Storytelling is always a matter of perspective. In Predator, the classic 1987 science fiction film, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays a man confronted with an alien like none we’d seen before on screen – a hyper-intelligent apex warrior from a technologically advanced planet.

From the man’s point of view, it’s a horror story. A monster is stalking him in the woods, taking his compatriots out one by one. From the monster’s point of view, a being of great dignity and skill, it’s a hunting trip.

Predator: Badlands marks the starkest departure from anything we’ve seen so far in the franchise precisely because it finally switches perspective. In director Dan Trachtenberg’s follow-up to Prey, now in cinemas across the Middle East, we follow the Predator on a hunting trip on an alien world – turning him into a stoic hero and the story into a rip-roaring adventure.

“It’s funny, because this story was always lying in plain sight,” Trachtenberg tells The National. “Even from the original ’87 movie, what the Predator was wearing spoke to a culture, and its actions spoke to having a code. I thought a lot about hitman movies and gangster movies – movies about bad people that, if we encountered them in the real world, we’d think they should be in jail. But inside the world of those films, we root for them.”

Predator: Badlands reframes the usual horror narrative into an adventure story from the monster's perspective. Photo: 20th Century Studios

That notion – the idea of rooting for the monster – lies at the heart of Badlands. Just as Dutch in the first film said, “If it bleeds, we can kill it”, Trachtenberg has turned that phrase inward. The Predator bleeds, too. It can be wounded, humiliated, even outcast – and that humanity, for lack of a better word, makes for a compelling character. “It’s a culture with a code,” he says.