The business of trophy hunting is booming. The wildlife hunting tourism market is projected to be on the cusp of crossing over one billion dollars in value across the next few years (Coherent Market Insights 2025). This growth has been largely attributed to a rising interest in the display of wild animal body parts to signal status, personal achievement, and mastery over nature. Many of us will have the same picture in mind when we imagine the blood sport in practice. Khaki-covered figures in a ‘grip-and-grin’ posture, rifle in hand while sat on the carcass of big game. The trophies themselves, hides, tusks, horns, and antlers, are, for their owners, reflective of the practical skills required to attain them, but they are also monuments of the cultural and financial privileges through which the sector operates.
These are not the acts of subsistence hunting or indigenous ritualism that are practiced by countless communities around the world. This is a global business that exists to commodify the lives of often rare and exotic animals. There is little dignity, in my opinion, to be found in a banker from Montana jetting off to Tanzania to shoot big game. Many women, of course, are self-identified trophy hunters, but it is not a coincidence that the industry is couched in grotesque machismo and predominantly propped up by men. What better method of reaffirming masculinity than to demonstrate the stoicism required to kill without sentiment? Ernest Hemingway, for example, whose life and work were variously elevated and diminished by a startling level of brutal clarity, expressed no compunction at the prospect of taking such lives when done with seemingly sufficient skill. When wounding a bull and condemning it to a long death while hunting in Africa, he would write that “I felt a son of a bitch to have hit him and not killed him. I did not mind killing anything, any animal, if I killed it cleanly, they all had to die and my interference with the nightly and the seasonal killing that went on all the time was very minute and I had no guilty feeling at all” (1936: 185).
Since its first instalment in 1987, the Predator franchise has made an indelible mark on the sci-fi and action genres by mythologising trophy hunting as a testosterone-fuelled thrill-ride driven by such acts of lethal prowess. When a ferocious alien arrives on Earth to test the mettle of humanity, Arnold Schwarzenegger is a suitably muscle-bound ambassador for us to deploy in kind. The film acts, alongside many features in the action star’s decades-long oeuvre, as a textbook example of vainglorious action at its most bombastically appealing. The film’s cacophonic barrage of machine guns, flexing biceps, and hyperinflated machismo is delivered in such a straight-faced manner that it’s difficult not to get swept up in its absurd spectacle. This is the film, after all, that features Jesse Ventura offering his buddies chewing tobacco with the cavalier statement that “this stuff will make you a god damned sexual Tyrannosaurus, just like me.” Less lovingly remembered, but no less notable, is the shockingly normalised homophobic expletive that Ventura utters beforehand. In both instances, audiences are in no doubt of the red-blooded virility and violence through which all-American manhood might be derived.
Collecting the skulls of its victims for display within its spacecraft, the predator acts as an appropriate means for the sci-fi genre to speculate upon the skills and temperament required to be a trophy-hunting glory hound. Directed by John McTiernan, who would follow up on its success with Die Hard (1988), Predator’s high-octane adrenaline was potent enough to sustain thirty-five years of diminishing returns. For all their bravado, Predator 2 (1990), Predators (2010), and The Predator (2018) unfortunately proved themselves to be relatively toothless productions. The less said about Alien vs. Predator (2004) and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007), the better.
Thankfully, the franchise is currently experiencing something of a resurgence due to several projects that have been collectively helmed by Dan Trachtenberg, of 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016) fame. Prey (2022) acted as a noteworthy addition to the series by reframing the series’ archetypal ‘wild hunt’ from the perspective of a young Comanche woman, Naru, in the Northern Great Plains of 1719. Played by Amber Midthunder, Naru’s battle against the eponymous alien allows her to demonstrate her strength, resilience, and ability to protect her tribe from the dangers of the wilderness. The animated follow-up, Predator: Killer of Killers (2025), offers similar variance to the franchise, structured through a series of historical vignettes that draws its protagonists from Viking, samurai, and US naval history.
In defiance of Hollywood’s consistent reluctance to release their intellectual properties from the vice-like grip of nostalgic repetition, the Predator franchise acts as an apt reminder that it is only with the inclusion of new blood and fresh perspectives that popular culture remains timely and resonant. Prey may not be a radical departure from studio convention, but it nevertheless holds the honour of being the first feature film to possess a full dub in the Comanche language. The Predator franchise’s science-fictional explorations of bravery and endurance, violence and reward, demonstrate the richness of hunting mythologies that can be traced throughout all human history. As Brian Boyd argues in On the Origins of Stories (2009), our species’ impulse to shape our social structures through the creation of narratives and myths is evolutionarily tied to the cognitive and biological standards that hundreds of millennia spent as hunter-gatherers instilled within us (167).
As the third of Trachtenberg’s entries in the series, Predator: Badlands (2025) had its work cut out to avoid the same sense of inertia that had restricted so many of the series’ previous efforts. Its primary contribution is, therefore, a comparatively sizeable one. The film reframes its action-oriented mythos of trophy hunting through the perspective of Dek, Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi, a member of the alien race that has long acted as the franchise’s antagonists. Borrowing the name of the species, Yautja, from the series’ expanded universe, Badlands ensures all the creatures’ characteristic features are present and accounted for. Schuster-Koloamatangi’s performance, impressively tracked and transformed by mo-cap, renders Dek as a being of cold-blooded lethality, determined to hunt the most dangerous beasts the universe has to offer.
Anatomically, Dek’s monstrous appearance is similarly familiar to fans of the franchise. His unblinking yellow eyes betray no sense of sentiment, his battle-cries are hollered out through a yawning mouth of sharp teeth and mandibles, and even his blood appears toxic in nature, spattering upon the wilderness in streaks of luminescent green. Due to his towering presence on-screen, Schuster-Koloamatangi found himself repeatedly addressing rumours that he was 7’3”: “I’ve had this question a lot,” he would state through laughter, “everyone is always severely disappointed when they see me because I’m only six foot two” (qtd. in LRM 2025). Dek might not inhabit the role of villain usually adopted by his species, but he nevertheless fulfils the Predator series’ expectations of alien power-fantasy admirably.
Despite his formidable appearance, Dek is portrayed as an ignoble runt within his species. While he appears sufficiently intimidating to his human audience, compared to his kin, his diminutive size and comparable weakness place him in danger of being culled for the good of the clan’s honour. The film opens with Dek’s father, Njohrr, killing the Yautja’s more physically imposing brother, Kwei, for refusing to do the job himself. For the patriarch, his children’s loyalty to one another is a sign of their emotional frailty, and must be met with fatal recompense. Driven by a desperate need to overcome his perceived inadequacies, Dek embarks on a quest to hunt the Kalisk, a legendary apex predator feared even by Njohrr. “Father calls me the weakest,” Dek says determinedly, “so I must kill the strongest.”
The film’s first half follows Dek as he tracks the fearsome Kalisk and learns to survive the dangers of its native planet, Genna. Carnivorous vines, poisonous barbs, and fields of razor-like grass, as well as alien variations of bison, vultures, grubs, and snakes all act as hostile antagonists. At first, the Kalisk’s habitat seems to align very closely with the Yautja’s designation of a so-called ‘death planet.’ This is a landscape where every element of its flora and fauna have evolved to compete in a deadly struggle for survival, the perfect arena to test Dek’s cunning and combative abilities, while evidencing his clan’s mantra that ‘Yautja are prey to none. Friend to none. Predator to all.’
Badlands’ most significant turning point occurs at its mid-point, when, finally in combat with the Kalisk, Dek is captured by a Weyland-Yutani expedition who are similarly hunting the creature while exploiting their planet’s natural resources. Weyland-Yutani is, of course, the interstellar conglomerate first introduced in Alien (1979), subsequently crossed-over frequently with the Predator series by their joint-owners, 20th Century Fox, now owned and rebranded by Disney. With speculative stories of corporate hegemony and aggressive resource extraction, life appears to imitates art.
Exposed to the pillaging practices of Weyland-Yutani, Dek’s story becomes a quest of ecological redemption. Revisiting Kwei’s ship and ruminating on the sacrifice that his brother paid to spare his life, the Yautja realises that strength and bravery are not measured by unthinking brutality, but by a resilience of character that is uncowed by an overwhelming adversary. Mounting an attack on the company’s compound, Dek employs the knowledge of Genna’s ecology that he had previously utilised to conquer it. Various local animals are recruited as allies, while the planet’s dangerous vegetation is crafted into an assortment of darts and explosives. Badlands reframes the carnage and excitement of its hunt through the spectacle of anti-corporate vigilantism and eco-activism. Rather than killing the Kalisk, Dek’s sense of self-worth is pivoted by his desire to liberate it and reunite it with its young.
The film’s coda sees Dek return to his father, who is disgusted when he discovers that the trophy his son has claimed is the head of a Weyland-Yutani android, rather than that of the Kalisk. “I’ve completed my hunt,” says the younger Yautja defiantly, casting the burned-out metal skull at his feet. Njohrr’s contempt sparks one final trial by combat, this time between parent and offspring. Dek’s righteous fury and skill carries him to victory, proving that he is not as weak as his father suspected. The boon that he had once desperately craved, Njohrr’s acceptance of him, is met by Dek’s indifferent rejection that “I have my own clan,” as he watches the Kalisk’s child casually behead him. Violence and spectacle might remain Badlands’ operating principle, but it is notable for exultating in its protagonist’s refusal to slay his questing beast.
Dek’s rejection of his patriarch’s trophy-hunting demands aligns him with a time-honoured history of myths, legends, and folktales that extol the virtue of similar protagonists who transgress dominant expectations of the treatment of animals. Whether it is Siddhartha saving a hunted swan, Androcles caring for a wounded lion, Francis of Assisi taming the Wolf of Gubbio, or King Śibi offering sanctuary to a dove, centuries of fables collectively attempt to reassess humanity’s dismissal of other species’ rights to ethical consideration. As Imelda Martin Junquera and Francisco Molina Moreno summarise in ‘Mythology and Ecocriticism: A Natural Encounter’ (2018), ‘just as certain myths have legitimised the subjugation and exploitation of nature by humankind, others reflect a will to attain a harmonious relationship with the natural environment (6).
Badlands’repositioning of its audience’s perspective into that of its seemingly antagonistic aliens is its most important facet. It’s a shift that places the film firmly within science fiction’s tradition of emphasising definitively posthuman concerns, those that challenge a host of anthropocentric biases. Helen Kopnina (2020) is one of many anthropologists to argue that such questions are of the utmost importance to contemporary culture, arguing that they have the potential to expose what she calls ‘the central tenets that define humanism,’ by ‘condemning speciesism, human chauvinism, and human supremacy’ (2).
Beyond upending its myth of the hunt, Badlands’ does this most directly by featuring absolutely no human characters whatsoever throughout the entirety of its running time. Alongside Dek and his clan of Yautja, the Weyland-Yutani expedition is entirely made up of the synthetic lifeforms that have played a prominent role in the Alien franchise. Receiving top-billing is Elle Fanning as Thia, an android who serves as Dek’s companion throughout his adventure. The Yautja’s respect for her is, following their initial meeting, comparable to the meagre courtesy he extends to the other lifeforms he encounters on Genna. He ignores her name and refers to her instead as “tool” when learning that she is synthetic, carrying her severed torso around like a backpack so that she may aid him on his hunt. Thia’s attempts to unite with her surviving twin ‘sister,’ Tessa, has a similarly tragic trajectory to Dek’s own ambitions for familial acceptance. Both characters are born from oppressive systems of power, corporate and tribal, that deny them the communal belonging that they crave.
It is Thia who first challenges Dek’s inherited belief that strength within a hunting community is best cultivated through individualism and self-reliance, informing him that “the alpha isn’t the wolf who kills the most, the alpha is actually the one who best protects the pack.” Dek’s dismissal of Thia’s call for communal cooperation, “I will be the alpha that kills the most,” is weathered away by Badlands’ conclusion. It is his relationship to the synthetic and the other creatures of Genna that eventually allows him to free the Kalisk, reject his father, and develop a new understanding of his social value.
Interestingly, Dek’s shift in perspective reflects the recognition of several endemic flaws that Craig Stanford associates with hunting practices that can be traced back to our species’ pre-history. In The Hunting Apes: Meat Eating and the Origins of Human Behaviour (1999) Stanford argues that much of humanity’s inability to maintain social solidarity and empathy has been modelled and worsened by practices of ‘meat acquisition rather than meat sharing’ that have physiologically and culturally been engrained within us (11). Dek’s own character arc similarly teaches us that survival of the fittest relies as much on social cooperation as it does the prioritising of self-sufficiency.
Similarly, Badlands’ reliance on an entirely posthuman cast signals several ethical concerns regarding disparate approaches to hunting practices. Humanity remains notable through its lack of physical presencee upon the surface of Genna. Weyland-Yutani has no desire to risk human lives during its resource extraction if synthetic lifeforms can be reproduced and disposed unfeelingly. In contrast, the Yautja’s own hunting ideologies, as brutal as they might seem, possess a modicum of honour based on the stakes and consequences risked if their efforts meet with failure. Their bravery and skills are tested within a variety of dangerous environments that they have neither industrialised or dominated. The ritualistic nature of Dek’s hunt demands he triumph over an opponent that is provided with advantage. Anyone with familiarity of the Predator franchise will know that the Yautja will not needlessly kill a creature that does not pose an immediate threat.
It is difficult, therefore, to relate the Yautja’s hard-fought successes to the trophy hunting industries of our contemporary cultures. Little personal merit accompanies, for example, the act of Donald Trump Jr. spending over $17,000 of American tax-payers’ money to hunt argali and ibex sheep in Mongolia (White and Honl-Stuenkel 2020). It is nigh on impossible to find nobility in his taking of such lives when one considers the fact that he did not possess a licence to do so, and was only provided one retroactively (ibid.). This sense of entitlement and privilege exists in dichotomy to the hunting practices of communities that, for centuries, have accounted for far greater care and deference for our natural world. As Calvin Martin observed in Keepers of the Game (1978), the hunting practices of the Ojibwa people stand in stark contrast “to the exalted position” that humanity places itself within much of “Judeo-Christian tradition” (74).
Trump Jr. has repeated all of the usual arguments that are trotted out when questioned on his recreational interest in killing living creatures. When British gun manufacturer John Rigby & Company interviewed him during a deer-stalking trip in Oxfordshire, he obliged by rolling through them one by one. Rather than being a practice embedded in everyday rural existence, it is, for him, a holiday: “a great escape from some of the nonsense of the world” (qtd. in Brodie 2025). He is keen to describe shooting a roebuck with a broken leg as “the right thing to do,” a seeming act of mercy that helps the herd’s well-being (ibid.).
His hunting partner, Rigby’s managing director Marc Newton, adds that heritage and a sense of historical connectiveness is also seemingly important. “I can imagine our ancestors doing much the same thing,” Newton says, reaffirming the masculine power-dynamics of the culture by describing his own expedition with Trump Jr. as “three blokes out there spending time with one another” (ibid.). The most frequent defence seeks to position the blood sport as an act of conservation and wilderness management. As Trump Jr. himself states, “we’ve hunted in the most pristine landscape today and it’s key that we conserve that for the future” (ibid.). His statement that “I’ve not been an angel but hunting has kept me out of a lot more trouble I’d have found myself in without it” speaks volumes as to his beliefs concerning the psychological merits of firearms and a recreational outlet for violence (ibid.).
Even if one wishes to overcome the sizable ethical concern presented when justifying the pleasure and enjoyment found in the killing of a living creature, an over-whelming number of environmental scientists and organisations argue that corporatising conservation efforts and tying ecological management to tourism revenue and financially-motivated practices is entirely counter-productive. The repeated refrain that such trophy hunters are “killing them to save them,” is, in the minds of environmental law scholars such as Myanna Dellinger, entirely fallacious. “Doubt about the true conservation value, if any, of trophy hunting is still raised as a reason to continue the practice,” she writes, “this is turning the situation and applicable law on its head: when in doubt, we must – under the precautionary principle of law and for reasons of common sense – err on the side of saving the species” (2019: 59).
Scandals continue to abound of the population decline of rare, high-value game, corruption in hunting governance, regulatory loopholes, and rampant illegal poaching due to a spiralling global marketplace for their remains. A report on trophy hunting from last year tallied that “in 2023 alone hunters took home over 25,000 bodies and body parts from 100 threatened species and an estimated 100,000 trophies were taken from all wild species” (Warner 2025). The killing of Cecil the lion in 2015, where the creature was illegally lured from a nature reserve, shot with a compound bow, and left critically injured for over ten hours before being killed, beheaded, and skinned, caused justified international outrage against the Minnesotan dentist who had reportedly paid $50,000 for the privilege (Kassam & Glenza 2015). Even so, in the decade that has followed, at least 10,000 more lions have been killed by similar acts of trophy hunting (Warner 2025).
Here in the UK, the Animals (Low Welfare Activities Abroad) Act 2023 has been introduced to regulate the use of captive animals for entertainment tourism, but it is notable that the more expansive Animals Abroad Bill was blocked by prominent Conservative members Jacob Rees-Mogg and Mark Spencer (Dalton 2022). This Bill, which would have introduced measures to outlaw the import of hunting trophies, furs, and foie gras had been promised in the party’s 2019 manifesto, and was curtailed by the ministers for being, in their words, ‘un-Conservative’ (ibid.).
The current Labour government has promised to introduce such legislation, but recent news reports that the U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum has reached out to the UK’s Environment Secretary, Emma Reynolds, suggest direct attempts to hamper such efforts. Burgum reportedly expressed “concern about any bill that would crack down on trophy imports, arguing that trophy hunting benefits wildlife conservation and communities around the world” (Block 2026). It remains to be seen whether pressure from the US administration will restrict the UK’s animal welfare reform in the same manner that its wider policy has taken a sledgehammer to broader acts of international cooperation and global stability.
Summarising increasing frustration with several European nations’ resistance to the ban of such imports, former president of Botswana, Ian Khama would state “with the decline of wildlife worldwide, and many species approaching extinction, all caused by man, how can there be justification in trophy hunting? How can any government say they are fighting poaching whilst allowing trophy hunting at the same time?” (qtd. in Millar 2024: 52). Kharma’s call for clarity and action is all the more remarkable considering the fact that 86% of the UK’s population reportedly supports the ban, rising to 92% of Conservative party voters, despite their ministerial attempts to block it (Millar 2024: 39).
It might seem strange to attach such politically-charged and contentious debates to a film that derives its pleasures so obviously from pulse-pounding action. As Cary Wolfe notes of animal studies more generally in What is Posthumanism? (2010), ‘just because we direct our attention to the study of nonhuman animals, and even if we do so with the aim of exposing how they have been misunderstood and exploited, that does not mean that we are not continuing to be humanist – and therefore, by definition, anthropocentric’ (2010: 99). The ideologically circumscribed Walt Disney Company is certainly ill-equipped in its capacity to disrupt such perspectives of the world.
Still, I would contend that Predator: Badlands is a welcome, if minor, distraction from the cultural and political drive towards self-interest and individual populism. It’s posthuman cast face problems similar to our own. Deliberately subjugated within his clan, Dek has been forced to direct his anger against those in similar positions of subordination. Like him, our struggle requires us to reject the overwhelming number of voices that encourage us to embrace callous and fatalistic worldviews. Badlands’ representation of a world where action might be utilised to overthrow such perspectives provides much-needed catharsis.
Head Image: Predator: Badlands, 20th Century Studios, 2025.
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Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. 2007. D. The Brothers Strause, Film, US: 20th Century Fox.
Block, Kitty. 2026. ‘Trophy Hunting Does Not Benefit Animals, No Matter What US Interior Secretary Claims,’ Humane World, February 3: https://www.humaneworld.org/en/blog/uk-trophy-hunting-trade-bill.
Boyd, Brian. 2009. On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Brodie, Liz. 2025. ‘Donald Trump Jr. Tracks the Traditions of the Hunt,’ John Rigby & Co, July 31: https://www.johnrigbyandco.com/donald-trump-jr-tracks-the-traditions-of-the-hunt/.
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Dalton, Jane. 2022. ‘Jacob Rees-Mogg Refuses to Debate Why He ‘Blocked’ Bill That Would Have Spared Elephants from Torture,’ The Independent, June 10: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/rees-mogg-bill-mark-spencer-elephants-ban-b2098382.html.
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Kopnina, Helen. 2020. ‘Anthropocentrism and Post-humanism,’ The International Encyclopedia of Anthropology, ed. Hilary Callan. Chicester: John Wiley & Sons: 1-9.
LRM. 2025. ‘Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi is Not 7’3″ To Play Predator in Predator: Badlands,’ YouTube, November 9: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/AJL3_D1xaKY.
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Predator 2. 1990. D. Stephen Hopkins. Film, US: 20th Century Fox.
Predator: Badlands. 2025. D. Dan Trachtenberg, Film, US: 20th Century Studios.
Predator: Killer of Killers. 2025. D. Dan Trachtenberg, Film, US: 20th Century Animation.
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Wolfe, Cary. 2010. What is Posthumanism? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Creature Features: Animal Welfare on Screen 