Spoilers for "Prey" follow
The first and most obvious problem with "Prey," the seventh installment in the Predator film franchise, is that it's the seventh installment in the Predator film franchise. As we've written here before, Hollywood is in a miserable rut of sequels, reboots and intellectual strip-mining of established properties, so it's already a bit of a letdown that we're watching yet another Predator movie rather than something new.
Such are the times we live in, however, and so here we are reviewing another entry in what is now a septenary series of films. And you will probably not be surprised to learn that this film is not very good. It is without a doubt a pale, ineffective shadow of the magnificent original film, though even on its own merits it stumbles and ultimately falls.
The premise is kind of more or less the same as the other six films in the franchise: A Predator alien comes to a planet to hunt things. In this case the creature comes to the early-18th century American plains, landing near a Comanche tribe and eventually crossing paths with several of their warriors, including the female protagonist, Naru.
Violence, bloodshed, mayhem and intense fighting sequences follow. It will not surprise you at all to learn that Naru eventually triumphs over the Predator, killing him and solidifying her status as a great warrior of her tribe. In fact, there is nothing at all surprising about this film. Being the seventh in a 35-year-old film series will do that.
The film does have its brighter points. The cinematography is often quite appealing, particularly the depiction of the Great Plains of the U.S. prior to widespread colonial and U.S. emigration. Amber Midthunder, who plays Naru, turns in a commendably understated performance; she manages to sell the character's irritation of being sidelined in a patriarchal tribe without making it too woke, which is an impressive feat in and of itself. The depiction of the Comanche people is also well done; they appear as relatively normal men and women, anyway, rather than the sort of sainted, whitewashed Nature People that most modern progressives picture Native Americans to have been prior to European contact.
Yet the movie still mostly bombs. Naru is the only character in the film that even comes close to being fleshed out; every other player in the movie is relegated to largely irrelevant background roles. When you consider how fully dimensional the seven main characters of the original film were presented, this lapse feels all the more striking.
The movie also suffers from that intellectual anemia that afflicts so many modern films. Mere minutes after barely escaping a terrifying attack from the Predator, Naru runs into several of her fellow tribesmen — and yet she seemingly almost forgets to tell them what just happened to her, only mentioning it as a casual afterthought. At one point Naru encounters a French trader who just happens to have come across the Predator, somehow survived the incident, and incredibly figured out that the Predator is a "hunter" who is "looking for the strongest beast." It's as if screenwriters these days just run with the first idea that pops into their heads without thinking of how bizarre and inexplicable it will play out on-screen.
The action sequences, meanwhile, have almost the opposite problem: They're overwhelmingly overthought to an absurdist degree. Consider in the original film how protagonist Dutch just barely defeated the Predator by a sheer stroke of luck after the creature happened to stand under a counterweight while preparing to kill him:
Compare that with Naru's rather ridiculous battle against her own adversary, wherein she receives a perfect weapons assist from her Dixie Dog before literally leaping up onto the Predator's seven-foot-tall frame to wrap a rope around its neck several times:
It's just over-the-top and unbelievable, though the way Naru ultimately defeats the Predator is more patently ridiculous than even this sequence.
In the end, though it has its small moments, "Prey" is ultimately a product of its time, an unserious movie for an unserious age of cinema. It's one part nostalgia to two parts sloppy and silly filmmaking; it is hardly worth the 90 minutes you will spend watching it, if you even bother.
The one upshot is that it's out for free on Hulu so you don't have to pay nineteen dollars to go see it at a movie theater. For once, a movie is priced quite accurately relative to its worth.
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