie, with the right balance of familiarity to freshness to make it appealing once more.

A Room with a Clue: 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE

John Carpenter initially thought his classic horror film Halloween could become a series of otherwise unconnected horror stories set around the eponymous holiday. Alas, Michael Myers proved too popular, and the one time that long-running property tried out the stand-alone idea (Halloween III: Season of the Witch) didn’t work out well enough to try again. But if you’ve been hoping someone else would take that great idea for a unique spin on franchise filmmaking and try it out, you’re in luck. J.J. Abrams and his production company Bad Robot have sprung a surprise on us. With the title of Matt Reeves’ great 2008 found-footage monster movie Cloverfield in its name, 10 Cloverfield Lane is a stand-alone thriller only similar in that it’s built around a small-scale high-concept executed with simple and engaging plotting. If the Cloverfield brand will continue and become synonymous with cheap, resourceful, and entertaining sci-fi tinged tension, then, based on the evidence at hand, count me in.

The setup is this. A woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) crashes her car in the middle of nowhere and wakes up chained to a makeshift hospital bed in what appears to be an empty anonymous basement (and with no reception, naturally). Soon an imposing older man (John Goodman) walks in. He’s her captor and self-appointed caretaker, intimidating and odd even before he informs her that he’s also her savior. You see, they’re in his doomsday bunker. He claims to have snatched her from the wreckage of her accident and allowed her to stay with him, locked away from a world that has fallen into radioactive or biological warfare, or maybe both. She’s not so sure he’s right, and even when the bunker’s other occupant, a nice young man (John Gallagher Jr.), corroborates the story, she’s still not so sure what’s going on. The good thing is the audience doesn’t know either. What follows is a measured mind game as the woman attempts to discover the truthfulness of her situation. Best-case scenario: a madman prepper has kidnapped her. Worst-case scenario: it really is the end of the world.

With a hook so intriguing, and a three-person cast of uniform excellence, the movie would be foolish to let all that go to waste. In its tiny setting, impeccably set-designed with rows of nonperishable food items, incongruously homey placemats and knickknacks, and bookcases overflowing with Tom Clancy novels (a low-key funny touch), the three characters maneuver around each other, pressing advantages, keeping secrets, and jockeying for power. Can we trust anyone? What are their motives? And what’s really outside? The answers are slyly and slowly teased out by screenwriters Josh Campbell and Matthew Stuecken, relative newcomers, with Damien Chazelle, an Oscar nominee for Whiplash, although this is closer in tone to his script for the pianist-held-hostage-mid-concert thriller Grand Piano. Director Dan Trachtenberg makes a slick, competent debut – a fan film based on the video game Portal was the most prominent item on his résumé before this – by letting his craft play subtly while trusting the writing, the mystery, and the cast to carry the picture.

A reasonably clever claustrophobic thriller – it’s practically an inadvertent B-movie echo of Room – 10 Cloverfield Lane takes its time, bit by bit building the setups for a string of payoffs. It earns this patience by sticking so closely to a sympathetic performance by Winstead. We don’t know much about the character and don’t learn much more, but she brings such an innately appealing presence, warm and capable, smart and scared, that it’d be difficult not to care about her suffering. Add to that a sweetly odd Gallagher Jr. and a simmering, unpredictable Goodman (a convincing, human-scale monster) you’re looking at a trio of fine actors who build a fine, prickly atmosphere on which Trachtenberg can hang the film’s deliberate escalation of unease and suspense. It’s a sturdy guessing game making for an entertaining 95 minutes or so, deflating only in its disappointing conclusion, which goes about 10 minutes further, explaining away ambiguities with overly literal and predictable action, effects, and unsatisfying late breaking twists. Even so, for a modest feature of chills and thrills, it’s a passably good time.