dan trachtenberg | the m0vie blog

411. Prey – All-ien 2024 (#—)

Posted on February 8, 2025 by Darren

Hosted by Andrew Quinn, Darren Mooney and Jess Dunne, this week with special guest Joey Keogh, The 250 is a (mostly) weekly trip through some of the best (and worst) movies ever made, as voted for by Internet Movie Database Users. New episodes are released every second Saturday at 6pm GMT, with the occasional bonus episode between them.

This week, Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey.

It is 1719. Naru is a young member of a Commanche tribe, trying to prove her value to the community extends beyond her knowledge of medicine and cooking, and so sets out into the wilderness to hunt a lion that has been stalking the woods. However, Naru quickly discovers that there is something far larger and more dangerous waiting out there in the darkness.

At time of recording, it was not ranked on the list of the best movies of all time on the Internet Movie Database.

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Filed under: The 250 | Tagged: all-ien, Andrew Quinn, character development, colonialism, Comanche Nation, cultural significance, dan trachtenberg, ecological awareness, female lead, imdb, indigenous portrayal, Jess Dunn, jess dunne, joey keogh, Joey Keough, narrative structure, Naru, podcast, predator, Predator franchise, prey, representation, The 250, visual storytelling | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Column! On “Prey” and “Predator” as Postcolonial Horrors…

Posted on August 5, 2022 by Darren

I published a new In the Frame piece at The Escapist this evening. It’s a big weekend for media releases, but the weekend’s best new release is Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey, a sequel to the science-fiction action classic Predator. So it seemed like a good opportunity to take a look at what makes Prey such a satisfying sequel.

The original Predator is a postcolonial horror movie. It is a film about a foreign intervention that goes horribly astray when an elite commando unit find themselves hunted while on the wrong side of the border in Central America. Predator evokes contemporary anxieties over Vietnam, but also about American foreign intervention more broadly. Prey is a worthy follow-up to this, expanding and deepening the theme by setting the story on the American frontier and focusing on an indigenous protagonist.

You can read the piece here, or click the picture below.

Filed under: On Second Thought | Tagged: amber midthunder, dan trachtenberg, horror, postcolonialism, predator, prey, the predator, thriller | Leave a comment »

New Escapist Video! “Prey is Worthy of the Predator Brand”

Posted on August 4, 2022 by Darren

I’m thrilled to be launching movie reviews on The Escapist. Over the coming weeks and months, I will be joining a set of contributors in adding these reviews to the channel. For the moment, I’m honoured to contribute a three-minute film review of Prey, which is streaming on Hulu from tomorrow.