Predator: Badlands director Dan Trachtenberg wants you to fall in love with his version of the Predator.
That would be Dek — and unlike the other movies in the sci-fi series that started with 1987’s Predator, this time the Yautja warrior is the main character.
Played by Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, Dek is seen as the smallest and weakest in his group, with a lot to prove.
But, it’s a little bit more intense than just proving [himself], because there are some traumatic, violent things that he experiences, and then he finds himself on a planet where everything is trying to kill him.
Trachtenberg tells Entertainment Weekly, adding
The idea to make Badlands focus not just on the alien predator but also take place in his home world instead of Earth is a first for the franchise. Trachtenberg, who gave a fresh take to the 2022 prequel Prey along with screenwriter Patrick Aison, says it all started with one simple thought: The predator never wins.
That hasn’t happened in a Predator movie. The predator never wins, but how can that still be a beautiful movie, not just a movie from the bad guy’s perspective — how can that still really be a full-meal experience? So that’s what led to Badlands.
Trachtenberg says
To make it work, the director says they had to carefully balance the character of Dek.
On the one hand, finding a way to get an audience to emotionally engage with him and connect to him and root for what he’s after, but also not neglect that he’s a creature and he is ferocious and frankly a f—ing badass.
he says
To achieve this, Trachtenberg took inspiration from classic movie characters who “don’t say much, but have a strong and intimidating presence.”
Characters that have a code in a morally ambiguous landscape that are very much sort of anti-hero, but still go through a gauntlet.
Think Clint Eastwood movies, Mad Max in The Road Warrior, and Conan the Barbarian, he says
Another unexpected way they approached the character was by taking away one of his most well-known features — the mask. Trachtenberg says the Badlands team did create a “very cool” mask for the movie, but don’t expect Dek to wear it as often as the others did.
We were tempted, but the whole thing is, can you find a way into this monster?. Shrek isn’t wearing that knight’s helmet throughout the whole movie. It’s like, no, the idea is he’s an ogre. That’s it — and you’re going to have the experience with that guy and hopefully fall in love. And so that became the path here: really saying, yes, he is a creature, and yes, hopefully you’re going to fall in love.
he explains
Of course, Dek isn’t on his (anti)hero journey by himself. He teams up with an unlikely partner, Thia (Elle Fanning), a synthetic created by the Weyland-Yutani company — first known from the Alien franchise.
Just don’t expect this movie to be a full Predator-Alien crossover.
It is exciting to have this movie be just a little toe-dip link between those franchises. It’s important to me — I am sure people anticipate a much bigger thing, and maybe other movies and other cinematic universes would be more aggressive — but I really didn’t want to take all the action figures and smush them together. I really wanted to tell a cool story.
Trachtenberg teases
To make that work, Trachtenberg says he knew Dek needed a companion, but making her human would mean that everyone — both the audience and producers — “would start to get tempted by that human and their story.” So, he made her a robot instead.
And then the next thought was, wait a minute, I know a company that makes robots. And that led to the Weyland-Yutani synth of it all. They are a pretty interesting and bizarre pairing for each other, and that’s a huge part of the fun of the movie is their chemistry.
he explains, and then As for the character of Thia herself, he teases
Speaking of chemistry, the film’s next big moment is at Comic-Con, where Trachtenberg hopes to impress the crowd in the famous Hall H later this week — an honor the director doesn’t take lightly.
I spent eight years waiting in line, sleeping in line, or getting there at 2 or 3 a.m. to get into Hall H. I’d spend the entire con in Hall H and hoped and dreamed that maybe one day I could make something that would be worthy of being up on the stage. I will be very emotional if I allow it to sink in, it will really nail me, and so I’ll be doing my best to not let it fully nail me. It’s beyond words for me.
he says. Not that he’s allowing himself to think too hard about it when EW spoke with him a few weeks before the convention. After that Trachtenberg says
Source: EW