Prey

Directed by Dan Trachtenberg, Prey follows a young Comanche woman (Amber Midthunder’s Naru) as she’s eventually forced to battle a fearsome space creature bent on total death and mayhem. It’s a compelling, intriguing premise that is, in large part, employed to hopelessly underwhelming and persistently uninvolving effect by Trachtenberg, as the filmmaker, working from his and Patrick Aison’s screenplay, delivers an often aggressively polished thriller that progresses at a snail’s pace and contains few, if any, wholeheartedly engrossing sequences – with the arms-length atmosphere compounded, and then some, by Midthunder’s unconvincing, overly contemporary turn as the eye-rollingly spunky protagonist (ie Naru possesses many of the personality traits one associates with a Disney princess, ultimately). It doesn’t help, either, that Trachtenberg overuses computer-generated special effects to such a degree that virtually all of the action set-pieces are hopelessly drained of energy and excitement, with this especially true of a mid-movie sequence involving said creature and several doomed French trappers (eg it feels like a video-game cutscene), and there is, as such, little doubt that the violent yet completely tedious climax is hardly able to pack the visceral punch one might’ve anticipated (and was that CGI snow really necessary?) – which does, in the final analysis, cement Prey‘s place as a thoroughly misguided endeavor that squanders an admittedly stirring (and promising) setup.

*1/2 out of ****