Four years after Shane Black’s The Predator was considered rather tasteless. However, The Predator Franchise returns with Prey (2022), newly released on Hulu. The Predator story has been taken back to the beginning, almost 300 years before the events of the first movie starring the ever-famous Arnold Schwarzenegger took place.
In the newest action film that is winning hearts, a Predator ancestor, lands on Earth in Comanche territory – a native land in America. We see a young hunter named Naru (portrayed by Amber Midthunder) who does everything in her power to kill it in order to protect her family. The film is currently standing at the top of a must-watch list, and we shall talk about why.
Amber Midthunder, whose biggest performances so far have been in the underrated FX series Legion and the movie Hell or High Water, delivers breakthrough performance in the picture. According to Midthunder, who revealed to Variety that she had auditioned in both English and Comanche, the auditioning process was also extremely unique.
Given that the film was originally intended to be shot in Comanche, this makes sense. And although they ultimately decided to shoot the movie in English, they also released a dubbed version in Comanche; making it the first movie to have a Native version when it was initially released.
‘Prey’ Connects a Dot to the Rest of the Predator Franchise
At the end of the newly released film ‘Prey’, Naru manages to kill the Predator, taking back its head to her tribe. Simultaneously, she brings back a pistol from one of the French trappers killed by the Predator earlier in the film.
Interestingly, we see the same gun at the end of Predator 2. In that film, Lieutenant Michael R. Harrigan (Danny Glover) is also able to defeat a Predator. Rewarding his efforts for the incredible valor displayed in the battle, the Predators on the ship where the battle takes place, hand over to Harrigan an antique pistol—the very same pistol we now see in ‘Prey’.
In Predator 2, it is possibly revealed that the Predators have been battling humanity for years. We humbly want you to visualize a different scenario that begs the question: how did the Predator acquire the pistol from Naru’s tribe? Could we soon witness a sequel in which the Predators exact revenge on the Comanche for killing one of their own?
This scenario, according to director Dan Trachtenberg, was crucial to determining whether or not his idea would be successful. According to Trachtenberg, one of the things that inspired him to make the movie was “recalling Predator 2’s ending and understanding that there is precedent for them existing throughout this time.”
Currently, Prey has an audience rating of 81% and a reviewer rating of 92% on Rotten Tomatoes. This stands in sharp contrast to The Predator, the franchise’s most recent installment. The Predator is commonly regarded as the worst entry in the franchise, despite Prey being hailed as the best Predator film since the first one. Can we consider the idea of contemporary cinema as a feeding factor for its success? (Yes, it is rhetorical!)
Predator Franchise: Hunting Grounds’ Set Decades In the Future
Prey may not be the first Predator feature to deal with historical themes, depending on how you define the franchise. In the movie Alien vs. Predator, archaeologists unearth an ancient civilization beneath Antarctic ice and learn that Xenomorphs have existed on Earth for a very long time. The Predators, though, are more recent arrivals in that movie. The story starts in 2004 when a Predator ship lands on Earth and melts a hole in the ice.
Some do not consider Alien vs. Predator part of the official canon. When Trachtenberg was asked why he mentions he wanted to set his movie in the past, he said, “I wanted to make a movie about a protagonist that we never see as the lead of a movie, being Native American and the Comanche even more specifically, so that sort of lent itself to being set in the past. And I just want to sort of go even further than when we typically see Native Americans show up, it’s in a Western, in a cowboy movie, in the 1800s. I just wanted to go back further to the height of the Comanche empire.”
Prey is currently streaming on Hulu.
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