PREDATOR: BADLANDS

Here's the surprise: a Predator movie with this much heart. Dek, the outcast runt of a warrior clan, ends up hunting an unkillable monster to win his father's approval — and instead learns compassion from a broken android and a small, loyal creature. The film argues, with real conviction, that protecting the weak ennobles the soul. That's a rare thing to find in a franchise built on hunting for sport.

It costs you something to get there, though. This is a violent film — bodies impaled, androids torn apart and beheaded, a father who runs his own son through with a flaming blade. The camera cuts away from the worst of it, but the intensity is sustained and the creatures are genuinely scary.

If you're an adult or older teen who can watch tense, bloody action without it troubling your conscience, this is a well-made, unexpectedly moral film worth your evening. If you're picking for children, this isn't the one — the violence alone rules it out.

Dek is the runt of the Yautja, a warrior clan that kills off anything it deems weak. Rejected by his father and headed for death, Dek chooses instead to hunt Genna's deadliest apex predator, the Kalisk, hoping a kill will finally win him honor. Alone on a hostile planet full of killer vines and worse, he finds unlikely allies: a damaged android named Thia and a small, monkey-like creature. What Dek needs to survive Genna may not be strength at all.

Four stars means this delivers on every front it sets out to. Director Dan Trachtenberg gives the film excitement, thrills, and genuine heroic stakes, and the camera has the discipline to cut away from the worst of the gore rather than dwell on it. The contrast between Thia's compassion and the villainous androids' cold cruelty gives the action real emotional weight instead of empty spectacle. It's a monster-hunt movie with heart, and that combination is what earns the top score — this is a franchise entry that works as both thriller and parable.

This film has a genuinely strong moral center, and it's worth naming plainly: protecting and equipping the weak, it argues, is what ennobles a soul — and what ultimately helps you survive and defeat evil. Thia teaches Dek compassion and empathy; the villainous androids model the opposite, a heartlessness with no mercy in it at all. That contrast is the movie's real engine, and it lands.

The film is honest, too, about where it falls short of a biblical picture of family. Both parental figures in the story — Dek's father and the corporate "mother" program the androids serve — are cold and destructive. Dek keeps trying to earn a father's approval that will never come, a father who kills rather than forgives weakness. Scripture commands the opposite: children are to honor father and mother, and fathers are called to raise children with love, not cruelty (Ephesians 6:1–4). The film doesn't resolve that ache; it simply shows what happens when it goes unanswered, and lets compassion from outsiders fill the gap.

Still, the film's central conviction — that the weak are worth protecting, not discarding — echoes something true. "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise... God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong" (1 Corinthians 1:27).

This is a Predator movie with an unexpectedly strong moral spine — a story about mercy toward the weak, told with real craft and heart, and remarkably clean of language, sex, or nudity. But the violence is sustained, intense, and sometimes gruesome enough that it isn't for children. So here's our answer, the same one we opened with: worth the trip — adults only. Choosing for family movie night instead? Try our latest family-friendly picks.