Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for the movie Prey.The newest entry in the Predator franchise, Prey directed by Dan Trachtenberg, absolutely rips. In previous years, the franchise has been kind of misguided in finding new ways to tell more stories in the same universe. The commercial and critical reception of those sequels also reflects that. But, now with Prey, Trachtenberg and his team brought the franchise back to its core. Prey is a deceptively simple movie in today's climate of IP based movies. The movie follows a Comanche warrior, Naru (Amber Midthunder) hunting down a Predator to protect her tribe and prove to herself and others that she can be a skilled hunter. The movie doesn't waste your time either, while other action movies balloon past the 2-hour mark, this movie is a lean 100 minutes. This is only scratching the surface of what makes Prey one of the highlights of this summer's movie season. A lot of Prey's magic comes from the fact that it remembers the basic rule for fighting a Predator: it requires brain over brawn.

Looking back on the original 1987 film, it's easy to look at and see it as any other 80s action starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's a squad of big dudes that are so buff that they look like walking meatballs, carrying enough weaponry and firepower into Guatemala that they could practically level the entire country themselves. And they practically do! The squad is full of so much machismo and everyone speaks in really hilarious one-liners, thanks in part due to co-star Shane Black doing frequent on-set rewrites. But the trick of the movie, implemented brilliantly by director John McTiernan, is that this is all presented as being tongue-in-cheek. It's not meant to be chest-poundingly impressive, it's goofy. Hearing Jesse 'The Body' Ventura call himself "a sexual tyrannosaurus" with utter sincerity is meant to be laughed at as much as it is laughed with. This is all because that bravado is a bait-and-switch, these guys aren't action stars, they're fodder for killing. The original Predator is a slasher movie, closer to Friday the 13th than Rambo, and these beefy men are fulfilling the same role that the teenage girls at summer camp do in those movies. They're there to be killed by a horror movie monster.

Not only does this work for comedy and helping the movie stand out amongst other action flicks, but it sets up the Predator as a real threat unlike any other horror movie monster. Unlike a Xenomorph, the Predator isn't something that comes off like a random space animal that can't be reasoned with. The Predators are distinctly human, and are basically really tough inter-galactic game hunters. They drop on planets where their own technology can't be matched, they come armed with both weapons and strategies, and they can't really be outgunned.

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The Predator absolutely bodies just about everyone in the cast of that first movie. The only reason Schwarzenegger's character Dutch was able to win was because he yucked himself up in mud like a goblin and actually executed a plan well. This shows one of the biggest problems the sequels in the franchise had, they got the absolute wrong message from this ending. The other sequels kept going bigger in scope while the first movie started big but ended small. As a franchise, Predator is always better when kept at the smallest scale possible and focused on the actual idea of the hunt. Prey takes this lesson that the previous sequels didn't, and absolutely runs with it.

Perhaps the most ridiculous criticism about Prey that has been making the rounds online is that Amber Midthunder's Naru would never have been able to go one-on-one with a Predator, completely missing that this is the sort of the point of the movie. This is the perception that Naru is fighting against throughout the film. In fact, that exact criticism is the point of view of the human antagonists in the movie. In her home, her tribe and family are constantly telling her she can't be a successful hunter and needs to stick in her lane of medicine. As the movie progresses, and she gets kidnaped by French fur trappers, these kidnapers also tell her basically the same thing. And then they all got killed by the Predator in one of the most intense action sequences in any film from the past decade, and they all die because they were wrong. All the fur trappers died, and Naru escaped because she actually paid attention to the Predator's hunting habits and learned from them instead of just assuming she could take him on directly.

Naru essentially spends this entire movie in a training montage. Nearly every scene in the film shows her learning a new beneficial skill for hunting, observing and learning from the Predator's own fighting and hunting techniques, and learning from any mistakes she makes along the way. All of this culminates at the end where she puts all of this information to use and successfully takes out the Predator by luring him into a mud pit. This is not only a callback to an earlier scene where Naru got caught in the same area, but it serves as an excellent inversion of Dutch in the mud at the end of the first movie. When the Predator is compromised, that's when Naru strikes and kills the Predator with his own technology.

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What's amazing about the specific Predator in Prey is that it's obvious this alien isn't as experienced as the ones we've seen in other movies in the franchise. He makes a lot of mistakes, and even during the fight scene with the bear, the bear got in a few good hits before it got gutted. The mindset the Predator has when hunting in this film is the same mindset that Dutch's crew had in the first movie. And that's why he lost at the end.

Prey is a lot of things. It's a dope action movie. It's one of the few successful prequels that doesn't feel bogged down by having to set up the pieces for other movies and stories that have already been seen. It's an amazing example of how diversity is a good thing. It's one of the few Hollywood movies with an all-Native American cast, in roles that don't fall into stereotypes or racist caricatures. And it manages to do all of this while staying true to the core of the franchise. It's all about being clever and using wit to get out of situations. If the Predator just had to be out-punched in order to be defeated, the franchise wouldn't have lasted for 35 years.