It would be a fairly hefty understatement to say the long history of the Predator franchise has been marked by inconsistency, but the early buzz surrounding Dan Trachtenberg’s impending Prey suggests we might finally be getting an action-packed hybrid of sci-fi and horror that lives up to the classic original.
It’s not from lack of trying, though, with Stephen Hopkins’ underrated Predator 2 moving the action to a concrete jungle, before the crushingly dull Alien vs. Predator crossover was followed by the horrendously terrible sequel Requiem, which then led to Nimrod Antal’s Predators failing to get the sequel it deserved, prior to Shane Black’s The Predator becoming the highest-grossing entry in the series, but its status as the most expensive saw it go down as a box office bomb.
Taking things hundreds of years into the past is one way to slather on a fresh coat of paint, with Trachtenberg breaking down the ways his film stands apart in an interview with Digital Spy.
“For this one, I really wanted to make this version of the Predator so much more feral and ferocious and animalistic, from its movements to its silhouette and its design. That was something that we looked at the other iterations and tried to zig where they zagged a little bit. The thing that I really wanted to do was, on the one hand, embrace the suit because I love the design of the creature and that it is a practical suit, but also, really try to make sure we weren’t limited by the limitations of a physically-built suit with a man inside operating it.
I sometimes feel in watching some of the Predator films that it feels very much like a professional wrestler, not literally, but a professional wrestler who’s lumbering around. I feel like it’s driven by a person and I never have really gotten swept away by feeling like it’s an alien creature.”
At the end of the day, it’s still a tall dude in an alien costume hunting down potential victims, but everything we’ve seen and heard from Prey so far indicates that it might just be able to live up to the hype.