Hunter Prey (2010)

Who payed the critics

This is How Movies Should Be Made

Good concept, poorly executed.

disgusting, overrated, pointless

Great yet simple plot, minimalist scenery, no ballast, right balance between action and suspense. I enjoyed watching this movie a lot.I bumped into it accidentally while browsing through last days of programme on SciFi channel. Does anybody else gets a association with another great movie, even better in my opinion? Enemy Mine comes to mind on more that one occasion.

For those not aware, this is basically a 'student' film, made by amateurs who somehow got a budget and the time together. But it's a rather good one.It's a spin off from the 'Enemy Mine' universe, and that's not blowing anything, you find that out pretty quickly near the start.It's well shot (the landscapes are austerely gorgeous), and there were a couple of moments, just a few seconds here and there, where there was some beautiful capturing of reactions among the protagonists.Rookie mistakes:* Dialogue that drags on and on with too much back and forth. They needed to sit down and edit the hell out of all the conversations. I'm impressed they managed to get the film up to feature length! But it's mostly talk-padding, unfortunately.* Shot sameness. Basically in a film no two shots should ever look the same, unless you are doing so deliberately to make a point. But this is largely a function of how much time and effort you can afford to put into the thing. It's also why roving cameras and continuous takes have become more popular (and all this 'found footage' rubbish). Simplest way is to shoot all scenes with at least 2 cameras, then shoot them again with the cameras moved, and make sure they are all at different zoom distances - gives you 4 streams you can edit to jump between that all look different.And that's about all the criticism I can level.The story could have been told in 40 minutes, and probably should have been, and if I want to give them another digging at I could say what the hell was with the capes and crests on the helmets? But, style is a choice, they wanna make it look that way, that's their prerogative.OK - now I wanna see the same team go forth and make a REAL film! They have proved they have what it takes!

This movie may not be brilliant, but how can some people compare it to "Enemy Mine", one of the worst/dumbest/soppiest and most-overrated sci-fi films of all time. That visually unappealing sentimental politically-correct fluff is sci-fi only in appearance; it's a watered-down version of a guy's flick, watered-down down down all the way to the lowest-common-denominator level of a hankie-wetting weak movie – the sort of demographic group (along with them and others like that) I'd normally expect to watch and weep to its trite, idealistic, pathetic premise. I don't think even Batman and Spiderman movies deserve to be compared to such stuff. Perhaps not even "Avatar"! No. I take that back. "Avatar" is actually even worse than "Enemy Mine".Not that HP doesn't have its own brief moments of misguided lofty idealism – i.e. sheer silliness. Case-in-point: "You harboured fugitives, so it cost you your planet," says Centauri, the main nose-less alien protagonist, to which Jericho (the last human left) responds: "It cost us everything, but we made the right decision." Now that was silly. I don't see how even the most empty-headed, weak, idealistic, brainwashed, naive, weird immoral thing could possibly consider ANY decision that leads to the demise of the entire human race as "the right decision". It boggles the mind. This line alone carries so much bad weight (measured in horse things), that it alone could have sunk this movie, were it not easy to forgive this B-movie its comic-book roots hence justifiable naivety. Fortunately, this was an isolated incident.Three Boba Fetts crash-land on an unknown planet where they chase their escaped prisoner. Well, of course he's a human. Once it is revealed that the three Bobas are in fact nose-less rock-faced aliens, it's just simple 2 + 2 addition from there: the prisoner must be a human. Or do you think anyone out there actually has the nerve to make a sci-fi film that is totally devoid of men? Not a chance. If there are any, please let me know.There are plenty of twists and turns; some work, some don't; some are genuinely surprising, some are predictable. But at least the movie keeps moving, although the non-changing setting will doubtlessly prove too tiresome for some viewers. It also helps that there are no major logic holes. The only dodgy moment I could mention at this point is that Centauri let Jericho live, which makes very little sense. Never were we given enough proof that Centauri hates his race and planet so much that he would let an alien – whom he'd hunted all along until then – destroy it. This is too much of a stretch.Speaking of which, HP's shoe-string budget had been stretched rather well, still looking like a low-budget film but not at the Z-level that for example Sci-fi Channel's generally plastic-looking produce normally does. I like the setting, the costumes are quite OK; I see no reason for complaints there. No-one has make-up or is wearing strange blouses.

This is a great little sci-fi short story about a solder chasing down a dangerous escaped prisoner.From the very start it is obvious the budget of this movie is very tight. But the production is handle with great skill and -most importantly- care. They obviously couldn't afford much in the way of set but instead of trying to recreate Mars from papier mache and dodgy cgi it has been shot on location in a desert somewhere, which works just fine.The makeup for the aliens is convincing which is where it counts for a character based movie.There is some action but the film is mainly about the two opposing solders and the motivations for their actions.If you have an hour or two to kill on a random Wednesday and you like Sci-fi and this comes up on TV go for it. This movie has a lot of heart but don't expect Avatar.