Prey

Originally published on Letterboxd on 05/08/22

A little too slick and formally perfunctory for my liking, but this is very competently constructed for the most part. There's an all-too-rare tactility in the action here that imbues skirmishes with genuine weight and consequence, in spite of the formula for Predator films being pretty well-established.

The way in which the film's environments are presented as a series of balances and exchanges disrupted by the arrival of the predator is an obvious spatializaton of the colonial allegory, but beyond the paper-thin thematic allusions, this presentation of the environment also creates a sort of rhythm to the action as a collection of successive improvisations using elements of the woodland. In a similar vein, the establishing of the Predator as a hunter here is particularly effective because of how its invisibility is reconfigured as not a tool of defense but as something imbuing it with nigh-supernatural potency, ripping apart the food chain effortlessly.

It's a shame that the geography of its action seems like a relative afterthought (especially compared to PWSA's mapping of ancient, labyrinthine passages in Alien vs. Predator), because this is otherwise the sort of sturdy, journeyman-borne craftsmanship that seems almost extinct in virtually any other franchise.