Prey
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
Writer: Patrick Aison, Dan Trachtenberg
Prequel to: the Predator movies
Cast: Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro, Stormee Kipp, Michelle Thrush, Julian Black Antelope
Seen on: 17.9.2023

Plot:
Naru (Amber Midthunder) hopes to join her tribe’s hunters like her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers). For that, she needs to go on a big hunt, but that’s easier said than done, especially since she is a woman and it is rather unusual for women to become hunters. When a mountain lion threatens her people, her hour seems to have finally come. But there is a bigger predator still in the forest – The Predator (Dane DiLiegro).

Prey comes hyped up and was highly anticipated by me. Given that most of the Predator movies so far were rather middling affairs at best, Prey had a lot to prove – and it did. I really enjoyed it.

Being a new entry in a long-established series of varying, but mostly not too good quality comes with its challenges. But Prey gets a lot of things right: the historical setting with a native tribe gives them the opportunity to strip the story back to its bones instead of scaling it up. It’s all about one person outwitting one predator (with the help of a dog). That that person is a woman is an added bonus in my book.

Plus, the setting allows them to draw parallels to the colonial massacre. One has to wonder who the bigger monster is: the Predator or the Europeans. In all of this, though, the Comanches are never shown as passive victims: they are capable, brave warriors faced with overwhelming forces. (I was disappointed that the Comanche language version was not made available to me, I could only watch the English language one.)

I was also struck by the visuals of the film. It’s been a long time that shots of a film actually left me with my mouth open, but Prey has a couple of those shots that even worked on my small screen at home to leave me with a sense of wonder. The film has some clever ideas regarding the gore, but most importantly it has vibrant characters that are easily rooted for and that keep the tension up as you fear for their safety and well-being. Midthunder and Beavers have great sibling chemistry, but Midthunder is rightly the center of the film.

Having watched my way through the series over the past year or so, I can confidently say that Prey is the best Predator movie. And you don’t actually need to go through all of the other films to enjoy this one – it is strong enough to stand apart from the series as a whole as well.

Summarizing: Excellent.