Prey (2022).

“This is as far as you go.”

Directed by Dan Trachtenberg

Written by

Starring

The Stage.

The year is 1719. The highly evolved Predator species lands on Earth for the first time in search of the next great hunt. There it finds incredible predators like dogs, wolves, bears, and the French, but it’s greatest adversary will be a Comanche warrior named Naru.

The Review.

1987’s Predator pitted Arnold Schwarzenegger and his band of sweaty commandos against an alien being whose only goal was to collect the skull of the planet’s strongest being. It was a sci-fi/action masterpiece that immediately had a sequel greenlit, and boy was Predator 2 a disappointment. That film killed the franchise for close to twenty years, when the Robert Rodriguez-produced Predators released. It was fine, yet forgettable. Eight years later, Shane Black came back to the table after writing the first film and directed The Predator in 2018, a film that I was really looking forward to that ended up being the worst movie I saw that year…like, I cannot understand how he could make a film is so bad. I didn’t even mention the Alien vs. Predator films that released in the mid-2000’s, and that’s only because I’ve tried so hard to forget about them. Needless to say, each Predator sequel and spinoff film has been pretty bad, so I had pretty low hopes going into Prey.

I’ll tell you right off the bat - Prey fucking rocks. Prey gets back to basics, it strips the series back to what made Predator so special. The strongest, smartest species on that planet being hunted on their own territory. This time it takes place on the frontier, and instead of well-armed commandos, we get a tribe of Comanche led by James Franco. Just kidding, all of the Comanche characters are played by Comanche people, which was great to see and it really does make a difference. And if the time and now antiquated technology is not intriguing enough, the main character is a teenage girl named Naru, a capable axe slinger and medicine woman who’s been living in the shadow of her older brother, the tribe war chief named Taabe. In order to truly become a warrior in her tribe, she needs to kill something that’s hunting her. Easier said than done.

Along the way, we see Naru grow as a warrior, but not with brute strength. We see her get smarter. Like Arnold in the first film, she uses the land to her advantage, she pays attention to the Predators weaknesses, and she dissects the technology to find out how it can come in handy. She’s five foot nothing and probably weighs less than a hundred pounds, and when you see the Predator killing the more imposing people in the Northern Plains, you just wouldn’t buy Naru going up against it mano-a-mano. At one point, she tells a story about how she watched a beaver chew off its own leg to get out of a trap, but she’s smarter than a beaver…a story that is paid off brilliantly during the final showdown, not once, but twice. She’s also got a kickass American Dingo named Sarii who helps out in spots when she really needs him most.

The plains are an excellent source of brilliant visuals, with lush green forest, refreshing creeks, and vast fields that all looked fantastic on the OLED. There are several shots that we linger on that could easily have been framed and tossed on a wall. If I had one gripe with the movie, however, it’s the CGI. We still haven’t figured it out as a showcase, and the animals - namely the mountain lion and the bear, and at some times the Predator itself while jumping, looked pretty bad. It wasn’t enough to fully take me out of the film, but it was jarring at times.

The End.

Prey is easily the best Predator film since the original, and honestly, it might be my favorite of the entire series. The main character’s journey is really compelling - I thought that Amber Midthunder did a terrific job as Naru - and the battle scenes kick all kinds of ass. They’re brutal and really gory, with limbs and blood - both red and bright green - strewn about. There’s also a Comanche dub on Hulu, which is an amazing surprise, and it never feels like an old Kung-fu film. The actual actors all came back to dub and the mouths match up terrifically. Prey was a great surprise and I’d be surprised if it’s not in the conversation when it comes to my top 10 at the end of the year.