Prey

Naru is a young Comanche woman in 18th Century America. A skilled healer and a hunter, she ventures out, desperate to prove herself, and finds waiting for her not only the dangers of the wilderness and violent White men, but an alien predator too, one that hunts humans for sport.

I really liked PREY.

I liked it not just because it’s all around a good time, but because it adheres to the Predator movie franchise formula, something that hasn’t happened since Predator 2 in 1990 (and in 1991, in a crossover with Batman in a mini-series published by both DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics, written by Dave Gibbons, with art by Andy and Adam Kubert.)

Now, most of the films in the Predator franchise are terrible, and they’re mostly terrible simply because they’re bad… bad script, bad direction, bad effects, take your pick, bad everything, but another common reason why they’re all bad is because they focus on the wrong thing.

The bad films either focus on the setting too much—like say… Predator in generic medieval times—or they focus too much on the fight like it’s some kind of wrestling match—like say… Predator vs generic Samurai—all while forgetting, or maybe never actually understanding, that the key to the Predator franchise formula is that it has to be firmly rooted in a different and recognizable movie at the start, something familiar, something like… The Guns of Navarone, or Dirty Harry, or Robin Hood, because then, when the Predator crashes into this other movie and starts ripping the spines out of people’s backs, it’s ultimately going to end up facing a genre and cinematic Icon, like Schwarzenegger and his team of G.I. Joe-like characters, or Danny Glover as a street-weary cop who’s “getting too old for this shit.” It has to be someone like that, a known and recognizable hero, because that’s the point… when the Predator hunts, it hunts THE CHAMPIONS OF OTHER STORIES.

That’s the whole trick.

The prey has to be the king of their jungle, a recognizable quantity to the audience, the star of a story we already know, it has to be Arnold, it has to be Batman, it has to be a God, a Hero of Legend, a King Badass, because the Predator is a trophy hunter, and they only go for the really big trophies, they only go after the real lions, and only in the lion’s den, and the audience needs to be able to recognize immediately that the main target is that big time trophy.

That’s the challenge. Otherwise, why bother?

PREY uses the rebellious princess trope as its base story, the one that then gets interrupted by the Predator. Think Merida from Pixar’s BRAVE or Arya from Game of Thrones, for example.  I love this idea. Not only is it not an immediately obvious choice for the franchise, but it’s a story we’ve all seen a million times, so we know how it turns out. We already that the rebellious princess is extremely capable, and is in fact more than able to beat the average man at his game of choice.

Now the Predator is her real test.

So, yeah, lots of fun. It’s gory and exciting. It moves quickly and it looks good while doing it. Amber Midthunder is fantastic. The script is smart too. I really liked how the Predator is used as a metaphor for colonization, and how, regardless of whatever else is going on, Whitey is in the middle of it all, making everything worse.

So it’s historically accurate too.

It’s not as good as the original, of course, but it’s good enough that it could claim the number two spot from Predator 2 on the “best of the franchise” rankings. Yes, that’s a bit of low bar, sure, but there’s been a lot of attempts at the crown over the years, and until now, they’ve all fallen far short.

Prey doesn’t.

In the end, I only had a couple of nerd complaints…

One, usually the Predator is drawn to heat and conflict, and the stress from those external pressures adds to the tension. PREY doesn’t use that at all.

Two, the end credits stinger shows a bunch of Predator ships showing up, seemingly implying that other Predators are coming for revenge for taking out one of their guys, and I think that is a wrong choice. One thing that is often shown in these stories is that when the Predator loses… They will either blow themselves up, OR if you manage to kill them, other Predators show up to collect the body, and then they will usually pass the victorious human some kind of trophy that was taken in some other hunt, as a gesture of respect, a knife, a gun, a badge, whatever. This ties into the whole reason why the Predator hunts the best and the strongest on their own turf in the first place, it’s a contest, and if you best the local champion, if you take them down on their home court, then you deserve that trophy, you’ve earned it, but if the prey ends up besting you, it’s because they were better, and they deserve recognition for that. It’s not about revenge. It’s not a war, and it’s definitely not an invasion.

Three, maybe this is just me, but I did not need the stress that came with worrying about Sarii the dog the whole time. He is too good a boy to be in so much danger.

But like I said… nerd complaints.

Big thumbs up. Loved it.