Review of Prey (2022) by Megapeej — 05 Aug 2022

This was not the full on woke crapfest that I had been expecting. It does have a few of issues but it was not the usual heavy virtue signalling turd that the entertainment industry has been blasting out of their backsides for the last couple of years. If I am brutally honest with myself after watching the trailers I had already "pre-hated" this film and expected the story to be "strong independent native American woman, perfect at everything and only held back because of the men of her tribe, has to fight against adversity when she encounters an even bigger threat, white men. Also there is a predator in it". The trailers were so bad that I even expected Naru to team up with the predator to fight the evil colonialists. But this was not the case, Naru does go on a bit of heroes journey, she is a bit of crap hunter in the beginning, the dialogue is a bit clunky but it does not have to resort to belittling all men in order to show that Naru has strengths, her brother is clearly portrayed as a likeable character as well as a stronger hunter and fighter, sure most of the characters are forgettable fodder and are purely present just to be torn apart by the Predator and the white colonialists are written to be obviously unpleasant and unlikable but they are all French, so not too difficult to suspend your disbelief there.

It is no way a perfect film, some of the CGI is TV quality levels, but it was not the franchise killer that I expected it to be, whilst it does not really add anything new it does not crap all over any of the previous canon like Disney usually froths at the mouth with excitement to do, it has a couple of nods to the other films and is leagues better than the last Predator film that was released. Naru is certainly no Ripley, but at least she is also not another Captain Marvel either. Much better than I expected.