PRINTER FRIENDLY VIEW
(inverts site colors)

The combined sonic personality of Schachner and Wallfisch is fully united in the resulting score for Predator: Badlands, but whereas Schachner handles more of the character and location aspects of the plot, Wallfisch concentrates on the major fighting scenes and conclusion. While their styles are not distractingly different, the Wallfisch cues have more complexity to their layering in general, orchestrally deeper in their constructs. His music for this film is exactly the same as what he provided for Predator: Killer of Killers earlier in the year: a brutal, over-produced rendering that is too obnoxious to tolerate. Schachner takes the less obvious animosity from her own 2022 score for the concept and moves that sound closer to Wallfisch's, giving her portions an even angrier feel. Make no mistake about it; this score is a hateful, machismo exposition of despair for characters left unwanted by their own kind. Some listeners may embrace the sheer brutality of its core demeanor, for the composers leave you with a sense of horrific defiance through their more palatable sequences. The extremely manipulated soundscape is meant to sound alien from the eerie atmospheres at the very start. A brooding, low range orchestral recording is processed for an overtly oppressive environment, each element altered to convey the strange and foreign aspects of the location. Electric guitar-like tones contribute ambient coolness at the fringe. Vocals are the key to this score's appeal, from chanting in the native language of the Yautja (which, with its forcefully exhaled, monosyllabic words, sounds a bit too much like Klingon for comfort) to lighter usage for the androids. Much of this presence is highly manipulated for the Predator side of the story and provides for the flashiest portions of the work. Atmospheric ramblings from droning synths or plucked elements are annoying even at low volumes. From late in "Badlands" through "Spiky Plants," these plodding portions try too hard, and other hazy passages, like the synthy "Other Half," are non-engaging meanderings. Distortion is the norm in the bass region, Wallfisch's techniques in this area still extremely difficult to tolerate for any length of time. The defining characteristic of the resulting, harshly bass-dwelling bravado from the entire mix is its unashamed nastiness, a personality trait that moderates at times in the middle of the score but never really leaves you.

The mood of the music for Predator: Badlands is so angry that it actually becomes somewhat funny at times, so overbearing in style that you have to imagine the composers in a studio trying to imagine ways to make the music more hostile even when not simply pounding away with volume. The metallic grinding and tapping and related woodwind manipulation in "Copycat" is borderline comical, for instance. From a strategic viewpoint, going too alien makes none of it appealing emotionally, and music with no clear protagonist is tough to connect with unless you use it simply to establish a dispiriting mood. Not surprisingly, with none of the Silvestri material or even hints of its formations evident, Predator: Badlands devolves into mostly a rhythmic score rather than a melodic one, no theme being memorable whatsoever. It is structurally simplistic to a fault, relying on its mood rather than substance. Thematically, there are many ideas explored, but the narrative is an absolute, ineffective mess. The few ideas that exist are swapped between the composers, showing effective coordination, but you cannot expect any of them to appreciably establish themselves. A theme presumably by Schachner for the young Yautja, Dek (wouldn't it have been so much more interesting if its name were Vladimir or Jorge?), is a deep chant repeating five notes on key using the newly devised Yautja language at the outset. Introduced immediately in "Yautja Prime" and reverting into a static rhythm for synths and percussion against obtuse low brass blasts in an extremely brutal atmosphere, the droning nature of the identity builds to some fragmented ascending phrasing later. The idea thumps along on guitar-like tones in "Earn Your Place" but shifts to other phrasing, its pounding rhythm continuing early in "Badlands." After moving to minor third alternations at the start of "Sisters," the theme swaggers with a little more confidence in the strummed, synthy "Wolfpack," ascending secondary phrasing occupying the latter half of the cue. Remodulated and accelerated on extremely harsh, grating synths in "Infiltration," the Dek theme returns to its opening performance in "Dek of the Yautja" with the foreign language, in which the droning rhythmic idea receives some variation in harmony alongside hints of the score's family theme. That familial idea, also likely by Schachner, provides the score's obvious Prey leftovers, eventually illuminating ascending figures of minimal hope.

Processed cello tones of slight harmonic resonance in "The Alpha" supply the family theme with a rough Vangelis-like edge. This mode continues into "Chosen Family" with some moderate dramatic vitality and extends solemnly to "Betrayed" on light choral tones that dissolve into dissonance. It consolidates again in "The Partnership" on processed string layers for more accessibility and eventually overtakes the Dek material in "Dek of the Yautja" with some sense of victory. Inspired by the two unhappy androids in Predator: Badlands, Schachner provides a sisters theme for Thia and Tessa for which the repetitive chanting of the main Dek theme carries over to a lighter character version, its tentative melody using eight notes as a primary formation while also sometimes droning on key. The female vocal puffs and electronic meandering in "Meet Thia" is generally lighter for this material but still laced with the same angry processed string, percussion, other darker tones. The same rhythmic phrasing receives an even more electronic tone in "Tessa" and is later altered to raise the final note in the rambling "Lost and Found." It has no discernable impact in the disjointed sections of "Sisters," and the theme's evil half dominates "Last Chance" but tosses in some vague brass heroics. Wallfisch's cues provide a confrontation motif of seven pounded notes mostly on key in an action formation, the middle note initially differing. The rhythm sometimes elongates to eight notes or is abbreviated to only three. Aggressive on low strings, brass, and synths in "Brothers," the three-note variant emerges more as the cue progresses and takes an even nastier turn in Schachner's "Bad Plant." The fuller rhythm returns for battle in the extremely monotonous and angry "Razor Grass;" the vocals from the main theme carry over here, but they get lost in the pounding. The idea struggles to maintain any movement in "Let's Go Hunt" but pounds away with extreme force in "Prey to None." Finally, Wallfisch explores two other motifs, one for the terrible creature, the Kalisk, in the form of a stomping, four-note cycle of boneheaded simplicity and menace in "The Kalisk." The other is the closing "Yautja Prayer," a somewhat reverent translation of the Dek theme into a tonal hymn using its vocals, though the percussion in this piece remains relentlessly present. Ultimately, the very harsh attitude of this score's rendering makes the whole endeavor extremely unlikeable by design and thus yields a persistently challenging album. That presentation has decent opening and closing cues, but the remainder is completely wayward, the franchise having devolved into angry, smash-mouth simplicity.  **   @Amazon.com: CD or Download

Bias Check:

For Benjamin Wallfisch reviews at Filmtracks, the average editorial rating is 3.27 (in 15 reviews) and the average viewer rating is 3.11 (in 3,707 votes). The maximum rating is 5 stars.

Total Time: 66:48