Predator: Badlands

Essential, and it is the biggest swing the series has taken. For thirty-eight years these films have been about humans being hunted, with the creature kept at a distance precisely so it stays frightening. This one makes the Predator the protagonist and asks you to want him to survive.

That should not work, and the reason it does is that the film does not soften him. He is an outcast from his own culture, judged too small and sent to prove himself, and the film treats his values as genuinely alien rather than translating them into human ones. The planet he lands on is hostile to everything, which puts him in the position every human in this franchise has occupied: outmatched, improvising, and a long way from help.

It also finally makes the shared universe explicit rather than a skull on a wall. A Weyland-Yutani synthetic is central to it, which puts this film in the same corporate future as the Alien series and does so as a story rather than as an easter egg.

Trachtenberg's third in a row, and the three of them are now the reason to care about this franchise: a historical survival film, an animated anthology and this. Watch it last whichever order you use. It is set far later than everything else and it reads as a conclusion.