Prey, or How To Make a Prequel Better Than the Original

Predator was awesome, but Prey is even better. Here's why.

We can’t talk about Prey without first talking about its Prey-decessor—sorry, but not really sorry.

Arnold Schwarzenegger’s sci-fi action horror film Predator is one of those movies I typically watch once or twice a year. Whenever it pops up on streaming, I watch. But I have never watched any of the Predator sequels or spinoffs more than once. That is, until now. In the last month, I have watched Prey, a prequel to the original, a handful of times. And I already know that this addition to the series will be my new go-to Predator film.

Directed by Dan Trachtenberg (of 10 Cloverfield Lane, another awesome movie) and starring Amber Midthunder, Prey is set in the Northern Great Plains of North America in 1719. It tells the story of Naru, a young Comanche woman who longs to be a hunter like her brother, despite the expectation that she will follow in her mother's footsteps as a healer. But when a technologically advanced alien who hunts humans for sport lands near her home, Naru must protect her family by proving that she is the real predator.

Sequels and prequels are hard to pull off. You want to honor the original while doing something new, but you also don’t want to fall into the trap of trying to outdo the aspects of the original that already work. Often, in an attempt to “out Predator the Predator,” the sequels have ended up taking a wrong turn into bonkersville, making bigger and badder monsters that end up feeling cartoonish and flat, like in Robert Rodriguez’s Predators, or they pit Predator against a bigger and badder foe, like in Alien vs. Predator, which just turns the movie into something more akin to a PvP videogame than a movie.

The creators of Prey did not fall prey—I am on a roll—to any of these traps. Instead, they remembered the wisdom of all good sequels and, frankly, all good fiction:

It’s all about character.

Prey works because it is grounded in Naru’s very personal predicament. Add to that Amber Midthunder and Dakota Beavers’ stellar performances, Dan Trachtenberg’s direction, and the near-perfect balance of historical realism, sci-fi action, and horror, and you’ve got a really special film on your hands.

All these elements working in concert with one another show why Prey is superior to Predator. In the original film, the first 30 minutes get kind of stale after a while. The story of the commandos on a mission in the jungle primarily exists to show how badass they all are (that and their sleeveless, flexing biceps), thus heightening the fear when the Predator dispatches them one by one with relative ease. As for who the characters are, the original doesn’t really care. It’s man vs. monster, Predator vs. Prey. And by the end, Arnold and the Predator both rid themselves of their tools and fight mano a mano. We don’t know anything about Arnold’s wants and needs when the film begins. But honestly, I don’t really care. He’s Arnold. And he’s been dropped in a shark tank. And I want to see him claw his way out.

If there’s any real takeaway from the original, it’s this:

Guns are stupid, and booby traps are awesome.

Prey does all the things that Predator does, but grounds it with a parallel conflict within our main character so that defeating the Predator also means overcoming her internal struggle. It’s trial by fire, kill or be killed. And the stakes are higher than just her own life.

Nowadays, we are wading through seemingly endless fields of sequels, reboots, and prequels of varying quality. So it is refreshing to find one that rises above the GMO crops and grows something original from familiar ground.

So what are you waiting for? Go watch Prey!

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