Belonging and Self in Predator Badlands

The tension between our need to belong and our need to be ourselves is something most people struggle with at some point in their lives. As children, and often well into adulthood, we seek our family’s acceptance, which usually means absorbing their values and traditions as our own. Trouble starts when those values conflict with our individual sense of right and wrong, or with what actually brings us love and joy. If a family is rigid in its beliefs, the pursuit of what we feel to be true can come at a cost: shame, punishment, and even exile.

A common movie trope is the protagonist gaining agency by “becoming him/herself,” which usually means rejecting outright the obligations and value systems of their parental figures. Predator: Badlands leans into this trope, then complicates it. (Spoilers ahead.) The protagonist, Dek, escapes his own father’s attempt to kill him—the Yautja, the alien race they belong to, cull members of the clan deemed too weak to survive. To prove his worth, Dek travels to a hostile planet to hunt a legendary beast, teaming up with an android and an intelligent animal to survive the journey. Along the way he repeatedly states that a Yautja hunts alone; it’s the android who tells him about Earth’s wolves, whose strength comes not from solitary killing but from the pack. When Dek discovers the beast he’s hunting is his animal companion’s mother, he abandons the hunt to rescue his ally and free her instead, returning home with a very different kind of trophy. He defeats his father in a duel, is offered conditional acceptance if he yields, and refuses, declaring that he has his own clan now. It’s a satisfying moment on screen, and also a simpler one than real life tends to allow.

First, life is rarely this straightforward. Our parents don’t want us to die; they want us to live in a way that makes sense to them, within the structures they’ve built their own lives around. Reconciling our path with theirs can be extremely difficult, and it isn’t always possible. But where the situation allows, it may be worth leaving the door open rather than sealing it shut.

Second, this isn’t really a story about trading one belief system for another; it’s a story about synthesis. Dek doesn’t reject his father’s obsession with strength and survival, he redefines what those words mean. He still returns with a trophy and he still wins a duel, which are both Yautja traditions. The clan’s terms of worthiness aren’t abolished, rather, Dek expands them.

At the very end of the film, Dek rejects his father’s offer to join the clan and slays him. Real life seldom offers this kind of cathartic finality, though there are plenty of non-violent ways to reach the same release. But maybe that’s for the best: without a clean, irreversible ending, we keep open the possibility of reconnection and reconciliation, however difficult that might be.

If you found this topic interesting, we’d invite you to listen to episode eight of the Facing the Moment podcast, Bridging Family Chasms, where Mona Sullivan speaks with Toufic Hakim, PhD, about growing up Muslim-Egyptian in the United States, and how she navigated the tension between her parents’ expectations and her own sense of self.