Genre: Action/Sci-Fi/Period
Premise: When an alien predator arrives on earth in 1719, it sets its sights on the great warriors of the Comanche nation, only to learn that one of them, a young woman, might be more than he can handle.
About: This movie comes from Dan Trachtenberg, who I’ve been a fan of all the way back to his “Portal” short film days, and then when he went on to make 10 Cloverfield Lane. I was surprised when his career stalled so I was very happy to hear he was entrusted with a franchise as iconic as The Predator. The script for Prey was written by Patrick Aison, best known for his work on Wayward Pines. The film cast the single coolest last name in all of Hollywood for its female lead warrior, Amber Midthunder.
Writers: Patrick Aison and Dan Trachtenberg (characters by Jim & John Thomas)
Details: 99 minutes
I was all over this when it was first announced.
I think my exact words were, “This is how you bring something fresh to an old franchise!”
The basic plot for Prey is that it’s America circa 1719 when the Comanche reigned. A young female member of a Comanche tribe named Naru isn’t happy that her male tribe members get to hunt and she doesn’t. So she’s always trying to tag along on their hunting excursions.
As the group attempts to hunt down a lion that maimed one of their tribe members, Naru sees a monster that easily kills a wolf, and later a bear. If it wasn’t hard enough to get her tribe to accept her, an insistence that monsters are in the woods isn’t helping.
So Naru goes out to hunt this thing (with her trusty dog) and finds herself, instead, out in the middle of nowhere being hunted. She will need to become her best hunter self if she has any chance at defeating… the predator.
I suspect that if I’d never seen the original Predator, I would’ve liked this movie a lot more.
I bring that up because, obviously, there are a ton of people watching Prey who’ve never seen the original film. To them, this will be new, fresh, and exciting.
But for me, having seen the first film, I was constantly comparing the two and, as a result, running into a lot of questions that didn’t have good answers.
What was so great about that first film was that it was a metaphor for American military might at the time and how muscles, machismo, and endless firepower could defeat anything – until it couldn’t.
Schwarzenegger’s “Dutch,” was a killing machine. Six foot two, 250 pounds of pure muscle, an unstoppable soldier who was both strong and smart. Yet he had to battle this alien tooth and nail all over the jungle just to barely – and I mean BARELY – beat him. You got the sense that there wasn’t a single other person on the planet who could’ve done what he did that day.
Yet now we’re supposed to believe that a 100 pound girl with bow and arrows is going to defeat a Predator?
Strangely, the screenplay leans into that. It knows its main character is tiny and unqualified, which creates the key screenwriting difference between the two films. As a screenwriter, you need to understand how these opposing choices changed each movie.
In one, the main character is already the strongest, and the movie sets about proving that he’s weaker than he thinks. In the other, the main character starts out weak, and the movie sets about proving that she’s stronger than we think.
It’s an interesting comparison – asking which starting point is better. Because, in theory, the underdog starting point should be better. And that’s “Prey.” But I enjoyed the original so much more because it was fun seeing our characters realize they were overmatched and, only then, become underdogs.
I, for one, would’ve loved if they’d gone more of the original movie’s route and made this Comanche tribe bada$$es.
The Comanche, let us not forget, were fearless and ruthless warriors who killed without remorse. Author SC Gwynn, who wrote a book on the Comanche, said this about them: “No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.”
Yet if this movie was your entry point into the Comanche, you’d think they were a sweet-natured group of malnourished, sometimes clumsy, teenagers, who put a premium on joke-telling. I mean, weren’t the Comanche the most skilled horse-riders in all of American history? Yet where are the horses here? Horse vacay?
Hollywood is probably terrified of portraying any Native American group as negative but it sure would’ve been nice to AT LEAST see the tribe kick some a$$. Cause then we’re thinking, “Okay, they have a shot against the Predator.” As constructed, I never once believed they had a shot at this thing without A TON OF HELP from the writer.
Heck, they didn’t even have a shot at REGULAR ANIMALS without help. For example, there’s a scene where our heroine is cornered on a tree branch by a lion, the lion lunges, she falls, hits her head and blacks out… and I guess the lion just goes home? What a nice lion.
Or when a bear is about to attack Naru, her dog runs past the bear, and the bear just decides, you know what? I’m going to play chasey-chasey with this dog now instead of killing this woman I ran up here to kill.
In screenwriting, you should be doing the opposite of this. You should be making it harder for your heroes. You should be slugging them repeatedly with obstacles that seem impossible to overcome. Audiences LOVE when you do this because it leads to much more exciting situations. It’s never exciting when your hero is magically saved from a difficult situation.
Despite this, there were a few things that I liked. I liked the decision to bring in the French army out of nowhere. They spiced up the movie at a time when it needed a boost. I liked the overall aesthetic of the film. I thought it was fun to look at. I liked some of the nature stuff, like being swept up in a river. And I liked the overall concept. That poster of a young female warrior being stalked by the infamous “Predator” gave you, “This could be a classic movie” vibes.
But the movie just never convinced me that Naru could defeat the Predator without the writer’s help. I’m still not sure if that had more to do with the writing or the casting. I just know that there were a dozen times in this movie where the Predator could’ve easily killed Naru and it didn’t.
Yes, I know there were reasons for this at times (It didn’t consider her “a threat” at first because she was a woman) but that’s still the writer helping out the protagonist. The writer doesn’t have to write that in. The fact that he did created a protective shell over our heroine for half the movie and that’s just not good writing.
With that said, this is an example of a great movie for the streaming experience. It’s not worth the price of a theater ticket. But 100 minutes of solid entertainment and all you have to do is point the remote control at your television? I do think it’s entertaining enough to warrant that. My expectations may have been too high here. However, if I’m looking at this objectively as, “Is this entertaining or not?” I think it is, which is why I’m going to give it a tepid ‘worth the stream.’
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: If I could leave only one piece of advice to the screenwriting community, it just might be NEVER SAVE YOUR HERO FROM A DIFFICULT SITUATION. ALWAYS HAVE THEM SAVE THEMSELVES. I know it is so much harder to do this. But it’s worth the extra effort because we always love to see our hero solve their own problems. For example, if you have your bank-robbing hero run outside the bank only to see ten cops pointing guns at him. And he can’t go back inside because five more cops are behind him. That’s a genuinely exciting scene to find our hero in. Do I know how to write your hero out of that situation? No. But that’s exactly why I want to see what happens next. I want to see our hero in an impossible-to-get-out-of situation and then see them somehow, get out of it! I don’t think we got much of that in Prey.
