Predator: Badlands And Star Trek Have One Surprising Thing In Common [Exclusive]

As moviegoers head to theaters to check out "Predator: Badlands," they may notice that this installment has a lot in common with various other franchises. The very premise of a traditionally villainous Yautja taking on the lead role is ripped right out of the James Cameron playbook with "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," for one thing. For another, director Dan Trachtenberg himself has admitted that he looked to "Star Wars" for inspiration when it came to figuring out the main protagonist for the film. But, more than anything else, fans may notice that the actual depiction of Yautja culture and language bears some unmistakable hallmarks of the Klingons from "Star Trek." According to the member of the crew chiefly responsible for this aspect of "Badlands," that was almost an inevitability.

In a recent interview with /Film's Bill Bria, linguist Britton Watkins opened up about his work on the newest "Predator" movie and how he went out of his way to avoid comparisons to the Klingons when crafting the spoken language for the Yautja. But, based on his prior experience working in the same role on "Star Trek Into Darkness," he admitted that there was some incidental crossover nonetheless. As he explained:

"Well, Klingon ... there's a paradigm of big scary people, right? And the Klingons are big scary people. The [Yautja] are big scary people, and they kind of emerged on the scene and popular culture around the same time. I didn't shy away from a sound that was in Klingon just because it was in Klingon, but I also didn't try to copy all the sounds that are in Klingon. So people who only know Klingon may think that it sounds a lot like Klingon, but if you speak Klingon, you don't understand a word of it."

There's a long and storied history in science fiction of creating entire languages out of nothing, and "Predator: Badlands" is no exception. So far, we've mostly only ever heard these warrior aliens "speak" in a series of guttural yells and primal clicks. "Predators" famously took the action from Earth to an extraterrestrial gaming preserve, but otherwise stayed firmly in the perspective of humans. Dan Trachtenberg's animated "Killer of Killers" took a bigger step towards immersing us in Yautja society. But "Badlands" is the first to depict these alien warriors actually having conversations with one another, which meant recruiting someone like Britton Watkins to figure out the basics of this language.

As it turns out, the Klingon influence wasn't something he tried to steer into or avoid. At a certain point, some "overlap" was always going to occur. According to Watkins:

"I worked on 'Star Trek Into Darkness' in 2012, so I'm familiar with Klingons, but I didn't channel anything about Klingon grammar or anything else. They needed to be close to each other, but again, with any kind of language that's going to be spoken, a lot of that language is going to be spoken by human actors and you're going to end up with vowel sounds that overlap. I mean, you're gonna end up with coincidental things that sound [like], 'Oh, well, that could be a Klingon word.' I guess even you could pronounce the Klingon word gagh, this food that they eat, you could pronounce that relatively well in Yautja, but that was not intentional. It's coincidental."

This may be the biggest shakeup these movies have ever experienced, and at least some of that is thanks to "Star Trek." "Predator: Badlands" lands in theaters November 7, 2025.