Let’s see how Prey breathed new life into the Predator franchise. The Predator franchise has been a mainstay of sci-fi action films for forty years, from the original fantasy Predator in 1987. A product of its time and action roots, it’s a film that has more than its fair share of muscle, sweat, blood and death, with a smattering of witty talk, jokes and sayings regularly quoted to this day. Unfortunately, since that first entry, and perhaps an argument could be made for Predator 2 starring Danny Glover, the Predator franchise didn’t do well, but that’s changed now. Let’s see how Prey breathed new life into the Predator franchise.
A predator’s story
The next installment after Predator 2 was incredibly poor Alien vs Predator and Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, which subsequently were both quickly moved away from “main continuity” and not considered true Predator installments by studios. Two of the greatest sci-fi icons of the past fifty years should be a film that writes itself, however, it certainly wasn’t.
We then got predators, which was a direct sequel to the story begun in the first two, insofar as the first two were briefly referenced. Starring Adrien Brody in what could have been his breakout action role, the film returned to the jungle, this time on a distant planet, with multiple predators hunting the motley crew of criminals.
Finally, and very recently, we had The predator in 2018, with Boyd Holbrook and Olivia Munn. Back on Earth, it centers on an imprisoned soldier and his family, who, along with a group of misfit soldiers, find themselves in a fight with a new type of Predator, but ultimately everything was average.
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How Prey breathed new life into the Predator franchise
At this point, many viewers thought we had lost any chance of a Predator movie even close to the original, let alone as good as the one we just got. If you’ve ever watched the latest addition on Disney+ or Hulu, you’ll realize there’s still life to the franchise.
By stripping the film’s premise back to basics, it also makes the brave decision to go back some three hundred years, centering on a tribe of Comanche warriors, and more specifically Naru, a Comanche woman who desperately seeks to be treated as a equal and a hunter for the tribe.
You would think it just wouldn’t work. Bows and arrows, axes and hounds against an incredibly advanced alien lifeform with a plasma cannon? Luckily, the film addresses this and at the same time shows us the progression of the Predator race compared to the original. The cannon is gone, the camouflage is less reliable, constantly failing and malfunctioning, and the mask… oh the mask is glorious. Gone is the steel mask, replaced by a more primitive bone mask.
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Tributes and reminders
Director and screenwriter Dan Trachtenberg not only understands his material, but clearly has a passion for the Predator franchise. The film is fast-paced, beautifully shot with fantastic shots, and the action is franchise high since the original.
Throughout the hour-and-a-half runtime there are plenty of intentionally framed shots like the original, whether it’s Naru climbing out of the mud or the branches moving as the Predator invisibly leaps from branch to branch. branch, and many others. It’s both an homage to the first movie and able to stand on its own.
Whether you’re looking for a Predator movie that delivers on gore and death, a prequel faithful to the original, or a movie that lives in the Predator universe and brings its own ideas, you should watch Prey. This is the movie that will continue and hopefully take the Predator universe to new heights, and so it is. Prey breathed new life into the Predator franchise.
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