Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Prey’ On Hulu, A Thrilling Prequel Addition To The Venerable ‘Predator’ Franchise

Between 1987 and 2018, the original Arnold Schwarzenegger-starring Predator spawned three direct sequels and two spinoffs into crossover territory that featured the titular mandibled space hunter grappling with the acid blood xenomorphs from the Alien franchise. Prey (Hulu), its first prequel, brings the whole bit back to basics: there are hunters, and they become the hunted. Prey was directed by Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Lane), who also developed the story with producer and original Predator creator John Davis. 

PREY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Since she was a child, Naru (Amber Midthunder) has trained as a tracker and hunter alongside her older brother Taabe (Dakota Beavers), despite those skills being the traditional province of males in her Comanche band. Naru gathers wood for the cooking fires, and hones her medicinal skills alongside her mother (Michelle Thrush). But she also sharpens her tomahawk and practices the bow. One day, during an impromptu chase of a deer with her trusty dog Sarii, Naru witnesses a disturbance in the sky. “A sign,” she tells Taabe. “A thunderbird. I’ve been practicing. It’s time for my kuhtaamia.” What Naru saw wasn’t a thunderbird, of course, but a spacecraft leaving earth’s atmosphere. The Predator (Dane DiLiegro) has arrived to do some hunting of its own. It’s 1719 on the northern Great Plains of what is now America.

As the Predator activates its active camouflage and toys with a few minor food chain members of the animal kingdom, Naru tries to convince the band’s young warriors that their wounded comrade wasn’t slashed by a mountain lion. She measures the considerable width of a bizarre footprint, and discovers evidence of French fur trappers operating in the area. Naru also ashions a rope from the bark of a pine tree, the better to expand her range with the tomahawk. She’s gonna need it. When she accidentally flushes a grizzly bear and is chased into a mess of branches along the river, she and the grizz witness the full force of the Predator’s hunting prowess.

The French have become aware of the creature, too, and are committed to trapping and killing it. They also capture Naru and her brother, as well as Sarii, and confine them in their camp before deciding to use the Comanches as bait against their new foe. By now, Naru has gathered some valuable intel on how the Predator hunts, and she knows the trappers’ plan is full of holes. “It doesn’t want bait,” she tells Taabe as they’re shackled to a tree. “It doesn’t hunt that way.” The Predator also doesn’t have to worry about taking shots from the trappers’ volleying Pennsylvania rifles. If you’ve ever tried to reload one of those while the bloodthirsty eight-foot-tall intergalactic killer your bullets have just agitated leers at you over the blades of its two-sided spear, you’ll understand the notion of being under-equipped.

In the end, it’s human ingenuity that’s employed against earth’s newest hunter, and the technology of an even older world.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Obviously there are plenty of Predator films to choose from. But Prey is the first outing in the franchise to fully understand how simple and effective the original premise was. It cuts away anything extraneous, and gives the singular acts of stalk, hunt, and conquest their due. In that, it’s aligned most with the 1987 original.

Performance Worth Watching: Amber Midthunder (Legion, Roswell, New Mexico) is terrific here as Naru. She’s at home in the silence of the forest, listening and watching. But she can also deliver a gibe in two languages, outwit an extra-terrestrial raised in a culture of hunter-killers, and fight off five or six french murderous trappers with a pilfered dagger and her rope-fed tomahawk.

Memorable Dialogue: “If it bleeds, we can kill it.” Prey is proud to link directly back to the franchise’s earliest moments, building the bold actions of the Comanche warriors against the Predator off one of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best lines in Predator.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Once blood starts being spilled in earnest – and be honest, that’s why everyone has always watched these films – Prey reveals a slew of remarkably staged fight sequences that engage with the Predator’s traditional equipment in interesting new ways. “I couldn’t see it until it was covered in blood,” Naru tells the other Comanche warriors, “but it looked like – like a mupitsl.” What else but a monster from a children’s story would an individual living in the 18th century equate with seeing a creature’s true shape only after it kills an animal and gallons of blood distort its technologically advanced active camouflage? And when confronted themselves, those warriors don’t stand pat. They fire arrows into the Predator’s flesh, drawing its infamous fluorescent blood, and deploy ancient methods of big game hunting against its superior firepower. And as for those pesky French, what seems like a great plan – employing their own advanced technology, that of a trap’s clamping iron jaws – only results in a visceral series of bloody takedowns by a battered Predator that’s still very much in the fight. And besides, it carries an instant wound cauterizer in its wrist gauntlet. Very handy when some guy in a tricorn hat is firing at you with his creaky flintlock pistol.

And speaking of flintlock pistols, the weapons and encounters of this era are woven into the larger narrative of the Predator franchise, which is that the creature who hunted Schwarzenegger and his crew in the jungles of Central America certainly wasn’t the only Predator earth had ever seen. Other films in the series have handled this in less subtle ways. But it’s with tact and a nod to how legends get created that Prey finds its truest connection. “A long time ago,” Naru says in voiceover as forested ridges unfold to the horizon, “a monster came here.”

Our Call: STREAM IT. Prey returns the Predator franchise to what made it great to begin with, incorporating the classic tactics and weapons of its titular galactic hunter against an inspiring, game new quarry.