Read the review of The Predator: The Hunt, the latest movie in the franchise te

After three and a half decades and five underwhelming films, the action horror classic The Predator (1987) is finally getting a sequel. The Predator: The Huntdirected by Dan Trachtenberg (10 Cloverfield Street) features many of the franchise’s most vivid and polished scenes without sacrificing gore. With Amber Middonner (Legion) as the protagonist, the film relies on a magnetic character of remarkable poignancy, while bringing to its plot a content of social commentary that goes beyond genre cinema. In addition, there is visible care with the healthy balance of nostalgia. It’s just a shame that all of this, handled flawlessly from mid to late production, isn’t enough to save him from a threat worse than any spacefighter: a bad start.

In its first act, The Hunt is professorial and predictable. What made the 1980s classic iconic, despite being a descendant of the more voluptuous alien The Rescue (1986), was precisely the director’s intelligence. John McTiernan making the titular monster a threat between various conflicts internal and external to the characters to add complexity to a simplistic actionplot, thereby increasing tensions typical of other genres it has opted for. Exclude the Predator from the original feature and you still have heavy combat and light drama about grays of wartime, political conflicts of an imperialist order and homoerotic tensions between macho soldiers. Invite the creature to slaughter and you’ve added horror and scifi to the mix.

As set up, The Hunt doesn’t even attempt to do anything similar, and from the first minutes presents itself as dependent on the promise of conflict between the young Naru and the extraterrestrial being who kills for fun, now in the American West circa 1700’s. As the steward of the Comanche tribe, Naru seeks to prove herself as a hunter through a ritual that involves role reversal with a predator. Therefore, the combination of the film’s conflicts presents the protagonist with a common solution: killing the Predator will prove her to her peers and also save her family and friends from certain death.

The feeling is that Trachtenberg and the screenwriter Patrick Azon They saw an attractive simplicity in this synergy, but the reality is that it makes anything that precedes the direct conflicts with the Predator an uninteresting exhibit. Until Naru and the beast come into a direct confrontation, all that remains to be highlighted is tired drama between her and her brother (Dakota Beaver) and present the most educated viewer in the franchise with the list of seeds that will bear fruit in Act III: the lessons that will allow the heroine to achieve a tactical victory in the war against the menacing alien and that serve as the film’s main baggage of nostalgia for what she did. Arnold Schwarzenegger35 years ago.

That this questionable beginning does not become a protocol for the rest of the film is both a gift and a curse at the same time: Firstly, because it turns The Hunt into a great overall film in the end, with Tratchenberg’s assured direction, the broadcast of Midthunder and the Choreography of the Predator’s attacks will fill your eyes with each scene; Second, because it just makes more visible how much better the movie would be with a more dynamic and engaging introduction. A big sign of this is Naru’s conflict with a group of French hunters probably the most digestible version of white men believed to have been killed by an Indian heroine in Hollywood. First mentioned in the opening act, they become a relevant element towards the middle of the film and add tension and dynamism to the plot. At the same time, however, they represent another conflict that is linked to the other as the same solution. It’s a narrative courtesy that detracts from the overall tension and lends an uneasy air of security to the entire project.

Endowed with superhuman physical abilities but driven by a kind of ferocity that frightens us precisely because it so ranks on what is our race’s hallmark, the Predator is one of pop culture’s most unrelenting monsters. Facing him requires all sorts of strategies; from the boldest, like mechanical traps, deflections, and coordinated flanks, to the more rudimentary, like covering your entire body in cold mud. Nothing in this process is courteous or safe. The Hunt understands this principle objectively (and that’s great), but subjectively retreats into its narrative trenches more often than ideally.