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ONCE I WAS TRYING TO EXPLAIN my theory of a \u201cperfect\u201d movie and how it differed from \u201cthe best\u201d movies. The Godfather<\/em>, Citizen Kane<\/em>, There Will Be Blood<\/em>: These are all movies that are in discussion for \u201cthe best\u201d movies. But a perfect movie doesn\u2019t necessarily need to be as good as these all-time classics to still be, well, \u201cperfect.\u201d If it accomplishes the thing it set out to do and does so in an entertaining manner all at a very high, efficient level, well, that\u2019s a perfect movie.<\/p>\n The specific example I offered up was Predator<\/em>.<\/p>\n Now, John McTiernan\u2019s Predator<\/em> is not necessarily the best movie ever made. Hell, it\u2019s probably not even the best John McTiernan movie ever made; after all, this is the guy who made Die Hard <\/em>and The Hunt for Red October<\/em>.1<\/a> But it is an absolutely perfect movie, a high-concept action-thriller with a star at the peak of his powers in Arnold Schwarzenegger delivering deadly one-liners, an absolutely stellar supporting cast, a script that indelibly sketches out every supporting character with just a few lines of dialogue and a handful of wardrobe choices, and a killer villain serving as the focal point for a half-dozen killer set pieces. The thing moves on rails. It is, in a word, perfect.<\/p>\n And one way its perfection reveals itself is that that 20th Century Fox\/20th Century Studios has been trying to turn the thing into a viable franchise consistently for the nearly forty years the film has existed. These efforts have universally failed to catch on. They weren\u2019t all terrible\u2014Predator 2<\/em> in particular has a certain amount of charm as a sort of urban decay crime movie in the mold of New Jack City<\/em> rather than a sci-fi-horror-action film\u2014but none of them has sparked the imagination in the same way the original did.<\/p>\n Share<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n Dan Trachtenberg, however, seems to have cracked the code. His 2022 film Prey<\/a><\/em>, about a Predator hunt taking place in the midst of a Comanche tribe and a bunch of French-Canadian fur trappers impressed critics and did solid numbers for Hulu, where it debuted. That led 20th Century Studios to greenlight two Predator projects for this year: the straight-to-Hulu animated anthology film Predator: Killer of Killers<\/a><\/em> about a trio of humans who survived a hunt and the theatrically bound Predator: Badlands<\/em>, which is the first of these films to offer up a Predator movie from the point of view of the Yautja, the name of the hunting-obsessed species at the heart of the series.<\/p>\n And while Predator: Badlands<\/em> is far from a perfect movie, it is a perfectly pleasing creature feature that revels in the absurdity of putting the universe\u2019s greatest killing machine on a planet designed to kill invaders and then watching him figure out how to survive with the help of a mouthy Weyland-Yutani Synthetic serving as his guide.2<\/a><\/p>\n