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

Ignore the negative reviews completely. They're all written by thirteen year old virgins who hate women and think anti-slavery laws are 'wokism'. You know the type. None of them have seen a second of the film.

In truth there's nothing woke about it at all; the female character is convincingly inexperienced at first and manages to get by in fights by virtue of her opponents considering her non-threatening. Her brother is probably the most badass character in the whole film. 'Woke' is a meaningless word these days.

So the reason this film is so good is because it pares the mythology of the Predator back to the minimum: one Predator against the world. No Pred-dogs, no giant Predators, no Alien hybrids - just one unbelievably badass Yautja that carves its way through everything. It's an extremely simple setup, there's the barest hint of a plot - young comanche girl is underestimated and patronised by her tribe, she wants to complete the rite of passage that would allow her to become a hunter but is held back be everyone else, even her brother, who is an extremely successful hunter already. Predator arrives on the scene...all hell breaks loose. Add French colonialists into the mix and you've basically got an excuse for the Pred to chew through bodies in various inventively cool-looking ways.

One thing that's notable about Dan Trachtenberg(the writer and director of this movie, as well as the brilliantly entertaining The Boys tv show) is how good he is at conveying physicality in his work. He has an eye for a striking action shot and a brilliantly effective command of gore and violence. There are countless fantastic shots in this film; it really is just a long sequence of fantastic action scenes so don't come into it expecting any particularly good worldbuilding or characterisation(Why would you?) - what it does is dazzle you over and over with scenes that succeed in making the Predator genuinely scary and cool again. There's a particular scene early on that made me laugh out loud and replay it at least three times before I moved on: it's the reveal scene of the Predator(who has never looked cooler either by the way; with a face mask that looks like it was modeled on something from a Benicio del Toro movie and a lean, swaggering gait - the rendering on his face is excellent, which alas can't be said for some of the other CG in the movie) as it fights an eight foot tall grizzly bear. The bear and the Predator wrestle for a few seconds, the former lashing and biting at the Yautja as streaks of lurid green blood flash down his partially invisible body. The bear pushes the Predator down into the river and turns away assuming victory. Then we have a low camera angle as the Predator rises from the river slowly, not even facing the bear, which, enraged, charges at him to finish the job. We see it running at the Yautja as the latter looks at the camera, its invisibility camouflage flickering on and off ineffectively. And in one languid but swift movement the Predator step-rolls aside from the bear's path and with a ferocious right hook smashes it unconscious. It's an absolutely majestic shot, improved further when we see the camouflaged Predator hoiking up the bear's huge carcass onto its back and carrying it away, the grizzly's body seeming to hang in the air.

The film is full of moments like this. There are numerous scenes devoted to the wonderful tech that the Predator carries with it, including a ridiculous hunting net that pinions its luckless prey to the ground and shrinks around it, its razor sharp strings slicing through them and turning them into mulch. But the best is the fantastic Sekiro-like metal parasol-shield-blade it carries(and uses mainly to decapitate the villainous colonialists). Trachtenberg is just so good at this kind of stuff - and equally good at making you feel the weight and momentum of the violence, the Predator leaping towards the protagonist with such speed and ferocity you wince at how close it gets.

In all honesty it's a pretty predictable movie. Wisely it's not trying to be the next Annihilation or Arrival. It's an extremely lean action movie with a skeleton of a plot and barely any characterisation. But what it aims to do it does brilliantly and it has some of the most punchy visceral action you'll see anywhere right now. And perhaps most importantly it succeeds in making the Yautja a credible action movie concern again, for the first time since the original film. After dog aliens that play fetch with grenades and lanky 'mega' predators that consider ten year olds with Asperger's to be worthy opponents, this film reminds us just what a one-alien army these things are when they're portrayed as they should be. Given how hit and miss the films have been it's probably too much to hope that this will result in a sea change in quality for the franchise, but all I can say is if Trachtenberg has any interest at all in making a sequel they should bite his hand off.