The Preda­tor fran­chise goes back to an uncol­o­nized Amer­i­ca in the first Prey trailer

Much like the dread­locked inter­galac­tic hunter at its cen­ter, the Preda­tor fran­chise just can­not be killed, no mat­ter how many attempt­ed reboots must fiz­zle out along the way. 2010’s Preda­tors had stur­dy hor­ror fun­da­men­tals, but couldn’t real­ly con­nect with audi­ences, and 2018’s Shane Black-direct­ed The Preda­tor was a self-sat­is­fied let­down short on the orig­i­nal-fla­vor ter­ror and faulty in the not-quite-clever humor used to compensate.

All of which has brought the stu­dio for­mer­ly known as Fox to a small­er-scale and more unortho­dox approach to the IP in the form of Prey, the first trail­er for which arrived online this morn­ing. No mer­ce­nar­ies, no guns, no white peo­ple at all — just the immutable dri­ve to sur­vive and the unal­loyed instinct to kill.

Direct­ed by Dan Tra­cht­en­berg (of 10 Clover­field Lane noto­ri­ety), the upcom­ing film diverges from tra­di­tion first in its set­ting, in the unspoiled Comanche Nation still yet to be col­o­nized by the set­tlers in from Europe. In this prelap­sar­i­an Amer­i­ca, a war­rior by the name of Naru (Amber Midthun­der, of TV’s Legion, just one in a cast made up pre­dom­i­nant­ly of First Nations actors) must use her wits and resource­ful­ness rather than tech­no­log­i­cal advances to dis­pel the Preda­tor come to lay waste to her village.

The com­mit­ment to hon­or­ing the Comanche ele­ments of this film isn’t all lip ser­vice, either; Tra­cht­en­berg has con­firmed that when Prey comes to its stream­ing home of Hulu, a Comanche-lan­guage dub will be avail­able for those who’d rather not hear the indige­nous char­ac­ters speak­ing Eng­lish. (One non-native mem­ber of the cast is Dane DiLiegro, a for­mer bas­ket­ball play­er tow­er­ing enough to por­tray the insa­tiable alien death-dealer.)

While it’s dis­ap­point­ing to see a promis­ing action project rel­e­gat­ed to the direct-to-stream­ing pipeline — not to men­tion what down­siz­ing a big-tick­et series to the small screen says about the over­all health of the indus­try — it’s nonethe­less refresh­ing to see some­one will­ing to take some unex­pect­ed gam­bles with a well-known char­ac­ter. When a fran­chise starts flag­ging, try­ing some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent may very well be the best bet. And besides, the fear of get­ting torn to shreds by a behe­moth with a mouth that opens into a square is uni­ver­sal, tran­scend­ing cul­tures and time itself.

Prey comes to Hulu in the US and Dis­ney+ in the UK on 5 August.