Prey is the best Predator movie since the original. And that’s not a controversial stance to take; everyone online who is engaging with the movie in good faith agrees that it’s a fun action movie with great cast and violence. Which is remarkable, because when you think about the movie, it’s really just a lean, straightforward feature that doesn’t try anything crazy. But that no fat approach to story, and basic functionality, is a big part of why the movie resonates with audiences. So it is worth breaking down these underappreciated elements that make Prey work, starting with…
Direction
Dan Trachtenberg is a solid director. While people like to gush about directors who love to mark a film with their authorial stamp or focus on hyper specific stories that speak to their experience, Trachtenberg feels like a classic journeyman. This is not meant as a slight, but rather a compliment. He approaches a project, makes creative choices that focus on clean storytelling, and matches his style to the genre he is working in. If you want proof of this, compare Prey to his previous studio film, the wonderful 10 Cloverfield Lane. Other than these two movies being thrillers with outmatched female leads, they have very little in common with one another.
Cloverfield is a character based, claustrophobic drama about characters using psychology and subtle influencing to work against each other. Prey on the other hand, is an expansive adventure film stuffed with gore and physical confrontations. But in both Trachtenberg displays an adept instinct of how to move the camera, highlight the actors’ performances, and build suspense in the scene. Of course, it helps that he’s working with a script that has a strong understanding of…
Setups, Payoffs, and Subversions
This is the straightforward part. The story does a good job of introducing elements early on, then either having them help out the protagonist later on or come back in unexpected ways. For example, Prey introduces a bear trap in the first five minutes when Naru has to free her dog’s tail from one, which clues the audience into the presence of the European colonizers who enter the story later. Another favorite example of this was when Naru falls into a mud pit early in the movie. My immediate thought was “oh, they’re going to have her covered in mud to evade the Predator like Dutch, and this is introducing that element.” But instead the movie uses another setup, Naru’s medicine, to lower her heart rate enough that the Predator can’t sense her. It serves the same function as the mud in Predator, but it’s just different enough that it avoids treading old ground, allowing Naru to succeed on the merits of her unique skill set and wisdom. But because the movie is very economic and purposeful with each scene, the mud pit still pays off when Naru uses one to trap her otherworldly adversary in their final confrontation. She even uses a bear trap later to free her and her brother Taabe while tied to a tree.
Part of why these set ups work so well is that the movie trusts the audience to understand visual storytelling, only using verbal exposition when absolutely necessary; which is why Naru’s killing blow against the Predator plays so well. The movie showed how the creature’s mask acts as a targeting system, how its removal affects the creature’s aim, and highlights that Naru witnesses all this happening. So the audience never has to pause and think about what’s happening when she uses the Predator’s mask to aim his projectiles back at him. Prey always places clarity and character emotion over the trap that kills most prequels, nostalgia.
Legacy
Miraculously, Prey seems totally disinterested in worldbuilding when it comes to the larger franchise. It instead focuses on portraying an often overlooked community that shapes the dynamics and motivations of our characters in the form of the Comanche. Despite the film’s official synopsis of “a prequel that explains the origins of the Predators on Earth,” Prey seems content to be a fun side story that uses the iconography of the central monster to tell something that stands on its own. Outside of the moment where Taabe quotes Dutch from the first movie (“if it bleeds, we can kill it”) there’s very little fanfare for the previous entries. Though there is one major element that stands out.
At the end of the movie, a close up shot reveals that the pistol Naru took from the Europeans is the same pistol the Predators gave to Danny Glover’s character in Predator 2. It’s one of the few times a creative choice in the movie interrupts the emotion of the scene; Naru’s victory is undermined by the possibility that the Predators will one day kill the owner of the gun and take it as a trophy. I’m not sure if it was just meant as a fun Easter egg or sequel set up, but it’s such a highly specific detail with its own baggage it takes you out of the movie for a second. Otherwise, Prey is a testament to how valuing story over franchise building and legacy makes for a memorable popcorn flick.
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