I’ll start from the list in which you wrote and I’ll explain more on my reasoning for calling back to the older movies, I myself am not DEEP deep into the predator franchise as much as others are here, but I’ve tried my best understanding everything as I go, imo the reason why I say “ego” for most of the deaths shown (and I’ll excluded S and The cause I know as much of how bad those are compared to the others) but the preds are told and displayed as “the ultimate killers” and we see them show that in their respective movies, for the human protagonists all of them witness the ultimate killers murder groups of people with ease, jungle killing first group of American soldiers then killing arnies group, 2 going on a mass spree, prey killing both natives and the invaders, KoK each of them having their own sprees. And then what plays into that “ego” is that they underestimate the protags and that’s what leads to their defeat by being outsmarted, it’s the “ego” of being ultimate killers that gets to them and the same is told in Dek’s story, even as a runt he still believes he can follow the honor code and even at first saying that he didn’t need the synth’s help and he pays for it it, and even with her “help” he still thought of her as a “tool” for most of the movie.
I’ll say from what I saw during the run of the movie, I wouldn’t take Dek’s strange jump and moving from killing separate things as him learning “combat” experience but it’s clearly shown that it’s more of an “adapting” experience, he very clearly did not gain combat experience from it and it shows in the fight with the two preds and his father cause he was still getting beat up but he adapted(using the dust from the ship to counter the cloak stuff like that) and countered, which in its own is a combat experience.
The run time was very much so a problem not in the way of “the movie should’ve been longer” but more of a “the movie has time skips and it leaves holes in the plot” which there I will say is the bad writing side because that could be a very good reason to why you don’t see him gain that “experience”
Finally for the female side of things, yes I will agree in other titles like terminator, Star Wars, (I don’t do much of Indiana jones lol) they do that shift trend of women being leads and being a “Mary sue” in some terms, but in this movie I just don’t see it in this movie, maybe yes in something like Prey where Naru WAS the main protag but in Badlands both female synths still felt like side characters, Dek even treats our “main” synth as one too, the weakness of Dek is in the character himself thinking he can be what he is not yet and I don’t think the females “emasculate” him for it. Our synth was like the “comedy” side of things while the villain synth was show as strong because she had a company behind her while doing it, doesn’t make Dek any less of a strong character than he is and even with help he still triumphed in his own way.
I don’t know like the ins and outs to writing and how people delve into it to look at the serious tones and all that to form opinions from their own personal beliefs, and if people think it’s bad writing then that’s what they can think, what I will say though is people should also take the “new” writing and not just shoot the person down for writing a story how they see it and see how it can be a learning experience for next projects and stuff like that (whatever power of friendship yada) because at the end of the day, Movies, comics, books like these are for fun at the end of the day
