- Directed by Dan Trachtenberg
- Written by Patrick Aison, Dan Trachtenber, Jim Thomas
- Stars Amber Midthunder, Dakota Beavers, Dane DiLiegro
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 39 Minutes
- Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ7LytagKlc
Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone
This was a really well-made prequel to the Predator movies. It’s simultaneously authentic-looking and believable and far-fetched. But the cast is excellent, the effects are mostly great, and it’s really entertaining.
Synopsis
We are told, “A long time ago, a monster came here.”
The Northern Great Plains, 1719
Naru wakes up in her tent. She’s a Comanche living in the woods with her people. We see that she’s really good at throwing a tomahawk. She’s out hunting a white tail deer when there’s a loud sound that spooks the deer. Her dog gets his tail stuck in a trap, but she releases the dog. The strange noise continues, and she watches as an alien spaceship comes down through the clouds. Credits roll.
Naru tells her brother Taabe about the “Thunderbird sign in the sky” and wants to hunt something that’s hunting her; it’s a kind of coming-of-age task for their people. Naru and her mother prepare food and medicine for the war chief’s bad knee. All Naru wants to do is hunt, mostly because everyone says she can’t.
Elsewhere, we see the Predator’s spaceship take off into the sky, leaving one of them behind.
One of the men soon goes missing, and the rest go out looking for him. They find the missing man, and it looks like a mountain lion got him. As night falls, they build a litter while Naru applies medicine. Naru wonders why he’s still alive. Did something scare away the lion? She finds strange tracks, bigger than a bear and like nothing she’s ever seen. Taabe tells Naru that this could be her test; the mountain lion is hunting her now.
Paaka boasts about being a great hunter, but then the mountain lion jumps him from off-screen. Naru falls out of the tree and has to be carried back to their camp. Taabe eventually returns to camp carrying the dead lion. Naru says something else is out there, but Taabe isn’t worried.
The next morning, Naru slips out of the camp in search of whatever’s out there. We watch the predator kill a snake and a wolf and take trophies. Naru comes across a whole field full of dead, skinned buffalos. She also finds a cigar, which means it wasn’t the predator. Not long after, the predator finds the buffalos and the cigar. Naru falls into quicksand but manages to pull herself free.
Naru then runs across an awful-cgi bear who chases her and her dog for a while. When the bear hears strange clicking noises, he loses interest in Naru and fights something invisible. The bear loses badly, but Naru gets a good look at what killed it. She runs across several men from her tribe, and she says she saw a creature that looked like a mupitsl, something from a children’s story. She wants to fight, but the others drag her home… with the Predator silently following. She tells them the thing is following them, but they don’t believe her– until they do.
On her own again, she runs from the predator into the tall grass, where she once again hears the clicking noise. She gets caught in another animal trap and has to free herself as the predator closes in. Four French-speaking men find her first and take her prisoner.
Naru wakes up in a cage in the trapper’s camp. She realizes that they are the ones who killed all the buffalo and have been setting traps. They want to know about the creature too. She sees that they have also captured Taabe, and they’re torturing him. Later, the two find themselves tied to a tree as bait for the monster. The two trappers in front soon notice that all the hunters behind them have been silently killed.
Naru and Taabe hear the screams of the white men as they die. The Frenchmen catch the thing in a bear trap and a net, but that’s not quite enough to do the trick. The predator finds creative ways to kill many humans.
Everyone takes a break to patch their wounds. One of the Frenchmen tells Naru how to use a gun in exchange for patching up his lost leg.
Taabe returns and knocks the Predator’s helmet off, but only for a minute. It’s long enough for Naru to see how it targets and shoots automatically. Taabe and Naru fight with the monster as Naru tries to figure out the gun. Taabe is killed, and the monster decloaks, as Naru runs away.
Naru comes across Big Beard, one of the trappers who abused her, and she knocks him out. She uses him as bait this time. She takes her temperature-reducing drug and walks right up behind the Predator and shoots him from behind. She runs off with his helmet. She lures him under a tree, jumps down on him, and starts walloping and chopping. She continues the battle with the now-heavily-wounded creature. She eventually knocks him into the quicksand, and he’s gone.
No, he isn’t. He rises up and raises his weapon right at her. She, however, has set up his helmet, which is still automatically targeting threats, which he has just become by brandishing a weapon. His head explodes.
Next morning, Naru walks into camp carrying the monster’s head and trapper’s gun. The old chief makes her the new War Chief.
Commentary
Before we started, Kevin asked is this horror? Really? It’s about an unstoppable monster in the woods picking off innocents, one by one. Yes, it’s part of an action movie franchise. Taking the film on its own, it definitely has all the elements of horror.
The CGI bear is really atrocious for 2022. The predator, on the other hand, was really well done.
I’ve seen debates on the feminist aspect of the film, and it’s obviously there, but it’s not so overwhelming that it detracts from the action.
Never have so many people been so outclassed by one creature. Having seen the other movies in the series, I can see the challenge in fighting modern humans, but these guys presented no challenge at all. I don’t see the value for the alien hunter here. I could kill ants all day long, but I wouldn’t call it hunting or take trophies.
We see early on that Naru’s medicine makes people cold. The wounded man with the mountain lion got it first; then, the injured translator mentioned he felt cold. When Naru took the drug, it made her cold enough that the Predator’s infra-red couldn’t pick her up. I don’t know how realistic that all is, but it’s established in the story.
Oh, and the dog survives too.