Prey Tell

The arrival of a new Predator movie is hardly an anticipated event in my movie-watching schedule. I'm fairly sure I've never seen any but the Arnold Schwarzenegger original, and I've never really heard anyone suggest that I've been missing out for that. But the newest film in the franchise, Prey, debuted on Hulu to a good deal of online buzz -- and more than one friend assuring me that it was worth a look.

Set in 1719 in Commanche territory, Prey centers on Naru, a young woman eager to prove herself as a hunter amid a society that would slot her as a gatherer. She is soon testing herself on "hard mode" when an alien trophy hunter arrives and begins marauding the area.

Action movies don't always need much in the way of story, and the original Predator had barely any at all. Prey is hardly sophisticated in this regard, but that it has any story at all puts it ahead. Naru's need to prove herself is a simple and brute force character arc, but it's enough here. Prey is also ahead of the game in terms of thematic resonance. Where Predator nodded half-heartedly to a "the hunters have become the hunted" motif, Prey includes a number of explicit scenes showing the pyramid of death. Again, it's simple and brute force; again, it's sufficient in this context to be meaningful.

Prey is actually a well-directed film, which surprises me less when I know that it was helmed by Dan Trachtenberg, director of the excellent 10 Cloverfield Lane. There's still a tendency to regard "direct to streaming service" films as "lesser" movie-making somehow (no matter how much money Netflix throws at such efforts). Yet this movie wound up on Hulu only as a consequence of the Disney/Fox merger, and you can tell Trachtenberg was thinking of how it would look on the big screen when you see the panoramic landscapes, and aggressive use of nighttime and shadowy cinematography.

The lead performance is good. Amber Midthunder will be recognized by fans of the unusual "superhero" series Legion (where she played Kerry). This role calls upon the physical acting and facility with fight choreography that she honed there. But it also requires a lot of non-verbal communication with the audience that she handles well.

The script isn't amazing, but it is clever in moments, particularly in the "conversation" it strikes up with the original Predator. On occasion, it lifts lines of dialogue directly from the first film in organic ways that don't really call attention to the shout-out. There are a couple of clever moments where you're made to think the plot is going to "zig" because that's how it went in Predator, but it instead "zags" to do something different.

At the same time, just hearing from a few people that Prey was "actually good" may have already been setting the bar a little too high. It's certainly worth a watch, and enjoyable. But to call it "better than you might think" is overselling it. I'd call it "exactly as good as you might think," and give it a B. That's probably better than any Predator movie since the original, though, so if you've bothered with any of those, you probably owe it to yourself to catch up with this one.