Prey

It was comic books that first brought together the Alien and Predator universes. That was at Dark Horse, the publisher whose creator-led titles from Hellboy to Harvey Pekar. Though there's maybe not 300 original horses in their stable there are a fair few, and for every thoroughbred like Sin City there's a tie-in that owes more to Wall Street than Sacred Oaks.

They had licensed comics featuring the Alien, the Predator, the Terminator. They even adapted Timecop. Comics had already seen the 'direct' market through comic book shops overtake newstand sales and Dark Horse was part of fundamental changes in how movies merchandised across media. What might have been an Easter Egg from one author was golden goose to another.

Predator 2 put a xenomorph skull on a trophy wall and gave camera canon to what had fermenting in nerdier spaces. It also cast the knucklebones towards a series of sequels for those three science fictional monsters that hit a high point with Terminator 2 and then experienced ever diminishing returns. I won't re-legislate which outings across Weylan(d)-Yutani, Yautja, and Cyberdyne are worthwhile, oddly enough, it's even harder to keep track of than Star Trek. What is easier to say is that across that mixed bag it's possible for good work to slip through the net.

That includes Prey. Predators took after Aliens in a few ways, including unified antagonists against a disparate and disunited group of humans. It built on what had gone before rather than repeating it, though dialogue repetition can tend to fan service through photocopying. Prey does much the same, taking the bones of Predator and putting new flesh on them.

Amber Midthunder is Naru, of the Comanche, before the Pueblo Revolt that brought horses to the West in numbers. She is coming of age, across various frontiers and borders. She hopes for a rite of passage to declare herself a hunter, but there is something out there that is hunting too.

It's a thrill ride in much the same way that Predator was, though set centuries before. That precursor status means it can have some bits of fun, elements of its Predator's design reflect pre-production concept drawings for the first film's foe. That's past replicating past, and with foreknowledge of both franchise and history there's foreboding from it.

The predator is not the only hunter, nor is Naru, nor her band. Just as Dark Horse sought to extract creative value from every part of a property others sought the big wins, surfaces stripped and what was left becoming rotten. Grist for the mill of complaints about sequels, also among the starker images of Prey. It was a different franchise that remarked upon something being a trap, but the snap of conclusion is as iconic here. James Cameron was involved in Predator, he'd made a suggestion to special effects wizard Stan Winston about mandibles and the jaws of the Predator were set. It's other teeth that grab here, but no less effectively. Prey is very careful about setting up its schemes, a trait it shares with the best outings of the trio of implacable biomechanicals.

Director Dan Trachtenberg will shortly be returning to the franchise, rooted in the crossover it reframes a Predator as protagonist. It was in anticipation of Badlands that I went to catch Prey, and I regret not doing it sooner. What felt like it might be homework as is sometimes the case with the MCU or adjacent universes was more a homecoming. Prey catches the spark of Predator in a way that other sequels often don't, haven't, won't. He first came to wide attention with 10 Cloverfield Lane, and its unseen menace is well replicated here. He co-writes with Patrick Aison, who has penned later entries in multimedia series involved Jason Bourne and Jack Ryan. Jim Thomas has a credit too, he wrote the first but despite some ambitious aerial antics the weight of Wild Wild West means he's now really only seen prefaced by 'characters created by'.

Prey is most successful because it treats the Predator as a proper movie monster, one with rules, and one in counter to men. The aliens aren't the villain in Aliens after all, the bad guy wears a tie. When The Diamonds were listing silver-screen smooch-starters in "Batman, Wolfman, Frankenstein or Dracula" they included "a monster from outer space", and 70 years on their table of terror still stands. Prey is not only a satisfying film in itself but a highpoint across a trio of inter-related franchises. Tracking it down is made easier because of streaming, and consider it a hook for the next one.

Reviewed on: 13 Oct 2025