I had heard a lot of good buzz around Prey; the latest film in the Predator series of sci-fi/horror films. I can't say I really paid it too much attention, I assumed this was coming out at the cinema, a place I don't really visit anymore. It was a nice surprise then to see this was streaming on Disney+, seeing it there I just knew I had to check it out.
Prey takes place in 1719 and follows Naru (Amber Midthunder - Legion TV series), a member of the Comanche tribe. She yearns to be a hunter like her older brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers) and the other men, yet she is expected to do the same jobs the females of the tribe are expected to do. Because of this, Naru is always out in the wilds practising, and it is while she is away that she witnesses a strange sight which she equates to a mythical creature called a thunderbird. In actuality it is a predator arriving in its spaceship (Dane DiLiegro - American Horror Stories TV series), an alien whose species exist only to hunt, and pride themselves on this fact. With the hunters of her tribe not believing her about this new deadly foe, Naru sets out alone to hunt down and destroy this threat to her people.
There have been so many bad entries in the Predator series that it isn't hard to argue that there had never been a decent film after 1987's Predator (entries such as Predators and The Predator were both shadows compared to the original). Prey finally breaks that trend thankfully and does so in a simple way, by stripping things back to basics. Maybe more so, the original had a squad of heavily armed soldiers out in a jungle, eventually coming down to a battle between Arnold Swarchenegger's character and the alien. Here you instead have an otherwise unremarkable young woman battling it out, instead of guns the character is armed with a flint axe and bow and arrows. This film not only goes against the increasingly outdated views of women as weak, but also tells an entertaining 'David vs Goliath' story. Of course, that also means the story is fairly bog standard, there isn't anywhere this goes that really surprised me, even if it did elicit some emotion out of me.
