Prey- 2022

Behind the scenes 💚

PREY (2022)

I’ve seen a lot of praise for the way Prey went back to “the roots” of the Predator franchise with a simple, direct story of the Predator hunting on Earth and the locals caught up in its way.  These observations are very correct, but I also noticed another way that the film echoes the original Predator that it seems nobody else is talking about: It portrays a developed, independent story before the Predator gets involved at all.

The original Predator started as a political thriller/action movie.  The reason that Dutch and his squad are in the jungle in the first place is because they’re on a hostage rescue mission, which unbeknownst to them is actually a front for a CIA operation to suppress an invasion/insurgency against a US-supported government in Central America.  For the first forty-five minutes of the film this is all that the characters are dealing with.

The Predator may be present, with occasional switches to his perspective as he observes the characters and they stumble on the aftereffects of his killings, but it’s not until forty-five minutes in that the characters actually know he’s there and begin reacting.  Until then, you could cut out the sci-fi parts and just present the remaining footage un-altered as a short-film by itself.

The rest of the franchise never replicated this, with the various Predators (Or other alien events) driving the plots from the beginning.  Alien vs. Predator is all about the investigation into the alien presence on earth, Predators sees people taken to a different planet, etc.  For all of them, there’s nothing to the story without the Predator.

Predator 2 kinda tried to do it, with the characters combating a city-wide drug war that was already going on, except that the Predator interrupts that conflict from the very beginning of the film itself.  They don’t know what it is until a while later, but it’s killing characters (Cops, criminals, civilians, etc.) starting in the very first scene and the characters are responding to it all along.

Prey goes back to the real roots of the franchise by showing that the Predator is interrupting lives and stories that are already in progress.  Like with the first film, up to the first forty-five minutes you could cut out all the scenes of the Predator itself and still have a cohesive, complete story.  In this case you could present it as a coming-of-age short film all by itself.

This is one reason that I think this film is so compelling compared to all of the stumbles elsewhere in the Predator franchise: By taking the time to invest in a completely independent story it imbues weight and substance to everything else that happens.