The first film‘s brilliance lay in the overdose of human testosterone it provided in the form of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Carl Weathers high-fiving and spitting out iconic quotes like “If it bleeds, we can kill it.” You could have inserted almost any monster into the antagonist role and produced a similarly watchable result. It can be distilled down to the mantra: “Let Dan Trachtenberg cook.” His 2022 film “Prey,” which took the “Predator” movies back in time to 1719, starred Amber Midthunder as a young Comanche woman who has to take down a Yautja with an arsenal of weapons that’s far more rudimentary than the machine guns that Arnold had to work with. But I now think the case could be made that Trachtenberg has the best gig within the studio system, as he could cram a career’s worth of original blockbuster ideas into the loosely-defined boundaries of the “Predator” franchise.
Author: Christian Zilko
Published at: 2025-11-07 15:00:00
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