I’m not gonna spoil but anyone else was disappointed with the killing blow to the predator? (I mean, you know he’s gonna die at the end, that’s how these movies go). It was really stupid of the predator lol.

Anyone else kinda wanted it to be without the predator and just Comanches vs. settlers? Seeing their war tactics against a real opponent, which would also leave screen time to show their culture and tribe life. The struggle of resisting never ending waves of colonisation, and the realisation that you cannot resist forever. The losses, the wins, the factual story that does not need a space hunter alien to be interesting to audiences.

I’d love to see that movie. Not this exploitation flick.

The exploitation genre is not necessarily a pejorative. Blacksploitation put afro-americans into the roles of main characters at a time where they were relegated to being side characters whose existence was to be useful to the main (white) characters.

But where blacksploitation was a letter of love to afro-american culture, with movies made by black directors, Prey was directed by the whitest guy you could ever conceive – just look him up lol.

Look. At no point did the Comanches speak their language, except to give some immersion with simple words here and there. So it’s especially weird they could talk with the French foreigners in English.

Ultimately you could have picked Comanches, you could have picked Genghis Khan’s Mongolia, you could have picked Charlemagne’s France, you could have made this movie with any culture or time period you wanted. The Comanches were not central to the story at all.

So there’s a contradiction in that movie, which somehow seems generalised in the exploitation subgenres. On the one hand they want to make an ode to cultures that were exploited (not in the good way this time) by Hollywood and the settler-colonial United States. On the other hand, they still made a Hollywood movie.

Also it’s weird they barely used bows when Comanches were very fierce bow warriors. It is said (and has been tested) that they could get 7 arrows in the air before the first one even hit you. They could use their bows with both hands, on horseback (using the horse as a shield), on the move, in any situation really. That’s partly why settlers had so much trouble against the Comanches early on – their flintlock rifles were not fast enough against their high speed and guerilla tactics.

The best moments of the movie, to me, were not the Predator’s screen time. This is boring (and I say this despite liking the idea of the Predator). There’s nothing here we haven’t seen in the 1987 movie. The best moments were when you could get the rare glimpse into what it was like to be a Comanche people in the year 1719.