Movie Review : Prey (2022)
I was not the target audience for a new Predator movie. Nothing against the feminism or first nations representation, I just didn’t really like any of the sequels to the original. But I watched them all anyway. Because when you like something as much as I love the original Predator, you expect the magic to operate again and again and it never does. Although it has been showered with praise, I thought Prey was barely the best Predator sequel. By a hair, really. It's not bad or anything. It’s just an aggressively OK movie.
Set in 1719, Prey tells the story of a young Comanche huntress named Naru (Amber Midthunder) who is following her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers) at work every day along with her dog, against the wishes of her tribe. I’m sure you’ve guessed it, at some point Naru stumbles upon our fun loving alien creature (Dane DiLiegro) and begins a blood feud with it although no one else believes it actually exists. The predator starts wrecking shit up, shenanigans ensue, I don’t need to tell you what happens next.
Predateen
This is a tricky movie to discuss because so much of its marketing was anchored around how wonderful of an opportunity Prey is for minorities to feature in a blockbuster and how respectful it is of their culture. This is not wrong. I just wish they had a better movie to feature their talents in. Prey is just very formulaic. It’s following a slasher movie template to a fault: 1) a pure young girl stumbles onto a menace 2) cockier kids refuse to believe it even exists 3) Aforementioned menace kills the cockier kids and so on.
Before you tell me the original Predator also follows this template (I had this argument on Twitter), it absolutely doesn't. It's a bunch of hard dudes who see the same thing, at the same time and freak out like the people who were at The Exorcist's premiere. It's a mess of guns, baby oil and coked up cinema that only the eighties could’ve granted us. Prey is… I mean, technically irreproachable. It’s just a little predictable and generic. There is only one twist I didn’t expect and it's because I thought it would be dumb to pull off.
But director Dan Trachtenberg kind of pulled it off, though. I’ll give him that.
People are losing their mind on how good Prey is right now, but I'm not sure it is going to be remembered in a year or two. I gave a hard time to Everything Everywhere All At Once, but it has a strong identity that makes it memorable. This is a pretty straightforward affair bankrolled by Disney. Although it is plenty gory, it is meant to appeal to the broadest audience possible and narratively speaking, it is ultra safe. It is a good old coming-of-age movie about a young woman overcoming adversity to gain the respect of her peers.
Nothing against such a trope in particular, but come on. You’ve seen that movie a hundred times already. It just happens to feature a lot of blood, severed limbs and actors from first nations. It’s a cynical, corporate product that is trying to dupe you into thinking it’s some kind of wonderful milestone film. Fuck that.
Accelerated Revisionist History
I believe that one reason why Prey is so well received is that its third act is… kind of cool? It makes us for the sluggish first hour it put us through. Once Dan Tratchtenberg and co-writer Patrick Aison stop trying to tell a story, it become visually and viscerally engaging. When it is stripped to its bare bones of a young huntress fighting off an alien menace, Prey is kind of cool. It delivers a strangling, claustrophobic atmosphere even if the action is set in the middle of the woods. It never feels not desperate.
Otherwise, I had to do pretty intense mental gymnastics in order to keep me in good spirits. For example, the CGI is not very good in regards to animals. There is, among other things, a bear that’s agile like Michael Jackson and that runs up a cliff like a goddamn parkour runner. At first, I asked myself what the fuck, it makes no sens.e But then I was like: maybe it’s Naru’s perception of how scary and supernatural the forest can be. The bear is not actually LeBron James, she just perceives it to be that scary.
But you need to do a lot of this in order to stay engaged and it gets tiring after a while.
*
Prey is not a good movie. It’s not bad or incompetent either. It's just fine, really. Forgettable even. I wouldn’t call it boring, but almost. It might feel great because it's more competent and less messy than any other Predator sequels that came before, but I believe it'll get buried in the nonstop avalanche of online content in a year or so? Don't get me wrong : I'm 100% for feminism and first nation representation. I just don’t think this movie is going to move the needle for any cause ever. It’s just going to make Disney money.
