Review | Predator: Savage Lands – Film Prelude

Whenever I finish reading one of those comic book movie prequels from Marvel Comics, my question to myself is why the hell do I go through this knowing in advance what the outcome will be 90% of the time. After all, for every cool prelude like Fantastic Four: Getting Startedthere is an infinity of rubbish that follows the line of the prelude to Alien: Romulus. Even the highest quality ones don’t add much and the bad ones only really irritate, as they not only reveal the slot machine nature that they invariably have, but, ironically, reveal the potential they could have if the publisher took their efforts seriously. The prelude to Predator: Wildlandsas you can already imagine from these acidic comments of mine, is in the category of Alien: Romulusbut with the disadvantage that it doesn’t even address anything that is directly related to the film.

Ethan Sacks’ script, however, begins promising something more, with some aliens having problems on their ship and going into stasis in the hope of being rescued, with 10 thousand years passing until the beginning of the comic with the yautja Dek and his brother Kewi on a mission for their father to obtain a piece of technology from the wreckage of said ship, with Dek complaining that this is not a job for a hunter and Kewi, despite being there by his side, inexplicably giving orders the youngest alone to retrieve the MacGuffin of the moment. But all the promise ends in the premise. I mentioned that this prelude does not deal directly with the film, but the truth is that it seems to be a “capsule” that summarizes the theme of Dan Trachtenberg’s film, with Dek having to deal with both alien technology and natural threats on the moon where he is, with highly efficient artificial intelligence creating almost instantaneous weapons and the use of local fauna and flora doing everything to prevent Dek from doing what he wants to do, because she thinks he is a threat to the aliens in the stasis chambers.

What follows, then, is the mindless brawl typical of Hollywood action films, with Sacks no longer trying hard to create the conditions for something more subtle and intelligent like in the first film in the franchise or something frantic, but very inspired, that we can see in Wildlands. It is, simply and solely, an AI that creates robots armed to the teeth against a young yautja also armed to the teeth, as if they were in an MMA fighting ring in which anything goes, except lemon in the eye. The digital art by Elvin Ching, finished by Oren Junior and colors by Juancho Vélez is well-behaved and clean, perhaps even too much considering that the ship invaded by Dek has been on this moon for 10 thousand years, but it is dynamic enough to handle the military and physical demonstrations necessary to make the fight between yaujta and machine something pleasant to follow. It’s a pleasant “okay little” kind of thing, but even so, we have to give value to the art that doesn’t clutter up an uninspired story, giving it even a discreet breath of life.

There was space and opportunity for this prelude to offer a little more of the daily life of Yautja Prime and Dek’s clan, exploring his relationship with his brothers and his father. There was even the possibility that the story would leave Dek in the background to put another yautja from his family in the spotlight, perhaps with Dek still much younger. But what Ethan Sacks offers is the basics without risk and without any mental effort, a mechanized and repetitive work that disappoints from the first pages and continues to disappoint with each new page, despite the effort of the design team. Of course, it’s not the end of the world in terms of comics, as it follows the pattern of this type of prelude, but it is undeniably a waste of an opportunity that could open horizons for something with a minimum of relevance to the mythology of the yautja in general and the film in particular. Unfortunately, however, all the reader receives is a tired story that turns each page turn into something automatic and numb. Who knows next time?

Predator: Badlands – Film Prelude (Predator: Badlands, USA – 2025)
Road map: Ethan Sacks
Until: Elvin Ching
Final-art: Oren Junior
Cores: Juancho Velez
Lyrics: Clayton Cowles
Publishing: Kaeden McGahey, Austin Hatch, Martin Bird, C.B. Cebulski
Original publisher: Marvel Comics
Original publication date: November 12, 2025
Pages: 28