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One year on, and Prey still stands out as one of the alphas of the Predator franchise. It’s no Predator 2, to be sure, but the deft directorial hand of Dan Trachtenberg and a mountain-moving performance from Amber Midthunder have stood the first test of time without breaking a sweat, and it has the Emmy nominations to show for it.
In fact, things were looking up for Prey the moment it planned on taking a road less traveled, opting for an 18th Century Great Plains setting and a protagonist in the talented Comanche woman Naru (Midthunder), who has every intention of both proving herself as a warrior and gutting the Yautja’s ego in one fell swoop.
But Prey‘s buoyant fate was arguably sealed when Trachtenberg made the decision to not utilize the Predator as an opportunity for fan service, but rather as an extension of the entire film’s identity. In a recent interview with IndieWire, the director opened up about his very specific handling of Prey‘s warrior, and it all boiled down to how the high-tech hunter operated on a thematic level.
“The thing that makes this awesome is what the Predator brings to it thematically. Not just ‘Look, how cool,’ and ‘We all love Predator,’ but literally what its mode is, what it suggests about our main character just by including it in the movie, with its own code and all that. It made the non-Predator aspects of our film even stronger, so it just felt like, ‘We gotta hold out. This should be a Predator movie. It just makes too much sense.”
And the result was nothing short of fascinating; between the Comanche, the Yautja, and the French trappers, the film absolutely dripped with comparisons and contrasts on the ethics of hunting; how and why does each party choose to hunt, how does it reflect their relationship, and perhaps resulting karma, with the Earth? Indeed, there was no shortage of thoughtful layers with Prey, and for a franchise that has loaned itself to spectacle for so much of its life, it was a welcome evolution.