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.

In Predator: Badlands, it seems that the warning was not heeded. While the film does not explicitly state that humanity has gone extinct, Badlands does take place in the far future, and their absence is conspicuous. The sole mention of people occurs in an off-hand comment when Thia explains why a synth would be sent on a mission by Weyland-Yutani, observing that no one from the Company could face the challenges of exploration half as well as she could. Outside of that, no one even seems to think about humanity. The synthetics instead serve only the Company with the same dutifulness (and sense of abstraction) as a modern day churchgoer might pray to a crucifix.

The absence of humans should send a shiver down the audience’s spine. While one interpretation might be they have sent the synthetics do a job too dangerous for humans; another might be that like Skynet still having a need for Terminators, the Company has become an entity unto itself, and synths like Thia and Tessa its apostles spread across the stars long after humanity’s flame has been snuffed. Hence the real scary part is the fact that Weyland-Yutani still exists in the future of Badlands, regardless of humanity’s status. In the new movie, we learn that the Company’s computer interface MU/TH/ER continues to send synths across the galaxy, looking for creatures they can turn into weapons, just like they did with the xenomorphs.

Perhaps they would like to use something like Genna’s Kalisk on the last vestiges of humanity? Or perhaps like Michael Fassbender David in Scott’s prequel films, MU/TH/ER finally finished what Ash started in the original Alien. It has expended all the crew. No wonder Thia is so chipper and happy to talk to anyone other than a robot when she comes across Dek in Badlands!

If indeed the world of Predator: Badlands has no humans in it, then we did indeed lose. And it wasn’t the xenomorphs or the Yautja who wiped us out. It were those AI instruments we so happily pursued. Perhaps Dek should be more afraid of the new tool he picked up along the way…