If it bleeds...
In the three-and-a-half decades since the release of the exquisitely focused and gnarly Predator, a high point in the careers of both director John McTiernan and star Arnold Schwarzenegger, that film's sequels and spin-offs have all been built around complicated, cumbersome variations on the misguided quest, "you wanted more world-building, right? Just tons and tons of mythology around the concept of lizardlike alien hunters tracking human beings for sport". Some of these have been decent enough - okay, so one of these was decent enough, 2010's Predators, but mostly the franchise hasn't had a good track record. And so the first thing one must praise the new film Prey for (or maybe the second: the first thing is that it has easily the best title that any follow-up to Predator could have) is that it's a ruthless, back-to-basics exercise in stripping away all of the bullshit.
Here are the components of Prey: a forest, a Predator, a human who is beyond outmatched compared to the Predator's advanced weaponry but clever enough to compensate for it, and several other humans whose horrible deaths help that clever human formulate a strategy. It basically is the 1987 Predator again, dressed up in new clothes: it's 1719 in the North American Great Plains, the protagonist is a young Comanche woman, the Predator itself has somewhat more rudimentary equipment than the version that arrived to give such trouble to those U.S. commandos in South America in 1987. This turns out to be more than sufficient to make probably the best and certainly the most viscerally satisfying of all the extant Predator sequels, even if this is strictly speaking a prequel. And sure, if this was the very first follow-up, and it had come out in 1990 instead of Predator 2, the fact that it's such a direct retread would maybe feel lazy and bad. But it isn't, and it didn't, and it feels enormously refreshing in the context in which we have gotten it, which is as the first movie in the franchise since 2018's The Predator came along and exploited basically none of the franchise's core competencies other than being extremely bloody.
Prey is only moderately bloody, and that's probably the biggest thing I can say against it. Another is that the dialogue in Patrick Aison's screenplay rings pretty flat; it's one thing to make the two specific call-backs to iconic lines from the first movie that this does, which even if its's cheesy is cheesy in the right ways. But it's quite another thing, and much, much more aggravating, to have so many lines which are lazily modern as Prey does; not even modern quips, just tossed-off casual observations that precisely nail the script to the 2020s for no reason other than because at the point that this was announced as a direct-to-streaming release (which is incredibly dumb, for the record; even in its slightly reduced state, this would have been a terrific theatrical experience), apparently everybody stopped caring by just that much. The tinny dialogue has a knock-on effect when it arrives in the mouth of Amber Midthunder, the lead and for long stretches of running time, the only human we see at all; she's excellent in the silent moments (and there are certainly more of these), where she's allowed to stare warily with her large eyes, framed by black makeup that has a narrative function (it's facial camouflage or war paint that, over the course of the first act, wears off to just racoon-like mascara rings), but subjectively largely serves to make her look like she's worn to a nub after forcing herself to stay awake for multiple days straight. And that adds a nice level of wired exhaustion to Midthunder's tensed-up, nervous performance, both stalking and evading at all times and doing a nice job of teasing out the ambivalence between predator & prey that's built in to the film's title. But then she speaks (and again, this happens much less often than it might), and there's not even the softest whisper of a hint that we're watching a human being from the 1710s.
(There is, for the record, a Comanche-language version of Prey that has been made available alongside the English version; different sources claim slightly different things, but the wording the filmmakers have used in interviews leads me to believe that English was used on-set and Comanche was then overdubbed in post-production, so I watched the English version. It's entirely possible that Midthunder's vocal performance feels less anachronistic in the dub, and I'm 100% certain that I wouldn't be able to tell).
So much for the big problems (okay, there's a third: there are a lot of CGI animals and they all look terrible, especially a bear. But this is direct-to-streaming, and allowances must be made). They're really not that big, either, particularly in the face of what Prey gets right. It's simple and sleek, a movie that's over and done with in 99 minutes, including the credits, and tells one brisk, streamlined story in that time. Naru (Midthunder) thinks she has what it takes to be a hunter, particularly after she sees a flaming bird in the sky that she takes to be a good omen. Nobody in her tribe agrees, including her mother (Michelle Thrush), and her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers), the latter of whom is leading a group to find the mountain lion that has lately been causing trouble. Still, he lets her join his hunting party, and they head off into the wilderness, where they get some good news and some bad news. The good news: the mountain lion has been scared off deeper into the wilderness. The bad news: what scared off a mountain lion was a murderous alien game hunter (Dane DiLiegro) with a body shield that allows it to turn mostly invisible, and the flaming bird Naru saw was the spaceship dropping it off for a spot of hunting. The worst news, of course, is that once the Predator has gotten bored with wolves and bears, it's going to be very interested to discover a whole bunch of highly-trained Comanche warriors to play with, not to mention a team of French-Canadian trappers who quality as "heavily-armed" by the standards of 1719 in the middle of the North American continent. And it also seems to think of Naru as insufficiently well-trained to bother with, but all the means is that she's got more opportunity than the doomed Comanches and Frenchmen to watch for whatever weaknesses it might display, or at least to start figuring out how in the hell its weapons work, enough to dodge them.
Prey neatly breaks into two halves, almost exactly: the first half is Naru struggling to prove herself, the second half is a hopeless massacre. It could probably be argued that the first half might benefit from being a little bit speedier, and a little bit less invested in wordless scenes of the Comanche hunting party, or just Naru on her own, nosing around in the forest; director and co-scenarist Dan Trachtenberg (finally making a follow-up to his well-received debut feature, 2016's 10 Cloverfield Lane) has put some effort into make sure this works as suspense, and the script lets us know almost immediately that the Predator has landed and is carving its way through the local fauna. Certainly, the scenes involving the Predator are largely very good: the filmmakers have decided to make the creature's invisible armor much less effective than in previous movies, so it's much easier to get a sense of the alien's presence and movement even when it's transparent. There are some wonderful shots showing it hulking its way around the environment: a snarling wolf distorting as the camera pans past the Predator's invisible legs, a (very bad-looking CGI) rattlesnake darting at the same legs, which flash red at the moment it futilely tries to bite. It feels menacing and even though we all probably know what's going on - this takes for granted you know what franchise it comes from, even though the original plan was apparently to hide that fact until it premiered - the Predator feels suitably inhuman in that first half, more than many of the members of its species.
I'm not sure the film quite keeps that up when it cuts back over to Naru, though to a certain extent, it doesn't have to. The clever thing about the narrative structure in Prey, which is sort of the same structure as Predator, though I think it's done better here, is that even though she has no idea what sort of hellish murdering creature she's up against, she knows very well that she's in constant danger just from what she expects to find in the form of wolves, bears, and lions. So she's tense and defensive even while the nature of the story keeps her and the actual antagonist ignorant of each other for such a long time. Trachtenberg does fine work with these scenes, keeping our attention on Naru (the film uses a lot more singles than my memory of Predator, which is that it favored group shots as long as there was still a living group to film), isolating her and keeping our attention on how little support she has even when she's with the other Comanches, and cinematographer Jeff Cutter favors diffuse natural lighting that makes the film feel overcast and just a little ominous; it's a beautiful world the film depicts (Prey was shot in Alberta, Canada, which doesn't really resemble the part of the Great Plains where the Comanche lived in 1719, but it works), but a hostile one, a little murky and hazy and gloomy even when it's sunny. Cutter can't or isn't trying to overcome how damn digital it looks - I am sorry to report that this does indeed look like a streaming exclusive - but the fundamentals are sound.
And so, for that first half, things just feel a little tense. Then the second half comes, and they feel tense in a much more active, vicious way, and while I feel at least slightly like I'm apologising for the first half of Prey, no such apology is necessary for the second half. It's not an all-time great action movie, like Predator was, but it's pretty darn good as a chain of violent interactions between humans and Predator, quick bursts of brutal violence (which errs on the side of flashy choreography more so than the animalistic force typical of the series) interspersed by panicked stretches of wondering just how long it will be until the next burst. The second half of Prey is pretty comfortably the second-best film this series has produced; not as elegant in its lack of bullshit as the first movie, but mostly unrelenting, clever in how it lets us follow Naru's scheme against the Predator, and free of any concerns but to provide a steady barrage of well-built genre machinery. It's not as immaculate as the 1987 film, but it's sensible, propulsive, and well-crafted, and in this series, that's more than enough.
Reviews in this series
Predator (McTiernan, 1987)
Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (The Brothers Strause, 2007)
Predators (Antal, 2010)
The Predator (Black, 2018)
Prey (Trachtenberg, 2022)
Other films in this series, yet to be reviewed
Predator 2 (Hopkins, 1990)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Here are the components of Prey: a forest, a Predator, a human who is beyond outmatched compared to the Predator's advanced weaponry but clever enough to compensate for it, and several other humans whose horrible deaths help that clever human formulate a strategy. It basically is the 1987 Predator again, dressed up in new clothes: it's 1719 in the North American Great Plains, the protagonist is a young Comanche woman, the Predator itself has somewhat more rudimentary equipment than the version that arrived to give such trouble to those U.S. commandos in South America in 1987. This turns out to be more than sufficient to make probably the best and certainly the most viscerally satisfying of all the extant Predator sequels, even if this is strictly speaking a prequel. And sure, if this was the very first follow-up, and it had come out in 1990 instead of Predator 2, the fact that it's such a direct retread would maybe feel lazy and bad. But it isn't, and it didn't, and it feels enormously refreshing in the context in which we have gotten it, which is as the first movie in the franchise since 2018's The Predator came along and exploited basically none of the franchise's core competencies other than being extremely bloody.
Prey is only moderately bloody, and that's probably the biggest thing I can say against it. Another is that the dialogue in Patrick Aison's screenplay rings pretty flat; it's one thing to make the two specific call-backs to iconic lines from the first movie that this does, which even if its's cheesy is cheesy in the right ways. But it's quite another thing, and much, much more aggravating, to have so many lines which are lazily modern as Prey does; not even modern quips, just tossed-off casual observations that precisely nail the script to the 2020s for no reason other than because at the point that this was announced as a direct-to-streaming release (which is incredibly dumb, for the record; even in its slightly reduced state, this would have been a terrific theatrical experience), apparently everybody stopped caring by just that much. The tinny dialogue has a knock-on effect when it arrives in the mouth of Amber Midthunder, the lead and for long stretches of running time, the only human we see at all; she's excellent in the silent moments (and there are certainly more of these), where she's allowed to stare warily with her large eyes, framed by black makeup that has a narrative function (it's facial camouflage or war paint that, over the course of the first act, wears off to just racoon-like mascara rings), but subjectively largely serves to make her look like she's worn to a nub after forcing herself to stay awake for multiple days straight. And that adds a nice level of wired exhaustion to Midthunder's tensed-up, nervous performance, both stalking and evading at all times and doing a nice job of teasing out the ambivalence between predator & prey that's built in to the film's title. But then she speaks (and again, this happens much less often than it might), and there's not even the softest whisper of a hint that we're watching a human being from the 1710s.
(There is, for the record, a Comanche-language version of Prey that has been made available alongside the English version; different sources claim slightly different things, but the wording the filmmakers have used in interviews leads me to believe that English was used on-set and Comanche was then overdubbed in post-production, so I watched the English version. It's entirely possible that Midthunder's vocal performance feels less anachronistic in the dub, and I'm 100% certain that I wouldn't be able to tell).
So much for the big problems (okay, there's a third: there are a lot of CGI animals and they all look terrible, especially a bear. But this is direct-to-streaming, and allowances must be made). They're really not that big, either, particularly in the face of what Prey gets right. It's simple and sleek, a movie that's over and done with in 99 minutes, including the credits, and tells one brisk, streamlined story in that time. Naru (Midthunder) thinks she has what it takes to be a hunter, particularly after she sees a flaming bird in the sky that she takes to be a good omen. Nobody in her tribe agrees, including her mother (Michelle Thrush), and her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers), the latter of whom is leading a group to find the mountain lion that has lately been causing trouble. Still, he lets her join his hunting party, and they head off into the wilderness, where they get some good news and some bad news. The good news: the mountain lion has been scared off deeper into the wilderness. The bad news: what scared off a mountain lion was a murderous alien game hunter (Dane DiLiegro) with a body shield that allows it to turn mostly invisible, and the flaming bird Naru saw was the spaceship dropping it off for a spot of hunting. The worst news, of course, is that once the Predator has gotten bored with wolves and bears, it's going to be very interested to discover a whole bunch of highly-trained Comanche warriors to play with, not to mention a team of French-Canadian trappers who quality as "heavily-armed" by the standards of 1719 in the middle of the North American continent. And it also seems to think of Naru as insufficiently well-trained to bother with, but all the means is that she's got more opportunity than the doomed Comanches and Frenchmen to watch for whatever weaknesses it might display, or at least to start figuring out how in the hell its weapons work, enough to dodge them.
Prey neatly breaks into two halves, almost exactly: the first half is Naru struggling to prove herself, the second half is a hopeless massacre. It could probably be argued that the first half might benefit from being a little bit speedier, and a little bit less invested in wordless scenes of the Comanche hunting party, or just Naru on her own, nosing around in the forest; director and co-scenarist Dan Trachtenberg (finally making a follow-up to his well-received debut feature, 2016's 10 Cloverfield Lane) has put some effort into make sure this works as suspense, and the script lets us know almost immediately that the Predator has landed and is carving its way through the local fauna. Certainly, the scenes involving the Predator are largely very good: the filmmakers have decided to make the creature's invisible armor much less effective than in previous movies, so it's much easier to get a sense of the alien's presence and movement even when it's transparent. There are some wonderful shots showing it hulking its way around the environment: a snarling wolf distorting as the camera pans past the Predator's invisible legs, a (very bad-looking CGI) rattlesnake darting at the same legs, which flash red at the moment it futilely tries to bite. It feels menacing and even though we all probably know what's going on - this takes for granted you know what franchise it comes from, even though the original plan was apparently to hide that fact until it premiered - the Predator feels suitably inhuman in that first half, more than many of the members of its species.
I'm not sure the film quite keeps that up when it cuts back over to Naru, though to a certain extent, it doesn't have to. The clever thing about the narrative structure in Prey, which is sort of the same structure as Predator, though I think it's done better here, is that even though she has no idea what sort of hellish murdering creature she's up against, she knows very well that she's in constant danger just from what she expects to find in the form of wolves, bears, and lions. So she's tense and defensive even while the nature of the story keeps her and the actual antagonist ignorant of each other for such a long time. Trachtenberg does fine work with these scenes, keeping our attention on Naru (the film uses a lot more singles than my memory of Predator, which is that it favored group shots as long as there was still a living group to film), isolating her and keeping our attention on how little support she has even when she's with the other Comanches, and cinematographer Jeff Cutter favors diffuse natural lighting that makes the film feel overcast and just a little ominous; it's a beautiful world the film depicts (Prey was shot in Alberta, Canada, which doesn't really resemble the part of the Great Plains where the Comanche lived in 1719, but it works), but a hostile one, a little murky and hazy and gloomy even when it's sunny. Cutter can't or isn't trying to overcome how damn digital it looks - I am sorry to report that this does indeed look like a streaming exclusive - but the fundamentals are sound.
And so, for that first half, things just feel a little tense. Then the second half comes, and they feel tense in a much more active, vicious way, and while I feel at least slightly like I'm apologising for the first half of Prey, no such apology is necessary for the second half. It's not an all-time great action movie, like Predator was, but it's pretty darn good as a chain of violent interactions between humans and Predator, quick bursts of brutal violence (which errs on the side of flashy choreography more so than the animalistic force typical of the series) interspersed by panicked stretches of wondering just how long it will be until the next burst. The second half of Prey is pretty comfortably the second-best film this series has produced; not as elegant in its lack of bullshit as the first movie, but mostly unrelenting, clever in how it lets us follow Naru's scheme against the Predator, and free of any concerns but to provide a steady barrage of well-built genre machinery. It's not as immaculate as the 1987 film, but it's sensible, propulsive, and well-crafted, and in this series, that's more than enough.
Reviews in this series
Predator (McTiernan, 1987)
Alien vs. Predator (Anderson, 2004)
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (The Brothers Strause, 2007)
Predators (Antal, 2010)
The Predator (Black, 2018)
Prey (Trachtenberg, 2022)
Other films in this series, yet to be reviewed
Predator 2 (Hopkins, 1990)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
