We got to Prey, just to make it 4K!
Luke Y. Thompson Reviews the new PREY 4k and reminds us of how cool physical media can be.
What a difference a year makes. In late July of 2022, following five days at San Diego Comic-Con, I was quarantining, lest my body somehow hosted COVID without my knowing it yet, in a half-finished guest house with no TV, watching Prey on my laptop. It probably had my email printed in large, semi-translucent letters across the screen, as most Disney-owned digital screeners do. I rewatched some scenes just to make sure I had the proper gist, and still cane away thinking it was a good movie. But the second-best Predator movie? That seemed like the sort of hyperbole one expects from the Internet, which by and large doesn't acknowledge just how creative the Predator franchise has been, with each installment drastically different from the rest.
Indeed, with the possible exception of AVP: Requiem – and even that is the only one to show us the Predator homeworld, which isn't nothing – every Predator movie is at least pretty good. But this year, with that guest house now a finished home, and my large 4K TV atop the furniture, playing the new UHD disc that Disney/Fox sent me for review, I think I agree that Prey is the second-best. Which is ironic, considering it is the most direct copy of the first movie's formula, with a space monster in the woods picking off unsuspecting warriors one by one until only a final challenger who properly understands the threat remains.
Predator 2 added the complications of a future Los Angeles; Predators featured hand-picked killers caught in a Predator civil war on their hunting-ground planet, and The Predator spoofed the original by having its “warriors” be mental patients with PTSD (it's borderline offensive in that regard, but also sufficiently over the top to not be taken too seriously). The first Alien vs. Predator had a woman of color, Sanaa Lathan, prove herself as Predator-worthy without necessarily being the obvious choice, and Prey draws from that too. Naru (Amber Midthunder), an aspiring warrior in an 18th-century Comanche tribe, isn't seen as a top threat by her own people, let alone the alien (Dane DiLiegro) who shows up. From the moment she throws her tomahawk-on-a-string into a tree, however, the audience knows that she is everything she aspires to be.
Predators – or Yautja, if we're being pedantic and using the “correct” word never uttered in any of the films – have canonically always had an affinity for Indigenous people of the Americas. AVP tells us they were worshipped by South American tribes whom they repaid with nuclear genocide, while the first Predator mentions that at least one shows up in the Guatemalan jungles every year that summers get especially hot. It makes sense they'd be into hunting Comanche too, although it makes less sense that they'd come into colder climates wearing fewer clothes. Then again, this is clearly a different variety of Yautja, leaner and taller, and using less high-tech weapons, save the de rigeur cloaking device. If you're wondering how more advanced Preds showed up in ancient South America, consider the fact that they are probably time travelers. It's the only way to make all the Predator movies canon, and it's a theory vaguely supported by the sight of space portals torn by their ships, as shown in The Predator.
Or there's always just the notion that planets are really big and diverse, despite so many sci-fi franchises depicting them with uniform terrain and populations. Even if the Predator homeworld is much warmer than Earth, it still has to have seasons and poles, with or without ice caps.
It's to the credit of director Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane), cinematographer Jeff Cutter, and the entire sound mixing and editing department that I just KNOW by watching that it's cold, of course. Using light and ambience, the scenes convey temperature, just as they capture the feelings of dawn and dusk. Most wide shots are in deep focus, and make you feel like a window to the past is open in front of you. Thus, I disagree with the choice to have periodic lens flares, precisely because they take me out of that feeling, reminding me this is a movie, in a Brechtian look-at-the-proscenium style that doesn't seem quite right for this.
This isn't one of those sets where the colors on the Blu-ray look drastically brighter than the 4K – both are spectacular transfers, but the 4K really makes the darkness come alive, and the shades of light at different times so much more evocative ( Ed — For a discussion of how they achieved such great night shots check out this interview in Filmmaker Magazine).
There is no digital copy included, since Prey was intended at release to be a subscription lure for Hulu. Odds are one will become available eventually, just as it did for Zack Snyder's Justice League, which was an HBO Max lure. But you'll be paying extra.
Want to watch the movie in Comanche, as dubbed by the cast? You can, but there's a catch: normal, unadorned English subtitles aren't available on the 4K disc. So if you want to hear it in Comanche but don't speak Comanche and want to know what's being said, you can only use the descriptive English subtitles, which describe every damn sound in brackets, as well as the dialogue. I don't know that hard of hearing people actually prefer that – I can't speak for them. I only know that when I have trouble hearing something, or need to watch a YouTube video with the sound off, I just want to know what's being said, period. Like, can't we all just take “[wind rustling trees]” for granted when we can see it happening onscreen? Maybe not. I'd genuinely like to know from deaf people if I'm off-base on this.
Or you can go the Mel Gibson Passion of the Christ route, and accept that perhaps the story will transcend the lack of your multi-lingualism. It's a bit easier when the story is one as super-familiar as the death of Jesus, and not a brand-new take on Predator, though.
My fear with Prey was that a one-on-one battle in which you inherently know both participants will survive until the climax could be a dull affair. It's not, perhaps at least partly due to the fact that Trachtenberg throws in several other side participants of both human and animal variety. This allows the Predator to make multiple gory kills, and Naru to face several non-alien threats along the way. The director cites Jackie Chan movies and video games as his action inspirations, and while he does not directly copy any of them, his penchant for long takes and coherent action stand him in good stead (and did so during the film's occasionally rushed schedule as well). The movie doesn't rely on dialogue, but it also doesn't go out of its way to avoid it, either.
In a recent piece for The AV Club, I argued that The Exorcist stands the test of time not because of its supernatural premise, but its very specific sense of time, place, and authenticity, with characters who feel like they have complete inner lives apart from the story they find themselves in. That, rather than the Predator-versus-human-in-the-trees premise, is what makes Prey a future classic as well. I could watch a whole movie about Naru proving herself to the tribe even without an alien trophy hunter being involved. The fact that he is there just adds a lot more gore and cool kills to an otherwise completely plausible, palpable historical narrative.
Extras include a live For Your Consideration panel with the key creatives and Midthunder, a making-of featurette that will make you appreciate how much the lighting adds to the movie, and three deleted scenes with non-optional director commentary. They're mostly superfluous, but seemingly included because they came up during the audio commentary sessions. An alternate opening expands on the scene where Naru's brother shoots the hawk, a character-establishing scene has Naru and a younger girl stringing a bow, and an animatic of a tree chase ultimately proved too expensive to render in live-action.
The commentary, on the Blu-ray only, features Trachtenberg, Midthunder, Cutter, and editor Angela M. Catanzaro. It's full of nuts-and-bolts comments about the filmmaking and trivia, as they point out things like invisible CG adjustments, they way it's really difficult to run with a torch while holding it to light your face because you then can't see anything, and the fact that DiLiegro had to look down through a hole in the Predator's neck (you cannot unsee this, as implied in his posture, afterward). Wanna know which character is supposed to be implicitly taking a dump when we see him? They'll tell you. I’m glad the movie didn't linger on it.
[This] is a movie that should make Midthunder an all-purpose star, and not just one who plays tribal warriors her entire career. The movie would still be a beauty without her, but it comes to life because of her.
The making-of commentary and the featurette emphasize the amount of respect and research done, with tribal consultants, to get all the Comanche details right. Trachtenberg knows damn well he's a white guy telling an Indian story, and has, by all accounts here, done due diligence so as not to make a simplistic noble savage trope. His is a movie that should make Midthunder an all-purpose star, and not just one who plays tribal warriors her entire career. The movie would still be a beauty without her, but it comes to life because of her.
There's a better than average chance this could become the first Predator movie, out of seven, to get a direct sequel with the same lead. Assuming they can time travel, though, I'd be all for an all-star installment that brings back every surviving protagonist. Arnold's getting old so that idea needs to hurry up if applicable. Meanwhile, Prey's end credit animation suggests three spaceships will come back next time, and after listening to Trachtenberg talk, I'm reasonably confident his idea is better than “the same, times three.”
In the meantime, I might just watch Prey again.
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