Predator: Badlands is the kind of movie that offers hope Hollywood has finally moved on from the bad old days of crossover cinema. Batman v Superman, Godzilla vs Kong, and the Alien vs Predator movies all imagined that the only thing you had to do to get bums on multiplex seats was to pair up two logos with recognisable silhouettes and watch the greenbacks roll in.
This new film, though, manages the rare feat of cross-pollinating between two decades-old sci-fi sagas, and somehow adding depth and emotional texture to both. Predator suddenly feels like a space where we discover that even within a society of ritualised trophy violence and hereditary warrior pride, there’s room to rebel. Alien is reimagined as a universe in which synthetic beings aren’t just sinister corporate automata, reprogrammed dolts or soft-voiced laboratory philosophers, but something more familiar: entities who can malfunction in ways that look suspiciously like a soul attempting to coalesce in the digital ether.
