Prey strips the Predator formula down to basics, but finds some room for style

polygon.com:

Before Disney bought 20th Century Fox in 2017, the film studio had become known as a purveyor of durable genre movies like the Alien, Predator, and X-Men series — and also as an interfering cost-cutter, defined by its willingness to set pivotal action sequences in generic parking lots and Canadian forests. (See The Darkest Minds, Elektra, or X-Men: The Last Stand, among many others, for examples of the Fox aesthetic at its worst.) These reputations weren’t mutually exclusive; sometimes, a Fox movie would strike up a pleasing balance between muscular thrills and relative limitations, like The Wolverine, a smaller-scale superhero movie that makes evocative use of its initial, woodsy setting.

Prey is the latest Fox production to capture both sides of that Fox history, while also nodding toward the studio’s new identity as a Disney-owned content mill for Hulu. The latest entry in the Predator franchise that began in 1987 is a stripped-down version of the usual sci-fi hunt, coming straight to Hulu without hitting movie theaters first.

At first glance, it makes sense to send a new Predator movie directly to streaming. Like a lot of R-rated sci-fi series, this one hasn’t been popular in years. 2010’s Predators and2018’s The Predator proved the series still has loyal fans, but also demonstrated that the audience is relatively small.Prey attempts to bring the series even further back to its roots than those films did — not that the other Predatormovies have strayed especially far from the formula of giant, masked, mandible-faced alien monsters hunting humans who eventually fight back.

Still, there’s an admirable minimalism in the idea of a prequel that goes so far back in time that the franchise’s previous characters won’t be