1/3/2024 0 Comments Prey 2022 reviews![]() ![]() IGN's Jim Vejvoda gave The Predator a 6.5/10, writing "The Predator is, in many ways, a throwback to what made the 1987 original so beloved. Previous Predator films have mined great material from the interplay between characters going up against the alien hunter, and Prey’s choice to focus on Naru to the exclusion of everyone else means that the supporting characters are a little thinly drawn. ![]() Naru’s fight to be taken seriously by her tribe as a warrior is a strong throughline, and that’s a good thing, because hers is the only one the script takes any significant time to focus on. ![]() It gnaws at Naru throughout the film - more as those around her continue to look past her obvious skill - and it’s that frustration that fuels Amber Midthunder’s take on the character. But not even her brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers), who leads the Comanche’s hunters, believes that to be possible. Like her warchief father, she’s a fighter at heart and intent on completing the Comanche hunter’s rite of passage: to hunt something that’s hunting her. Prey tracks the battle for the tribe’s survival through a blisteringly paced, take-no-prisoners tear through the Great Plains while both honoring the roots of the franchise and serving as the perfect entry point for newcomers who want to see what all this spine-ripping, laser-guided goodness is about.Īt the heart of the Comanche’s conflict with the Predator is Naru (Amber Midthunder), a teenage girl ridiculed by her family and peers for not being content to harvest crops for the rest of her life. But you’d be mistaken to underestimate the Comanche’s odds. It’s an intriguing setup, to take a villain whose initial appearance was defined by how easily he tore through a pack of meatheads armed to the teeth with guns and explosives and transpose it into a time where its targets don’t even have those tools to rely on. ![]() Set over 250 years before Dutch’s first encounter with that ugly son of a b!t¢#, Prey finds the Predator (Dane DiLiegro) landing in the middle of Comanche Nation for a blood-soaked trophy hunt. The other questions viewers may ask themselves as they try to stay interested in the events include: Will everyone get shot and die? What is the filmmaker doing to make us care? Will we learn who is doing the shooting? Will we learn why? Can any of the answers justify the numbing sameness of this narrative? Not only do we have no investment in the fate of these people, but what little we gradually do learn about them makes us less likely to care than when we knew nothing at all.After the middling reception of 2018’s The Predator, director Dan Trachtenberg ( 10 Cloverfield Lane, Portal: No Escape) takes the franchise back to the basics in Prey… all the way back to the basics. At one point, the shooter has everyone at gunpoint and lets them go. A guy whose bandage shows bleeding in one scene has a spotless bandage a few scenes later. They abandon a car that could drive them to safety, they run off without supplies, they walk out in the open with a shooter following them, and they leave shelter and a telephone to run without a compass through the brush. Every time the hikers have the chance to make a sensible decision, they do the opposite. Our understanding of who these people are is limited to the content of speeches delivered by angry men accusing others of wrongdoing, which isn't the same as character development. Those with the endurance to sit through the full 87 minutes may do best to forgo the horror music and simply turn the sound off, because the manipulative music adds nothing to the creakily manufactured tension. For that reason, no amount of plot revelation can "spoil" this long, dull, pointless slog, as there's no payoff to even the most devoted and engrossed viewer. At one point in the ridiculous Prey, one hiker being stalked by a killer ventures, "Who says it has to make sense?" That seems to be the guiding motto of this film. ![]()
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