We used to make things in this country; now, we just stack them on top of each other. Forgive the tired back-in-my-day routine, but there was a vanishing moment, located primarily in the mid-80s, when aspirant, high concept American blockbusters, all chasing the cultural imprint and box office returns of Star Wars and Jaws, were content to riff instead to be subsumed. The following decades of corporate mergers, audience testing, and burgeoning fan culture have all but killed the mid-to-high budget sci-fi original, but only in name. Narratively speaking, we’re still making the big, stupid, and glorious films of yore, only clumsily retrofitted into whatever established franchise the latest studio has decided to dredge up from their library. You can see the strategy at play in both of writer/director Dan Trachtenberg’s previous live action features, 10 Cloverfield Lane and Prey, a pair of juicy, kinetic tentpole offerings that traded in the appeal of home cooking for the wider exposure that brand recognition always brings. Either flick could have capably stood on its own two feet, blessed with rock solid premises and esteemable construction, but where’s the money in that? Better to sand down a few eccentricities and join ever expanding universes of sprawling lore and built-in marketability, an arrangement that Predator: Badlands signs up for with wearying eagerness.

Outside of the literal Predator iconography, Badlands has no real reason to moor itself to its chosen wider canon, unless you count financial incentives. The lone franchise entry to center its namesake, Trachtenberg’s latest follows Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi), a runt in the hyper violent humanoid species known as the Yautja who’s desperate to make a name for himself. A doomed run-in with his war lord father finds Dek stranded on Genna, a forest planet whose every inhabitant presents immediate mortal danger. Luckily for him, there’s help on the way in the form of Thia (Elle Fanning), a robotic screwball sidekick who knows the lay of the land, as well as just the right things to say to warm a young predator’s frost-bitten heart. Creatures are battled, lessons are learned, and newness is sacrificed at the altar of the IP machine’s insatiable appetite.

Well, not newness, per say, but rather the immediacy of introduction, as well as the cult status that Badlands leaves sitting right there on the table. However familiar the movements, you can easily envision a world where a movie about an ugly extraterrestrial and a wisecracking android fending off a slew of monsters becomes an instant subgenre classic. There’s a reason Joss Whedon’s Serenity and Jordan Vogt-Roberts’ Kong: Skull Island have remarkably different cultural footprints despite being qualitatively comparable, and both working within well-trodden molds; when an image that’s been famous since the 30’s shows up on screen, our lizard brains start filing the whole movie away into a separate category. Whedon’s Star Wars/Trek homage isn’t revelatory in any meaningful way, but at least we get to arrive at our feelings regarding both characters and situations in earnest, rather than bringing years of baggage to a one-off proposition.

That’s admittedly a lot of handwringing for a movie whose only real issue is outside noise, and if you can squint hard enough to view Badlands on its own terms, there’s an awful lot to like. At the top of the list is Genna itself, a doppelgänger of Avatar’s Pandora that makes up for its lower effects budget by prioritizing fun at every turn. Trachtenberg, whose Cloverfield flick is an absolute marvel of claustrophobic momentum, is perhaps a bit out of his depth with the bulbous scale here, but the set pieces are so tantalizing in concept that execution becomes less important. If razer-sharp grass, dart-spewing plants, and winged beasts with innumerable teeth don’t whet your appetite for some lavish, schlocky goodness, you’re probably just outside of the Badlands demographic, though it’s hard to imagine anyone who just wants some interplanetary melee walking away disappointed. In fact, they’re more likely to head straight for the couch, where the newest Predator seems primed for eternal cable syndication.

Specifically on TNT, whose Sunday afternoon programming, long a staple of anyone nursing weekend hangover, occasionally reaches for pedigreed entertainments like The Departed or Gladiator, but is more at home with the Godzillas and Pacific Rims of the world. Gesturing toward greater genre achievements while falling charmingly short is a feature here, not a bug, a counterintuitive boost that Badlands manifests with its obvious reverence for Denis Villenuve’s Dune films. Hans Zimmer’s domineering score, when paired with Patrice Vermette’s immaculate production design and all that jargon-heavy world building, might be a bit much when rest and relaxation are in order, but their dumbed-down counterparts should do the trick, sprinkled with moments of truly rousing badassery. Trachtenberg knows the power of a bloodied and muscled money shot, affording us a plethora as Dek vanquishes one assailant after another to rousing, primitive effect. It’s a lot of his face, and while the book keepers wisely prioritize close-up creature effects over the many leviathans that don’t require a perfectionist’s touch, one wonders if perpetually returning to such a hideous profile will keep certain audiences at bay. They’ve already crowded out all the girls.

Or at least made their presence regrettable, a sin that Badlands commits twice over, though one offense is much less agitating than the other. The more innocuous instance pertains to Tessa, Thia’s synthetic companion who emerges as the main antagonist down the movie’s homestretch. Fanning, who plays both parts, is a chillingly compelling foe in her latter iteration, but her steely glare is no match for the skyscraping torments of the film’s first act, inadvertently letting a little air out of the laudably frenzied balloon. Their shared manufacturer is the bigger issue, both designed and deployed by the Alien franchise’s nefarious  Weyland-Yutani Corporation, a harbinger of even more lamentable serialization to come. A simple nod to the ongoing saga would have been permissible, but Trachtenberg’s screenplay, co-written by Patrick Aison, becomes entrenched in Xenomorph-adjacent escapades, keeping the plates spinning on a second marque enterprise when capitulating to its own is already causing problems. The stinger re-centers the Predator franchise, but when callous continuation is all that’s on offer, watching a movie suddenly remember to peddle its own wares, rather than those of others, isn’t exactly heartening.

Fans of the larger Predator apparatus will also be disappointed by the flick’s PG-13 rating, a franchise first that comes with the abandonment of foul language and grisly kills, as well as some boilerplate dramaturgy and a snuggly side character who’s sure to pop up in your local toy aisle sooner rather than later. While their complaints will be justified, arguing over the ethos and arcana of a yarn that started as a braindead, matinee also-ran is part of how we got here in the first place. Predator: Badlands, for all its foibles, is an objectively sturdy actioneer, a high-floor, low-ceiling propostition that never bores, and even prompts the intermittent pumping of fists. It just reeks of compromise, and while those with replica dolls lining their shelves will surely be pleased, its unwillingness to chart its own path is a microcosm of how the event cinema industry has lost the plot. There’s a good movie in here, you just have to fight through all the trademark thickets to reach it.