#613: Prey
Comanche survival flick features invaders both French and spaceborne — and partially answers an old franchise mystery
Initial release: July 21, 2022
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
The Predator franchise has almost always been preoccupied one of two time periods: the present day and the far future, the latter usually in conjunction with the Aliens franchise (and usually in the far future, at that.) Alien vs. Predator probably got its birth with the presence of a xenomorph skull in the Predator trophy room in the finale of Predator 2, initially just an Easter egg but soon blossoming into an entire multimedia franchise. But more intriguing, and something the film actually gave focus to, was the implication that these alien hunters have been visiting Earth for a long time — perhaps even having seen these moments in human history in person. But this aspect of the expanded universe — or Xenoverse, if you will — has never been explored much. Oh, sure the Dark Horse comic line has touched on it — more on that in a bit — and I’m pretty sure Predator: Concrete Jungle for PlayStation 2 was partially set in the 1930s, but for the most part, even the Dark Horse comics rarely went further back than the 1980s for their Predator stuff. So when Disney dropped Prey onto Hulu it was something of a revelation for the franchise on multiple levels.
The year is 1719. (Savvy Dark Horse readers will recognize this as just one year removed from 1718, a short comic story published in a Dark Horse anthology miniseries in 1996.) Naru is a young Comanche woman living in the Northern Great Plains who dreams of following in her brother’s footsteps as a hunter. Nobody else respects her dreams; her brother, who sometimes does give her chances to prove herself, nevertheless steals credit for killing a cougar that had attacked a tribe member. Naru becomes convinced that something is out there in the wilderness, but nobody else believes her. She heads out alone, where she faces such hazards as sucking mud pits, angry bears, murderous aliens, and worst of all, the French.
This isn’t a typical monster movie; it’s not even really a typical Predator movie. The wilderness of Alberta, Canada stands in for Comanche land (and in fact it was filmed on Stoney Nakoda First Nations territory just outside Calgary) and the film spends a lot of time lingering on it; I was reminded heavily of the way The Revenant treated the wild land as a character in its own right. There isn’t a single permanent structure in sight the entire movie, only camps. It’s the ideal hunting ground, whether you be Comanche, French, or something else. We’re treated to a very viscerally visual explanation of the food chain — a mouse eats a spider, a snake eats the mouse, the Predator — or Yautja, a name originally coined by the Dark Horse comics — takes the snake’s head for a trophy. Wolves eat rabbits; the French hunt beavers and bears; bears hunt deer; and Naru hunts the Yautja.
The Yautja himself is awesome: he’s thinner, redder, uglier; his gear is older, almost analog in comparison with later Yautja tech. His mask is straight up a skull of some unidentifiable species with a laser pointer bolted on. Overall he seems more feral, meaner and faster. He gets to show off his skills more, as he engages in melee with quite a few people, from Comanche hunting parties to overconfident French trappers to Naru herself, making use of her hatchet-on-a-rope that she was roundly mocked for.
Naru is even more awesome: no matter how much her tribe — including her own mother — insists she’s better off staying home and cooking, she insists on getting out there and bringing home kills. She fights, she struggles, she fails repeatedly; when she gets stuck in the mud pit, it takes her a gutwrenching number of tries to get her hatchet to find purchase on a dead tree to pull herself out with. But she never stops trying, never stops practicing, and as the male characters, human or otherwise, all learn the hard way, she will not be ignored. “If they will not see, then show them,” she tells herself as she heads out once more to track the thing that is hunting humans. It takes the usual assumption about gender roles in films like these and flips it on their head. Ellen Ripley would be proud.
One of the enduring mysteries of the Predator franchise is, where did the old Yautja from Predator 2 get his flintlock? Dark Horse’s 1718 rather definitively answered that with a story about a scrupulous pirate captain who has qualms about stealing from the church and murdering a priest, and winds up fighting back to back with a mysterious alien against his mutinous crew. With most of the crew dead, they turn on each other ready to fight, only for the captain to be assassinated by a surviving crew member. In his dying moments, he hands his engraved flintlock pistol to the alien hunter, who subsequently gives the captain a hero’s burial. At a slim ten pages it’s more of a brief revelation than a lengthy exposition, but it’s got beautiful art and what little we see of the pistol’s wielder makes for an interesting character. In contrast, the Frenchman who teaches Naru how to wield a pistol is a timid loser who gets killed rather unceremoniously, and it’s left ambiguous what happens to the pistol itself. It’s clearly meant to be the same gun, thereby rendering the Dark Horse comic non-canon, but we never quite see the full chain of custody that leads from the Frenchman handing the pistol to Naru to Greyback handing it to Danny Glover’s character in Predator 2. It’s a little frustrating, not least because I think Dark Horse had the better story for this gun — but then, I think Dark Horse generally did a better job with the expanded Xenoverse than anything since Prometheus ever did.
One last interesting thing about Prey is that while the film was shot in English, a Comanche dub was recorded in post-production, spoken by the actual cast. While in principle this is awesome — it’s almost unprecedented, really — in practice it’s rather disappointing, poorly synced and even more poorly recorded. The film was shot in summer 2021, towards the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic, and it’s clear that the dub recording was done in the actors’ homes rather than a professional studio.
Nevertheless, Prey is a solid film, arguably the best since the first one (though you can count me as a huge fan of the second.) Naru’s arc is not merely a pithy parable of female empowerment but an examination of what it means to be a hunter, what it means to provide for your people, to lead them, to defend them against invaders both spaceborne and French. It’s a commentary about colonialism, about the invasion of foreign killers who ruin a pristine country for their own trophies. It’s quite telling how the Yautja is juxtaposed against the French: they’re rude and filthy and bad shots and leer at a captive Naru; the Yautja is sleek and methodical and a skilled hunter. But in the end, both bring great harm to the Comanche, and both must answer for it.
Prey is real good. You should go watch it. And spoiler alert: while hunting of wild animals is a regular feature, performed by just about everybody in the film, Naru’s dog survives the whole film.