Prey

"The animals who play with the most abandon are the predators."

"But surely prey are almost never safe enough to play."

-Brenda Cooper, Edge of Dark 

All native peoples have legends and stories about the sky, according to Lee Grayson, and in some groups, "children moving into adulthood go into nature to look at the sky for life-changing visions." But what if what a youth saw in the sky wasn't simply a vision serving as an impetus for her hero's journey but also a sign that something unearthly and dangerous is about to come for her? Such a danger has been featured several times before: with Navy SEAL Arnold Schwarzenegger and crew in Central America, with L.A. detective Danny Glover, and two (or four, if you count the two Alien vs. Predator movies) other films, all featuring that omnipresent clicking noise of the Predator. 

Prey, directed by Dan Trachtenberg, is the latest Predator movie. The last one was the Shane Black-directed film The Predator (creative title), but with reshoots, mixed reviews, and a MeToo controversy, it might have been the last time we were to see the towering menace and its thirst for human trophies. However, the creature returns in a prequel surprisingly set in the Northern Great Plains in 1719, and for many, surprisingly or not, Prey has been the best. This time, one of the Predators is up against not Arnold and his SEALs or Detective Glover (or Adrien Brody or Boyd Holbrook and on and on) but a Comanche tribe, specifically a young woman named Naru, played by Amber Midthunder. 

Predictably, everyone around Naru wants her to be domestic, yet she yearns for more masculine roles, such as being a hunter like her brother, Taabe (Dakota Beavers), a leader in her tribe. Her brother can be supportive, but not fully supportive, ultimately deciding she is not ready to go out and hunt whatever it is that she claims she is seeing in the sky. Yet she and her dog Sarii (played by Coco) sneak along with her brother and the other men to rescue one of their members who had been attacked by a mountain lion. Along the way, however, Naru sees troubling signs of a creature far worse. There are warning signs all around her: a snake totally de-skinned, gigantic footprints, and that disturbance in the sky she mistakes for a sign that she is ready to begin her trial. 

Naru and her tribe are in danger due to both kinds of aliens: one from outside their world and one from across the ocean. The latter are French fur traders, and the usual beats are there: They kill the buffalo the Comanche rely on, Sarii's tail gets trapped in one of their foothold traps, and they capture one of the Comanche men and torture him. The film uses the horrid behavior of the fur trappers to potently remind audiences what happened on this continent. The film makes clear that the real predators were Europeans. 

I'd like to quote Jon T. Coleman's book Vicious: Wolves and Men in America to help understand Naru as a character in relation to the Predator. According to Coleman, "Vulnerability—not hunger, not anger, and certainly not spite—is the key to predator-prey relationships. The skill and viciousness of the hunter matters less than the size, speed, strength, health, and ferocity of the hunted...Predators eat the mild and weak because those are the animals they can catch and kill." This is not to suggest that Naru is always invulnerable throughout the story. At different times, she is in profound danger. She even makes mistakes. But she also possesses the driving force of her own ambition to prove herself that helps keep her alive. The scorn she receives from male members of her tribe and the skepticism and frustration from her mother (Michelle Thrush) only augment her drive. True, she might use vengeance against other humans occupying her space, but against her non-human hunter, she will also weaponize her size, speed, and strength. Along the way, it certainly helps that she knows medicine and can help the injured. In essence, she is one of the most badass characters we've seen on the screen in a while. 

There are exciting moments throughout the film involving a variety of other predator-and-prey creatures (featuring snakes, mountain lions, wolves, rabbits, deer, and even a bear), all set against the backdrop of gorgeous locations in Calgary. Our protagonist will find herself in at least some of these trials and tribulations, and she faces them with wide-eyed grit. While watching, though, you almost might forget that you're not simply viewing a period piece involving a Comanche young woman, but you're also watching the latest installment in a thirty-five-year franchise. The Predator, as most of us have seen, is a tall, incredibly robust creature with technology far more advanced than essentially everything humans have been able to throw at it. In Predator back in 1987, he was played by the seven-foot-tall Kevin Peter Hall, and with hours of Stan Winston-created makeup effects featuring terrifying mandibles, Hall as the Predator made for a formidable foe against Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, Jesse Ventura, and others. Here, an ancestor of that first monster is played by actor and former basketball player Dane DiLiegro. The technology DiLiegro's Predator uses may be more primitive than that used in films that take place centuries later, but it is still more potent and deadly than anything his opponents have. 

Despite how exciting and thrilling this sci-fi/action/horror/thriller can be, it's a little surprising and even fascinating that 20th Century Studios, Disney, and the others involved with the production would agree to try something like this; that is, to take a franchise that got off to a great start way back in the Eighties (and then featured mediocre-at-best attempts to recreate the magic) but now make something totally familiar yet fresh. I imagine director Dan Trachtenberg, screenwriter Patrick Aison, and others might have faced a skeptical audience as they tried to persuade the powers that be that this would be a worthwhile project and worth the risk. Fortunately for them, the risk paid off: Prey is currently ranked among the ten best films of 2022 on Rotten Tomatoes, and it became Hulu's biggest premier ever.  

It's not too surprising that the franchise took a big swing by making the film a prequel and set it three hundred years ago. It's not surprising because Trachtenberg has a track record of taking such risks, like when he verged away from the found-footage monster horror of Cloverfield to make its sequel (10 Cloverfield Lane) a human-based thriller set entirely in a bunker. What is more surprising is that this well-known commodity features a mostly indigenous cast. Prey comes at a time of greater indigenous representation in the U.S., with Deb Haaland's appointment as the first Native American cabinet secretary in history and the FX teen comedy drama series Reservation Dogs gaining rave reviews being notable examples. Yet these examples exist in the backdrop of disappointing but unsurprising statistics: According to Reclaim Native Truth, Native American characters make up no more than 0.4 percent of characters in film and television.

Prey, whose production team took steps to make sure what was on screen was historically accurate (including the tooth brushing scene and horses, for example), even features a dubbed version in Comanche. I first watched Prey when it was released last summer. When I rewatched it, I did so with the version that was dubbed into Comanche, and I was happy that the dubbing is not as distracting as I thought it would be. It's least distracting in Midthunder's scenes. Speaking of Midthunder, she's the best part. Her acting is top notch, and whether it involves her going toe to toe with the Predator, standing up to the men in her tribe, or constantly running, she's great. It seems unlikely (though possible) that we will see her Naru again; if anything, the owners of this franchise will likely do what has always been done: try something new. But there are hints that a sequel could be possible hidden throughout the film (including a neat Easter egg). I don't think there should be a direct sequel involving these characters, but if there is, I look forward to seeing Naru and her trusty dog companion once again.