Baja Honour [Review: Hunter Prey]

Hunter Prey opens to a scenario not unlike Pitch Black: a spaceship crashes on an inhospitable world, the survivors include a prisoner, the last of its kind, captured by the army who destroyed its homeworld. The guards quickly realise that the prisoner has escaped and must recapture it.

Comparison with Gareth Edwards' Monsters is also appropriate: this is another indie sci-fi movie with a small cast and crew and ultra-low budget, powered by enthusiasm and goodwill, and shot on location in Mexico. Before making Monsters, Edwards directed a winning Sci-Fi London short; Hunter Prey director Sandy Collora gained a following from an impressive Batman fanfilm. Whereas Monsters relies heavily on subtle CGI, Hunter Prey is more traditional with much more use of costumes, prosthetics, make-up, props and models. Almost everything is on camera.

Hunter Prey takes a scenario that is superficially very simple, and develops it into a more complex plot: there are twists and surprises, a fascinating Sleuth-style cat-and-mouse dynamic between the runaway and his main pursuer, and another interesting relationship between the pursuer and his portable computer. While each alien is almost incomprehensible to the other, there are enough similarities that they are able to goad, challenge and learn from each other, in doing so gradually revealing the galactic events that have brought them together.

There are one or two missteps including a directorial cameo which is undeniably cool but lacks the gravity of the rest of the film, but on the whole this movie is excellent. It's more than just watchable, with characters and conflicts that draw you in. Everything comes together in this film thanks to excellent pre-production. It's not only the script and backstory which are very well thought out, but also the costumes and creatures and the choice of location. Shot on a Red camera against the yellow dunes and deserts of Baja, there's not a single scene in this movie that isn't just beautiful.

Production Values

I honestly believe that the presence or absence of Hollywood production values is not what decides the overall quality of a film. It's partly a trade-off - with a big budget you get undoubtedly more realistic and more demanding sfx throughout a film, better technical stuff generally, more famous actors etc. but you also get the problems - you have to keep all your investors happy and get the widest possible audience so you have to dumb down the film to the lowest common denominator, or change the ending to please the test audience (that means you, Little Shop of Horrors) or include characters to sell merchandise or computer games; also I think too many films rest on CGI at the expense of plot, dialogue and other character-driven stuff. Let's leave the sequels issue for now.

Indie films meanwhile are a very mixed bunch - lower budgets and production values sometimes compromise the vision but other times force the film-makers to innovate. It might be easier to stay true to your own ideas - or you might be even more dependent on your limited sources of money.

On a related subject I was thinking about the reasons people (like, say, the Asylum) might make derivative rather than original films - it's easy to be cynical about this. Here's a link to an interview with Sandy Collora who previously made a Batman fanfic short but is now working on a more original project. He talks quite frankly about getting more attention for his earlier work because it featured a known character - on the other hand by making it he developed skills and proved he could see a project through to completion, which must have helped when he was looking for support for his new feature.

http://io9.com/5091379/first-look-at-fan-auteur-sandy-colloras-hunter-prey