Prey
POSTED BY: Brenda
UPDATED: Saturday, May 25, 2024 22:07
VIEWED: 1302
PAGE 2 of 3
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
I tried to not be spoilery as you said and whozit said that you hadn't seen it. I've been waiting to find a copy at my local library and you can see the whys of that.
I'll also mention there is the usual family dynamics going on. Her mother taught her about making medicine and is worried about her. Her older brother doesn't think she is right but finally has to give in. Also normal. Just life and just being who she is and that was accepted by her people.
Sounds good to me. I'm pretty much sold on it.
Thanks for bringing it up.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Just looked into it and it was made by 20th Century Studios and it was released on Hulu and Disney+ with no theatrical release outside of a screening at the San Diego Comic Con in 2022.
Apparently Disney only wanted to release bad movies in the theaters in 2022 as well.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
I tried to not be spoilery as you said and whozit said that you hadn't seen it. I've been waiting to find a copy at my local library and you can see the whys of that.
I'll also mention there is the usual family dynamics going on. Her mother taught her about making medicine and is worried about her. Her older brother doesn't think she is right but finally has to give in. Also normal. Just life and just being who she is and that was accepted by her people.
Sounds good to me. I'm pretty much sold on it.
Thanks for bringing it up.
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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.
You are most welcome.
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So I watched it...
It was enjoyable enough. Better than AvP and whatever other Aliens and/or Predator movies I've seen post Predator II or Alien: Resurrection, for sure.
Here's my thoughts on it. (*****SPOILER WARNING AHEAD******).
PROS:
1. The setting and cinematography. I thought it was filmed beautifully, and I love going back to the wildlife setting in a Predator movie.
2. The early Native American perspective was a nice change of pace, along with the French trappers who were only slightly more advanced technologically over them compared to the Predator. Unlike the AvP style garbage where we live in a world where top scientist and government types are well aware of all of this, you're thrust back into a world where we don't know shit about anything and this "should" be terrifying.
3. I liked the acting well enough, although I don't think that they were really given too much to work with script wise.
CONS:
1. The sub-titles. Not sure if I just got bad ones or not, but I don't like it when there are foreign languages being used and the subtitles are not in English. It didn't happen too often in the movie, but there were enough scenes where you just have to assume you know what they're talking about based off of the situation and their reactions alone. I also found it jarring that all the Natives spoke crystal clear English most of the movie, except for when they didn't.
2. The Predator is a dick. At least in the newer movies the humans have some sort of way of fighting back, but this Predator was basically just taking a shotgun and shooting an aquarium to smithereens with it. Although they did tone down the capabilities of the Predators somewhat in this movie, the gap between what defenses the humans had against the Predator was amplified by 100 times.
And I do understand that it could be interesting to show that maybe the Predator's arsenal was quite a bit weaker 200-300 years earlier than the original movies, but it's not very convincing when you consider they're still capable of interstellar travel and they have cloaking technology. I'm really not buying that instead of having high powered explosive laser weaponry from the first few movies that he's got nothing but ordinary bolts to fire out here. It is possible that this isn't true and the Predator chose to outfit themselves with inferior weaponry because of how primitive everyone on earth was a, but that isn't hinted at. Although, to be fair, given the nature of these movies I don't know how you really could get that point across even if you wanted to.
3. It was a little too "Girl Power" for my tastes. And I really did try to go into this with as much as an open mind as I could.
In the beginning, my first warning signs on this issue were everyone in her tribe telling her she couldn't hunt, which is basically every flashback Carol Danvers has in Captain Marvel.
The next warning signs were, just after showing how skilled the men in the tribe could hunt when they showed her older brother effortlessly shoot down a hawk that looked to be over a mile or two away with an arrow, they spend the 2nd act of the movie making her look great by making all the hunting males in her tribe lower-double-digit-IQ levels of stupid. I felt they dumbed them down so much that there was no reasonable expectation for the audience to believe this tribe could even have survived on its own against real wildlife, let alone defend against an alien hunting them. Not only that, but then the scene where she wouldn't go home and the men in her tribe started beating the shit out of her to get her to go home. I don't believe for a second that they would have done that to one of their own women in the first place since especially back in the 1700's women were a prized commodity for a tribe, but again, they had her beating one of her own back so hard he couldn't even talk right when she got through with him. This is supposed to be on
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I honestly feel bad that I appear to have killed this conversation.
:(
I didn't hate the movie or anything.
And really my review wasn't meant as a hardcore slight against it, or me telling other people simply not to watch it because it wasn't worth watching. It brought positives to the table as well as my perceived negatives.
I think everybody else probably should give this a watch. Maybe I'm just full of shit and I'm too sensitive about certain things.
I'm sure there's truth to that. Anybody who's read any of my various walls of text in the Cinema thread knows that I hardly ever take any time to actually watch most movies or TV shows. Not just the ones that have come out in recent years. It's like I subconsciously feel like I'm getting myself into a commitment that I don't want to get into unless I'm absolutely sure I'm going to enjoy the experience, so most times I just don't watch.
And I think I kind of pride myself on watching only good things because I choose so little to watch, even though this isn't true and I'd say that only about 60 to 70% of things I've watched in the last 5 or so year's I'd rate between pretty great and excellent. I've seen plenty of things that have let me down and even a pure turd or two along the way. When something doesn't blow my mind I'm salty at myself for the choice I made.
I was positive that I'd love Dream Scenario, and my reaction to it was such a letdown for me. But somebody else could watch it and love it the way I had hoped to. Maybe I should watch it again...
I watched it with my dad the first time, and even though we both wanted to see it I just sometimes get that feeling that I'm responsible for putting somebody else through a bad movie if it isn't immediately apparent it will be a great watch. That feeling alone could be negatively tainting my perception of the Dream Scenario. Maybe I missed something important along the way because I was too inside my own head. It's got a lot of things happening at once. It certainly made you think while you were watching it. Maybe I watch Dream Scenario a second time and I end up loving it?
... and then I remember that I actually got angry after watching The Witch and hating that movie when it was highly recommended by somebody who's sensibilities seemed to align with my own and who's opinion I respected when it came to cinema.
What made it worse for me, and due in no part to the person who made the recommendation, is that I made my brother sit through it. He loves horror movies and even though I don't care much for them, we watch a few together off of his recommendation whenever he's in town, just because I know that it's something he enjoys doing. Some of his horror movies are actually pretty decent, but his bar for enjoying them is much, much lower than mine is. The last time he was here I told him I'd watch a horror movie he wanted me to watch, but we'd watch The Witch the next night, and that's what we did. But those accents were hard to follow and next to impossible to understand without subtitles at some points. My brother has issues with subtitles and I didn't even think to put them on because of him, and I think we both just ended up missing half the meaning of the movie because of it.
But after my feelings on the initial view of the movie subsided, at some point I watched a deep dive video into the meaning of The Witch by a creator I'd never heard of before. And something pretty strange happened. I really enjoyed being led through that movie a second time, with a guide who pointed out things to me that I had missed along the way. It was as if it were a completely different movie than I remembered watching and disliking. I still haven't gotten around to watching The Witch a second time, but I know that I will and I hope to get a lot more out of it, and I'm definitely going to have the subtitles on this time.
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SIX, apology accepted and you were in my opinion being hard on the film.
Not all the young men were from what I could see were killed. Just the ones that went out hunting the cat and ended up finding the predator.
I do also feel that you discounted Naru because she was a girl. As I said Comanche women could be warriors which is what she wanted to be. She tried to help the trappers when they encountered the predator as well. Offering medicine to one of them.
Now, I'm not saying that I would watch it a second time either but I can't throw it out.
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Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
SIX, apology accepted and you were in my opinion being hard on the film.
Well... It was an apology directly to you as well as anybody else who participated in the discussion so far. I'm pretty sure it wasn't much of an apology to the movie though.
Quote:
Not all the young men were from what I could see were killed. Just the ones that went out hunting the cat and ended up finding the predator.
That could be true. I wasn't watching it on a big screen TV, so if there were other young men that didn't die I just didn't notice them. I can't recall seeing any men at all in the final scene when she was back with the tribe except for one of the two elders though.
Quote:
I do also feel that you discounted Naru because she was a girl.
Well I can assure you that I didn't and that's not where my complaints about her stem from. I do want to make that clear. I realize that you're being very nice about how you say that, but for years I've been hearing that if I don't like a movie with a strong female lead it's because I'm a misogynist or I just straight up hate women. This has always been an extremely unfair assessment of reality whenever those words have been spoken or put into print.
I absolutely loved the Fallout TV show, and the main person with the most screentime is Lucy. She got herself out of a lot of scrapes too, but there was never a point during the show where I felt it was unearned or beyond belief. And that's despite the fact that she was a wide-eyed, naive, weak little thing in the beginning compared to where Naru already was the first time we meet her.
I think Predator is really hard to do right too. Let's be honest here... by all rights, every character we met in that movie should have been dead at the end of it.
Right off the bat it's hard to believe that a 90 lb girl with a short bow and an ancient gun could somehow kill and sever the head of a vastly technologically advanced alien 3 times her size when an entire group of roided out, highly trained military men including Arnold Schwezenegger and Carl Weathers in their prime didn't survive. It didn't even matter that they had in their possession a Gatling gun that was capable of cutting down an entire forest.
Quote:
As I said Comanche women could be warriors which is what she wanted to be. She tried to help the trappers when they encountered the predator as well. Offering medicine to one of them.
I don't have a problem with the story of a woman warrior, or the fact she wanted to be one. But it does beg the question though, that if Comanche women were allowed to be warriors, why did they go so far out of their way in the first half of the movie to make it VERY clear to the audience that nobody else in her tribe wanted her to be one, including the older women in the tribe?
Just make a movie where Naru is a warrior and let her lead by example. Just show the audience a woman who is strong and already has the respect of her peers and the elders of her tribe because she's already earned that respect off-screen before we meet her. And then all you have to do is make sure you don't make stuff happen on screen that the audience isn't going to believe is possible.
There isn't any need to put those #MeToo-era politics in there. There isn't any reason to clog up half the runtime of a Predator franchise movie with that. There's plenty of great examples of strong, believable, female characters that predate this movie by decades that didn't spend a single second of their time worrying about what The Patriarchy thinks of them and their choices. They're were just people who happened to be women that were bad ass by nature and unapologetic about it. Nobody asked questions about it. We just saw it and we believed it.
I just felt that because they chose to do the story this way and highlight the "struggle" she had as "a woman tryin
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
SIX, apology accepted and you were in my opinion being hard on the film.
Well... It was an apology directly to you as well as anybody else who participated in the discussion so far. I'm pretty sure it wasn't much of an apology to the movie though.Quote:
Not all the young men were from what I could see were killed. Just the ones that went out hunting the cat and ended up finding the predator.
That could be true. I wasn't watching it on a big screen TV, so if there were other young men that didn't die I just didn't notice them. I can't recall seeing any men at all in the final scene when she was back with the tribe except for one of the two elders though.Quote:
I do also feel that you discounted Naru because she was a girl.
Well I can assure you that I didn't and that's not where my complaints about her stem from. I do want to make that clear. I realize that you're being very nice about how you say that, but for years I've been hearing that if I don't like a movie with a strong female lead it's because I'm a misogynist or I just straight up hate women. This has always been an extremely unfair assessment of reality whenever those words have been spoken or put into print.
I absolutely loved the Fallout TV show, and the main person with the most screentime is Lucy. She got herself out of a lot of scrapes too, but there was never a point during the show where I felt it was unearned or beyond belief. And that's despite the fact that she was a wide-eyed, naive, weak little thing in the beginning compared to where Naru already was the first time we meet her.
I think Predator is really hard to do right too. Let's be honest here... by all rights, every character we met in that movie should have been dead at the end of it.
Right off the bat it's hard to believe that a 90 lb girl with a short bow and an ancient gun could somehow kill and sever the head of a vastly technologically advanced alien 3 times her size when an entire group of roided out, highly trained military men including Arnold Schwezenegger and Carl Weathers in their prime didn't survive. It didn't even matter that they had in their possession a Gatling gun that was capable of cutting down an entire forest.Quote:
As I said Comanche women could be warriors which is what she wanted to be. She tried to help the trappers when they encountered the predator as well. Offering medicine to one of them.
I don't have a problem with the story of a woman warrior, or the fact she wanted to be one. But it does beg the question though, that if Comanche women were allowed to be warriors, why did they go so far out of their way in the first half of the movie to make it VERY clear to the audience that nobody else in her tribe wanted her to be one, including the older women in the tribe?
Just make a movie where Naru is a warrior and let her lead by example. Just show the audience a woman who is strong and already has the respect of her peers and the elders of her tribe because she's already earned that respect off-screen before we meet her. And then all you have to do is make sure you don't make stuff happen on screen that the audience isn't going to believe is possible.
There isn't any need to put those #MeToo-era politics in there. There isn't any reason to clog up half the runtime of a Predator franchise movie with that. There's plenty of great examples of strong, believable, female characters that predate this movie by decades that didn't spend a single second of their time worrying about what The Patriarchy thinks of them and their choices. They're were just people who happened to be women that were bad ass by nature and unapologetic about it. Nobody asked questions about it. We just saw it and we believed it.
I just felt that because they chose to do the story this way and highlight the &quoNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
I wouldn't worry about apologizing to the movie.
Okay, good. I have never worried about the feelings of a movie before, but I do care about your opinion.
Quote:
There were a couple of young men but mostly buried in the back. I had to look for them. You are right the elders were out in front.
Okay. I will take your word for it. I didn't have my Analytical Hat on to that extent while watching the movie. Nobody jumped out at me at all other than the elders and the little girl who looked up at Naru in awe when she was made war chief, which I'm sure was the intent of the scene as it was filmed.
You would probably know a lot more about tribal life than I would, as I know just about zero and I'm just assuming that you know about your people's history. (I should point that out as being an assumption, since I'm a European mutt myself and I know just about zero history of any of the blood running in my veins)...
What do you think was the "status" of the existing battle-age males of the tribe? Why weren't they themselves hunters? Are they capable at all of hunting and/or learning how to hunt? Was there something wrong with them that they weren't part of the hunting party? Would they be capable of defending the tribe from outsiders now that the hunting party were all killed outside of Naru?
I know it ruins a lot of movies and TV Shows for me, but these are the types of questions I ask when presented with a story. And I find myself imagining what a non-Predator sequel to Prey would look like. Unless Naru's tribe merged with a neutral or friendly local tribe to survive, I'd imagine they'd have to give Naru super powers in order to defend her tribe from rival tribes or the incoming European invaders on her own. Even though I didn't buy her victory over the Predator, there was admittedly a heavy element of luck on her side for it to have happened. And I don't think they tried to hide that luck factor, which is good because it added back some believably to the situation. But you're limited on how often you can throw down the luck card before losing your audience. In order to make a follow up movie or TV show centered around War Chief Naru who's tribe did not merge with another tribe for survival, she can't have that level of luck every single time she goes into battle on her own with other war chiefs or the European invaders that are threatening her tribe.
I think a follow up to what happens to Naru's tribe after the Predator could make a great story if it were written right.
Maybe a book idea for you after you get your first one published?
Quote:
I've never seen Fallout so I can't speak to it.
If you get a chance, you should check it out. I think you'd enjoy it and I'm curious to see what you would think of Lucy and it would better explain what I feel makes a great female character vs. a middling one.
Maybe you could even point out a part where I was being too easy on Lucy and giving her a pass on something I should have been calling out after giving Naru such a hard time.
Quote:
Her mother's worry about her was clear and after the brother brought her back to camp. I think that was what made her mother be so adamant that she not become a warrior but stick to medicine.
Yeah. And I get that. Of course a mother is going to want her child to be safe and not be reckless. It's not a ridiculous scene at all. Like I said, I'm probably just way over-sensitive about this stuff after they pushed it all for so long. I just see this and laugh because I'm sure I could make a video with clips of Prey and everyone telling Naru she shouldn't hunt and should stick to medicine right next to all the Captain Marvel flashbacks with all the men in her life telling her she'd never succeed because she's a woman.
Like... okay. We get it. Can we just go back to writi
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by Brenda:
I wouldn't worry about apologizing to the movie.
Okay, good. I have never worried about the feelings of a movie before, but I do care about your opinion.Quote:
There were a couple of young men but mostly buried in the back. I had to look for them. You are right the elders were out in front.
Okay. I will take your word for it. I didn't have my Analytical Hat on to that extent while watching the movie. Nobody jumped out at me at all other than the elders and the little girl who looked up at Naru in awe when she was made war chief, which I'm sure was the intent of the scene as it was filmed.
You would probably know a lot more about tribal life than I would, as I know just about zero and I'm just assuming that you know about your people's history. (I should point that out as being an assumption, since I'm a European mutt myself and I know just about zero history of any of the blood running in my veins)...
What do you think was the "status" of the existing battle-age males of the tribe? Why weren't they themselves hunters? Are they capable at all of hunting and/or learning how to hunt? Was there something wrong with them that they weren't part of the hunting party? Would they be capable of defending the tribe from outsiders now that the hunting party were all killed outside of Naru?
I know it ruins a lot of movies and TV Shows for me, but these are the types of questions I ask when presented with a story. And I find myself imagining what a non-Predator sequel to Prey would look like. Unless Naru's tribe merged with a neutral or friendly local tribe to survive, I'd imagine they'd have to give Naru super powers in order to defend her tribe from rival tribes or the incoming European invaders on her own. Even though I didn't buy her victory over the Predator, there was admittedly a heavy element of luck on her side for it to have happened. And I don't think they tried to hide that luck factor, which is good because it added back some believably to the situation. But you're limited on how often you can throw down the luck card before losing your audience. In order to make a follow up movie or TV show centered around War Chief Naru who's tribe did not merge with another tribe for survival, she can't have that level of luck every single time she goes into battle on her own with other war chiefs or the European invaders that are threatening her tribe.
I think a follow up to what happens to Naru's tribe after the Predator could make a great story if it were written right.
Maybe a book idea for you after you get your first one published?Quote:
I've never seen Fallout so I can't speak to it.
If you get a chance, you should check it out. I think you'd enjoy it and I'm curious to see what you would think of Lucy and it would better explain what I feel makes a great female character vs. a middling one.
Maybe you could even point out a part where I was being too easy on Lucy and giving her a pass on something I should have been calling out after giving Naru such a hard time.Quote:
Her mother's worry about her was clear and after the brother brought her back to camp. I think that was what made her mother be so adamant that she not become a warrior but stick to medicine.
Yeah. And I get that. Of course a mother is going to want her child to be safe and not be reckless. It's not a ridiculous scene at all. Like I said, I'm probably just way over-sensitive about this stuff after they pushed it all for so long. I just see this and laugh because I'm sure I could make a video with clips of Prey and everyone telling Naru she shouldn't hunt and should stick to medicine right next to all the Captain Marvel flashbacks with all the men in her life telling her she'd never succeed because she's a woman.
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