Prey (2022)

You know those Predator movies? A couple of years ago, Hulu made another one, except they flipped the script and named it Prey. Which made sense superficially, as it’s set 300 years ago among the Comanche, and yeah, there’s just every reason to expect a slaughter.

But then the movie takes an early right turn, when the main character is a young woman who wants to be a hunter for the tribe, only nobody really believes she has any potential as a hunter except her brother. And honestly, the early scenes prove the tribe right, or at least they would if it were not clear that most of her failures come from everyone else’s criminal negligence. She is mocked and spurned at every turn, and even her pretty good ideas are seen as failings, but ultimately it is fair to say that she’s just not a very good hunter, even if the fault lies elsewhere.

Meanwhile, it appears Predators have never been to Earth before, because this one is only interested in hunting that which has first hunted it, as though it’s on a fact-finding mission; it ignores all prey, and only hunts predators. Which in a piece of dramatic irony is also the method by which the Comanche graduate a hunter; he (well, she in this case, of course) must hunt something that is hunting him.

There’s a lot of ground to cover between here where I’m leaving off and there where the movie ends, but if you think that the real confrontation is between predator and prey, well, it seems to me that you understand the kind of spoilers that a title can bring to the table.

[1] Also there were a few more that predate me reviewing things. (No pun.)

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