Disney infantilizes Hollywood's most violent franchise

BarcelonaWhen in 2019 Disney bought 21st Century Fox studio for more than 60 billion euros He not only acquired the superhero trading cards he was missing from his Marvel collection (the franchises X-Men, Deadpool, Fantastic Four...) but iconic sagas like Alien and PredatorThese films, which blended science fiction, horror, and action, naturally raised questions about how they fit into the completely accessible and uncomplicated approach that defines Disney's corporate identity. Six years later, perhaps the answer is... Predator: Badlands, which arrives in theaters this Friday and is a strange hybrid between one of Hollywood's most hyper-violent sagas and cinema family-friendly from Disney.

The saga Predator It originates from one of the hits Arnold Schwarzenegger's most testosterone-fueled during the 1980s: Predator (1987), one actioner A thrilling film directed with extraordinary skill by John McTiernan, which pitted a US military commando against an alien hunting on Earth in the Guatemalan jungle. The film's hyperbolic action—bordering on parody—the desperate struggle for survival against a vastly superior enemy, and the idea of an advanced alien race for whom our planet is merely a hunting ground form the DNA of a saga that expanded into more or less successful sequels during the dystopian era.Predator 2), now placing it on another planet (Predators), now crossing over the studio's two fantasy horror sagas (Alien vs. Predator).

With the purchase of Fox, the franchise made a move and in 2022 came the most interesting installment in decades: Prey It proposed a leap forward in time to the 18th century and a return to the essence of Predator with a thriller energetic – almost one western– about a young Comanche woman who bravely and with boundless ingenuity confronts one of the alien hunters, the relentless Yautja. The film's director was Dan Trachtenberg, who had debuted with the excellent 10 Cloverfield Street, a film that already explored female resilience in extreme situations. Unfortunately, Prey It's arguably the least successful installment in the saga, as Disney released it directly on Disney+ to bolster the platform's expansion and avoid taking risks with unpredictable post-pandemic box office returns.

The saga's Copernican shift

But Trachtenberg was not discouraged; on the contrary, a few months ago he released (also on Disney+) a magnificent animated feature set in the universe Predator with three similar stories Prey which pit the Yautja against, respectively, a 9th-century Viking warrior, a 17th-century samurai, and a World War II American pilot; three stories that converge on the Yautja homeworld, introducing an epic dimension and a unifying vision to the saga, unprecedented until then. That's why Trachtenberg's Copernican shift in this direction is so surprising. Predator: Badlandswhere the protagonist is, for the first time in four decades of the franchise, the alien hunter: the young Dek, a scrawny warrior by Yautja standards—impressive by ours—whom a tyrannical father wants to kill to prune "the weakness" of his clan. Dek is forced to seek redemption and revenge on a planet inhabited by a monster so terrible that even the Yautja avoid it.

Rejected by his own kind, tormented by the death of his brother—his only ally—and trapped on a planet with the most dangerous flora and fauna in the galaxy, Dek is a character consciously designed to appeal to a viewer accustomed to hating and fearing the Yautja. This feeling is heightened when Dek forms an unexpected alliance with the talking, optimistic, legless robot played by the superb Elle Fanning. They are an archetypal pair of buddy movieThe taciturn, decisive warrior and his quick-witted, fast-talking sidekick. All that's missing is for a cute alien creature to latch onto them during their journey to complete this endearing, unconventional family and the Disneyfication of the saga. Predator be complete.

Paradoxically, all this does not make Predator: Badlands a bad movie. On the contrary, it's a very decent piece of entertainment with a fantastical world inherited from Richard Corben's comics and echoes of Star Wars (especially from The Mandalorianand of the marginalized figures transformed into heroes in James Gunn's films. The relationship between the Yautja and the android carries emotional weight, and the alien landscape (the razor-sharp grass) adds interest to the frequent action scenes, which are resolved somewhat routinely. But it's a shame that the film abandons the identity of the saga to which it belongs, becoming indistinguishable in tone and dramatic mechanisms from so many other Disney audiovisual products. It's good to shake up the franchises to which Hollywood has sold its soul, but if the ambition is to infantilize and dilute their personality into a kind of corporate uniformity, wouldn't it be better to create an original film and leave the universe alone? Predator?