85% on Rotten Tomatoes (out of 222 reviews)
Runtime: 107 minutes
Directed by: Dan Trachtenberg
Starring: The main human you see is Elle Fanning, of course
From: 20th Century Studios
My apologies for not posting this last night; life happened. I didn't see anything last night anyhow. This time tomorrow night, I'll be caught up on everything, promised. Now, onto the review:
I don’t even want to read the fan fiction of Dek and Thia!
No, I don’t read fan fiction, period; rather, it’s the idea that I know some people will go wild over the two leads in this film as there are some out there who “get excited” about monsters. I don’t get it myself but perhaps I’m just too vanilla. In any case, the majority of the Predator films that have been made weren’t that good, in my eyes. I would be happy to just stick with the first two. I’m tired of property mining and the deluge of sequels that won’t seemingly ever stop-point noted, I still saw this film as the idea of finally getting to see the home world of the Yautja-a percentage have had this desire for decades-and the promise of new ideas piqued my interest.
After seeing Badlands, I could quibble, and not even in a pedantic fashion. My comment that there should have been at least a little less humor is valid, in my eyes. The story isn’t that complicated, although the idea of following a “runt” member of the alien species w/ something to prove who teams up with a human android is of course a “safe” choice for mainstream audience acceptance. That is much more preferable to me than Alien: Romulus-that not only was irritating due to the constant reminder of much better films from the past, the movie itself was just rotten.
In contrast, Badlands told an underdog story of sorts as Dek the Yautja has to prove himself; the method of achieving this task is to kill a giant creature no one has been able to stop. He soon meets Thia, a synthetic from… well, you can probably guess which direction they went in. The highlight of the film wasn’t the action, although that was typically enjoyable. Rather, it was the Death Planet where much of the movie is set. Creativity abounded with the variety of different creatures on display, in addition to the assortment of different ways the planet will attempt to kill anyone.
Another highlight was the rather unique score from Sarah Schachner and Benjamin Wallfisch; I was won over when hearing the movie’s theme and there’s a sound best described by me as “Gregorian monks chanting into a talkbox!” Of course, this is far different from the first two movies and even Prey. I can at least like all four despite and because of their variances. Also, I’ll give my props to Elle Fanning-I did not fully respect her game. No, I’m not referring to the hormone-induced reactions that some have done in reference to her the past few months!
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