FIRST KILL

DIRECTOR DAN TRACHTENBERG TAKES THE PREDATOR FRANCHISE BACK TO BASICS WITH NEW MOVIE PREY

- DARREN SCOTT

WHEN DIRECTOR Dan Trachtenberg takes time out to talk with SFX – wearing a Weyland-Yutani Corp baseball cap, no less – he’s in the final days of working on Prey, saying it’s “the most intense it’s ever been” as they complete sound and visual effects. It is, he says, “a very precarious tightrope we’re walking.” Gulp. If it doesn’t make it to Disney+ on time, don’t blame us.

Originally produced under the codename Skulls (“Always a cover-up,” he says, “Prey was actually the first title that I pitched”), this fifth instalment in the “regular” Predator series was originally in early stages of production at the same time as 2018’s The Predator.

The then 20th Century Fox saw Prey as an opportunity to mimic the Star Wars franchise, by having a “main trilogy and then there’s these interesting side stories”. Slightly sidelined by the Fox/Disney merger, this new take on Predator was influenced, he says, by minimal dialogue, action movies and survival stories – “a single character going through a gauntlet”.

That character is Naru (Amber Midthunder), a highly skilled warrior who sets out to protect her people in the Comanche Nation – only she’s never hunted something quite like this before. Naru and Prey, Trachtenberg says are “a lens-shift from the typical action hero that we see in this kind of movie. I started thinking about, ‘Who is the person that’s never the hero?’”