Jan 13, 2026 08:17 AM
Despite a lot of good reviews due to all the Woke boxes that the film checked, it's just another installment of the Predator franchise. No Criterion Collection expectations beforehand. So the knocks below are rather specious -- the same stuff applies to countless examples of Hollywood flicks.
Abundant historical presentism or anachronistic language expressions in the dialogue.
Back in 1719, there wouldn't be any indigenous tribe on the Great Plains consisting of several members who looked a quarter to one-half white and other multi-ethnicity. And especially 50% Thai-Chinese, as Amber Midthunder is. Still, the cast is vastly closer to the appearance of 18th-century natives than what I would be at one-eighth degree of blood, or the Euro actors who flagrantly played "Indian" roles in most 1940s and many 1950s Westerns.
And whereas an occasional warrior teen or woman who out-competed males in far earlier decades would stand out as creatively interesting or unique (like Weaver in "Alien" or Blackman and Rigg in "The Avengers" or Elly May of the Clampett clan, or real hunter Annie Oakley), today it's just the blasé universality of studios conforming to politics. That's excluding comic books -- where female villains and athletic or super-powered heroines were common and way, way ahead of their time. And acceptable to even the 97% male nerdish readers that bought them back in those dinosaur times (for obvious reasons that need not be pointed out).
https://youtu.be/wZ7LytagKlc
Abundant historical presentism or anachronistic language expressions in the dialogue.
Back in 1719, there wouldn't be any indigenous tribe on the Great Plains consisting of several members who looked a quarter to one-half white and other multi-ethnicity. And especially 50% Thai-Chinese, as Amber Midthunder is. Still, the cast is vastly closer to the appearance of 18th-century natives than what I would be at one-eighth degree of blood, or the Euro actors who flagrantly played "Indian" roles in most 1940s and many 1950s Westerns.
And whereas an occasional warrior teen or woman who out-competed males in far earlier decades would stand out as creatively interesting or unique (like Weaver in "Alien" or Blackman and Rigg in "The Avengers" or Elly May of the Clampett clan, or real hunter Annie Oakley), today it's just the blasé universality of studios conforming to politics. That's excluding comic books -- where female villains and athletic or super-powered heroines were common and way, way ahead of their time. And acceptable to even the 97% male nerdish readers that bought them back in those dinosaur times (for obvious reasons that need not be pointed out).
https://youtu.be/wZ7LytagKlc