Mark Reviews Movies: PREY (2022)

Prey, 20th Century Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 4, 2022

The makers of Prey clearly have the philosophy that, if it's not broken, don't fix it. This is the newest entry in the Predator franchise, and in a broad way, it's a return of sorts to the 1987 original. The story isn't directly connected, except that it features the species of alien monster that hunts and kills throughout time and space, but the approach certainly harkens back to the first film, which, after some clever misdirection of genre, was about a group of soldiers being slaughtered by the creature in a jungle, before one man spent of a lot of time evading and ultimately turned the tables on the particularly ugly thing.

The misdirection, at least, is absent from Patrick Aison's screenplay, because there's either no need or patience left in this series to play such tricks. The Predator appears fairly early in director Dan Trachtenberg's movie, and once that happens, there's only one for this to go, since we have four previous entries (as well as a couple spin-offs involving a different and just as famous species of alien beasts) that have firmly established the expectations for this one. The alien arrives. It kills a lot of things and people. A plucky survivor works out some way to defeat the invader.

It's intrinsically familiar, which is both a strength of Trachtenberg's installment, because it doesn't waste any time trying to do anything different, and an obvious weakness, since the whole of the plot is predictable from the start and in every beat that follows. Despite some shortcomings in the visual effects and a couple technical quirks, this is a competently made movie, to be sure. It does exactly what it needs to do and more or less does it well enough. Apart from the change in period, though, what's really the point of going through these motions again?

The setting, the Great Plains of North America in the early 1700s, definitely does change up things, if only in the way it severely sets the odds against the humans in their battle against the alien. Then again, that's not really as big a deal, since we know all kinds of advanced weapons aren't necessarily effective against the Predator. If the prior movies are any indication, spears, arrows, muskets, and flintlock pistols are, essentially, just as much of a disadvantage as modern-day military hardware. Still, it's different and adds some degree of tension, and that's the whole point.

In this place, we meet Naru (Amber Midthunder), a member of the Comanche tribe living on the plains. She's the daughter of a great hunter, whose older brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) has assumed that role in the band. Naru wants to be a hunter, as well, and when a cougar attacks one of their own, the community's hunters rally together to find him and kill the animal.

Naru joins the hunting party, and Taabe gives her the chance to prove herself. After seeing some strange signs in the sky and on the ground, she also believes that another creature—something much bigger and far more vicious—is out there, but the other hunters assume a bear is making those prints in the mud and somehow skinning a snake alive.

We know as well as—and, in fact, better than—Naru. A Predator has come to the Great Plains, and with its high-tech gadgets and weapons (the usual stuff, such as an invisibility-generating device, a thermal-view mask, and all kinds of implements of bloody, gory death), it's killing its way up the ecological food chain, looking to become the apex hunter of this world. Trachtenberg has a bit of diabolical fun with that food chain, such an early shot of a crawling ant being eaten by a mouse, which is turn eaten by the snake that the Predator leaves behind for the hunting party to find. The digital animals aren't convincingly integrated into the movie, but for the most part, that's a nitpick. A notable exception is a computer-generated bear, with its appearance undercutting a chase scene that leads to Naru having her fears of a deadlier killer being confirmed in a shower of blood from the Predator's metallic claws.

Anyway, Naru does discover the Predator and spends the rest of the story trying to avoid it, before deciding to hunt the monster herself. Taabe and the hunting party offer some help, while some ruthless French trappers, whose methods of killing and skinning buffalo could be mistaken for the ferocious alien's own (Take that as you will, since neither Aison nor Trachtenberg has any deeper thought about history or politics here, and that's fine), become targets, too.

Basically, the story becomes an extended action sequence—moving from the tall grass of the plains to a forest where the Predator's trademarked clicks echo among the trees, going from being chased and hiding to fighting hopelessly against the alien, witnessing carnage from dismemberments to decapitations. That certainly makes Prey an improvement over the other sequels, which became bogged down by assorted gimmickry that only highlighted the familiarity of the material. This is a stripped-bare narrative (which also means its human characters—even our protagonist, who's played with subtle intensity by Midthuder—are wholly expendable), and that, too, highlights the overly familiar nature of the movie—albeit in a slightly more palatable way.

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