(Seems like easy pickings for an 8-foot alien with technology far beyond this world, but apparently this is the Predator equivalent of a tourist checking out local restaurants.) Eventually, the two cross paths more directly.īefore that inevitable, satisfying clash, Prey makes some concessions to less-adventurous audiences. Meanwhile, an 18th-century Predator arrives on Earth and explores the Great Plains, mostly by observing smaller predatory animals in action, then taking them out. Naru trains herself in solitude with a custom-made weapon - a throwing ax she makes retrievable by tying on a rope - and she fulfills her tribal obligations alongside her trusty canine sidekick. Prey’s early scenes flirt with minimalism without fully committing to it. But when a series of mysterious signs indicates that an unfamiliar creature is stalking their territory, only Naru is willing to hunt it down. Her family and tribemates predictably disagree about her readiness for this task, encouraging her to help her people in other ways. Prey is set in the Great Plains of North America in the year 1719, following Naru (Amber Midthunder), a young Comanche woman desperate to undergo the training rites to become a hunter for her tribe. Still, there’s an admirable minimalism in the idea of a prequel that goes so far back in time that the franchise’s previous characters won’t be born for hundreds of years. Prey attempts to bring the series even further back to its roots than those films did - not that the other Predator movies have strayed especially far from the formula of giant, masked, mandible-faced alien monsters hunting humans who eventually fight back. 2010’s Predators and 2018’s The Predator proved the series still has loyal fans, but also demonstrated that the audience is relatively small. Like a lot of R-rated sci-fi series, this one hasn’t been popular in years. The latest entry in the Predator franchise that began in 1987 is a stripped-down version of the usual sci-fi hunt, coming straight to Hulu without hitting movie theaters first.Īt first glance, it makes sense to send a new Predator movie directly to streaming. Prey is the latest Fox production to capture both sides of that Fox history, while also nodding toward the studio’s new identity as a Disney-owned content mill for Hulu. (See The Darkest Minds, Elektra, or X-Men: The Last Stand, among many others, for examples of the Fox aesthetic at its worst.) These reputations weren’t mutually exclusive sometimes, a Fox movie would strike up a pleasing balance between muscular thrills and relative limitations, like The Wolverine, a smaller-scale superhero movie that makes evocative use of its initial, woodsy setting. Before Disney bought 20th Century Fox in 2017, the film studio had become known as a purveyor of durable genre movies like the Alien, Predator, and X-Men series - and also as an interfering cost-cutter, defined by its willingness to set pivotal action sequences in generic parking lots and Canadian forests.
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