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

The film, the seventh in the franchise (not counting the “Alien vs. Predator” offshoots), has the buddy comedy energy that comes with that dynamic. 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. 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.