The woke predator

Appears to be. I had to get very creative to watch it.

Yup, but he has spewed anti-"woke" nonsense like this before, so this doesn't really come as any surprise. Anyway, as for the movie itself, I'm going to try to watch it this Wednesday, so I'll report back here with some thoughts on it, if I have any.

This was one of my biggest gripes too.

__________________

Yeah, it’s always that ridiculous Amazon-type parthenogenesis feminist utopia. But then I also feel that’s 100 per cent intentional with these types of films, in the sense of, But that would be of course subtly pushing the opposite message, ie that women aren’t actually that capable, and hence be labelled misogynistic. Which is a shame as it’d be interesting to see.

Isn't it safe to assume that the Predator would've gotten to the tribe anyway? I mean, even before she starts her whole "quest", we can see the Predator in the area stalking them while sizing everybody up.

__________________

Ya know, I don't really care if it's woke or not, I'm just tired of endless unnecessary sequels to very old properties and I think especially Alien, Predator, and Fast and Furious should go to bed now.

They should do a woke Sleeping Beauty!
(get it?)

Or Sleepless in Seattle, The Big Sleep, etc.

It's not a gender issue it's a cliche issue when you see the same movies that have the same things to say 40-50 times a year you really grow to hate them. I grew up with movies that starred Jamie Lee Curtis, Jodie Foster, and Sigourney Weaver. My favorite shows growing up where Murphy Brown, Murder She Wrote, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

So also have something fairly contemptuous when you do these political films. You have this idea that you can't criticize the unlikable one dimensional characters because of a message of representation. Representation isn't about just putting someone out there to appease a group of people...it's about making characters that people will remember 20 years from now.

In Predator you knew all the characters as they got slaughtered one by one. Prey didn't do that we just got a couple action set pieces...where everything moved to quick so we didn't get that quality gore. The film makers could have done a lot with the fur trappers but they just existed to be murdered. You had a lot of good stuff in this film had they just shown restraint they could have had a classic.

True, but would it have necessarily killed all men and pointedly let the women survive? Possibly, if the women stayed in the caves hiding and the men went to fight, but we have the exact opposite message here and the same result: all men dead. I don’t know, maybe you’re right, and everyone just always dies apart from the final whoever. I don’t know.

If you're out and about in "hunting" mode, you're prey. If you're not, the thing moves on to something else. The predator is on a thrill-kill Safari hunt and is shown to be happily moving on from one target to another. "Cool, a wolf!" It does not engage with that which is not perceived to be a threat (as we see in the present movie) and the film series has established that predators have sporting ethics (e.g., not killing pregnant women). Our predator is a Dexter--it kills killers. It does not kill everything it surveys and is quite happy to move on to the next target. If the girl hadn't been tangled in his bear kill, the predator would have likely moved on to the French trappers who were in massacre-mode with buffalo. The French already knew about the beast, indicating that they were already engaged with it before the girl popped on it's thermal vision under a bear. If the tribe had all gone home to the village, it seems likely that they would have been passed over.

We can't know the above to a certainty, but what we do know is that the girl seeks the thing out after the lion hunt, putting her and those sent to retrieve her on the beast's radar. She learns how to kill the thing by blundering into getting all her tribesmen killed in an egoistic quest to be recognized as a hunter.

In terms of thematic properties, boys die to make space for girls; we do not see integration in the tribal hierarchy, but elimination. The circle of membership has not expanded. The others in the circle have been removed. Lumping-by-splitting just leaves you with the same problem on the other side of the overbalanced scale, so this is a dubious thing if we're meant to be celebrating girl-power here. Is this "the way"? If this is intended as a comment on gender equality, it is a questionable kind of inclusion that results in exclusion (e.g., we're still desperate to champion girls in higher ed, when they're now about 60% of the population, but it's hard to talk about boys being left behind without being suspected of some modern heresy).

On the other hand, if this is just intended as a the old "last man standing"/"final girl" trope, this simple mirrors the first film in which Dutch establishes his badassness by surviving what his team of badasses could not. Under either reading, however, the tribe -- that thing which has inscribed her as "hunter" -- that matrix in which she wishes to do her social climbing -- has been struck a considerable blow -- and this leaves the "Ooorah!" celebration at the end feeling hollow.

We get the admiring nod from a ten-year-old native girl with the Star Wars "hurrah" ending (she too can see herself as agentic, right? Inspiring, eh?), but with seemingly all the young men in the village dead(!!!), she's going to need to be inspired. They're not living in a faceless city where there's always a new person who can be plugged into a role in a corporate machine. They're living close to the ground, quite literally. Everyone has an important role (which is part of the reason for those pesky social rules). This tribe will struggle to survive (they've lost hunters, warriors, scouts, husbands), as they just lost a generation of boys.

I think there are a lot of fair points being made, even if I think character expectations for a scifi/slasher(?) film are a little high.

This movie is tight. 90 minutes and it doesn’t drag in the slightest. The Batman, as much as I like it, verged on being insufferable because of the runtime. It seems disingenuous to me to demand fleshed out characters who only serve to have their flesh turned inside out. Isn’t part of the burden on the viewer to suspend belief in order to make the sausage?

As far as the tribe, there’s a good chance they got slaughtered. The end-credit slide show depicts the Yajuta descending on the tribe and them looking up in surprise/terror. Fair to say we know how they got the pistol gifted to Danny Glover.

I skipped that bit. Ferris Bueller was cute, but I hate that you have to watch all the end credits of every film now, just in case. They've tricked us into eating our vegetables!

I simply never bother. Find out what I missed here/elsewhere.

https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/prey_2022

At 93% on RT the film really shouldn't have dodgy FX and script problems. That's another one of my issues when reviewers are dishonest.

It would also be seen as unthinkable to do the opposite, ie have a ton of (that is, all) the group’s women be killed and the men react by celebrating a “successful hunt”. Sure, we might not have an emotional display in a genre film, the men might all go have a moody drink or something, but I can’t quite fathom a happy drinking spree with strippers on the occasion of all the group’s females having perished.

Again, I feel like if the film had embraced the slightly dark/morbid/absurd/self-defeating nature of this, it would have benefitted from that: the women can defeat the Predator better than the men (in this universe, whatever we make of that), but they absolutely cannot run a functional camp/society that can procreate/endure. But again, that’d be flying too close to the sun.

Well, what's so bad about it?

But 93% doesn't mean that the film is 93% "almost excellent"; just that the majority of the reviewers had a positive reaction to it. That reaction could've ranged from "It was great!" to "It's good, but the CGI is dodgy".

Personally, I didn't have any issues with the CGI, though.

The obviousness of it.



The inevitability of it.



The anachronism of it.

I wonder if they're dishonest or if expectations have just become incredibly low.

I will concede to some of the dialogue being bad, but I think they were trying to stay true to the heritage of the franchise 😋

The cgi issues, I don’t really get. Are there moments where we fall into an uncanny valley? Ab-So-Lutely. So, we know the problem, what’s the solution. More money, more time? This movie wasn’t getting made under those terms. This franchise was a failed state that was given little more than a green light, probably in order to maintain the rights.

Disney buys FOX and now they’ve got a violent film, that they don’t really have a solid grasp on how to fold into the brand. But they see the potential. This isn’t a Batgirl. It’s a solid movie that they probably got by absorbing debt that will get written off anyways.

I get people not liking the movie. The bad dialogue. The social issues stuff, if that’s your lean. But judging the local high-school junior varsity (streaming movie) versus the expectations of a NFL team (big budget tentpole), seems to be arguing in bad faith.

There have been plenty of $200mil Marvel and Netflix movies with lacking cgi.