‘Predator: Badlands’ sticks its 2 stars together to take the franchise to new places

SAN DIEGO AP Predator Badlands belongs to a long-established cinema subgenre two opposed people reluctantly stuck together with a common purpose The film the seventh in the franchise not counting the Alien vs Predator offshoots has the buddy comedy strength that comes with that dynamic It also belongs to the narrower subgenre of people quite literally stuck together like s The Defiant Ones in which Sidney Poitier and Tony Curtis were fugitives united by chains And in a scenario that provided special challenges for stars Elle Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi Predator Badlands belongs to a still narrower subset it may share only with The Empire Strikes Back movies with a broken android worn like a backpack by a tall and powerful creature as they face peril in a strange corner of space The real physical inspiration for it was C- PO strapped to Chewbacca s back director Dan Trachtenberg explained The Associated Press in an interview where he was joined by the film s two stars But I think the fun of this is that it s not Chewbacca It s not a friendly well-intentioned creature it s a Predator The apt working title of the movie which will be published Friday by th Century Studios was Backpack For much of the New Zealand shoot Fanning and Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi were every bit as close as they appear to be in the film where the top half of her artificially intelligent character Thia was back-to-back with Schuster-Koloamatangi s young Predator Dek who is out to prove himself on a hunt against a seemingly unkillable megamonster His Predator braids would like whip me in the face all the time in our action sequences Fanning mentioned with a laugh Trachtenberg and the crew used an array of practical strategies to make the backpack setup work Any way you can think of making the rig we tried Schuster-Koloamatangi commented Through the mud through the water through rivers Fanning added She declared at times her co-star pulled her in a wheelbarrow and at other times they d do it on foot I would really pretend to be a backpack swinging around she revealed We d have to coordinate our actions I d be walking backward and it would be like OK left right left right In the scenes when they weren t back-to-back Trachtenberg yearned them to be genuinely face-to-face We developed this system where he wore a suit but his face was open the director commented And that way Dimitrius could really be driving the performance and he and Elle could work off each other in moments though fleeting when they were veritably facing each other He noted the whole reason for making the movie was to really emotionally connect with this crazy thing So it really demanded that we had a different approach and that the process allows us to be far more expressive and do things the other entries in the franchise couldn t do with its creature Trachtenberg a -year-old Philadelphia native has taken over the franchise that began in with the Arnold Schwarzenegger original He has taken it to entirely new times and places with entirely new approaches His first time at the helm was on s Prey which was set in on the Great Plains in the Comanche Nation His animated Predator Killer of Killers from earlier this year includes vignettes set in th century Scandinavia th century Japan and World War II Predator Badlands which he co-wrote with his Prey writing partner Patrick Aison is set in the distant future on a new planet Trachtenberg reported at a Comic-Con showcase of the film that one inspiration was the realization that The Predator never wins He needed to see what that would look like without making a slasher film Fanning who also plays other identical androids and Schuster-Koloamatangi were two of only three credited cast members She has been acting since she was a preschooler and is already a veteran pro at but she s relatively new to franchise filmmaking s Maleficent being the exception and entirely new to space-based sci-fi I guess I ve constantly been on Earth or a fantasy realm she stated with a laugh I think the approach to story and character and the script it s very much the same She had more credits by age than her -year-old co-star has had yet in his brief career Standing over feet tall Schuster-Koloamatangi was a local hire in New Zealand and a special find for the filmmakers While there was nothing settled about the greater part of the shoot he appreciated being on familiar terrain Home turf baby he disclosed with a laugh