Review of Prey (2022) by Euu — 06 Aug 2022

Prey keeps up with the tradition that each Predator movie must worse than the one before. It was hard to make a movie worse than The Predator, but congratulations to Dan Trachtenberg for pulling that off. At least The Predator had some nice comradery between the main cast, just like the Original; this movie has zero characters other than the protagonist and her brother that are anything more than people that die. Now, speaking of the protagonist, I don't care what simps with mommy issues think, but female protagonists don't work in a Predator movie for the same reason that male protagonists would not have worked in the Alien movies: both series play with different themes that are better explored with protagonists of different sexes. It doesn't help that Sacagawea(no, I don't remember her real name in the movie) is really annoying and that she has the most generic Female Protagonist motivation: to prove that she is just as good as the boys at boys stuff. This leads her on a quest to tack down the Predator which ends up in the death of every young male warrior in her tribe. This is even funnier because her brother(and the movie) makes a big deal about Hunting being about survival.

The Predator in the movie is not any better either. First off, it has the worst design of any movie until now. In the first and second Predator movie, when the creature's face was revealed, it looked otherwordly but also very real at the same time. This is why it has one of the most iconic creature designs ever. Here it has even more cartoonish mandibles than in the previous film plus a really silly Skull Mask that looks like a generic monster design in a Video Game. It's also very stupid, charging heads-on in confrontations with dozens of armed opponents, as oppossed to the creatures in previous movies that were patient, calculated hunters. Lastly, the movie makes the whole premise behind the Predators stupid. In the first movie it made some sense that these creatures come to Earth to hunt Commandos and Special Forces armed to the teeth with modern weapons. But do they really expect us to believe that these aiens travel hundreds of lightyears to hunt not only people with Stone Age technology but also snakes,coyotes and bears? You know, animals that humans have been hunting for millenia?

But don't worry, the Predator may be the main villain of the movie, but the real monsters are the White Men. They are no real threat for our protagonist though, who, despite being shown to not be a great huntress or warrior earlier, takes down six of them with no issues. Oh, yeah, and the movie is full of stupid references to the Original, it even explains that stupid pistol at the end of Predator 2.

I am only giving it a 1 because they had the decency to at least not call it Predator.