Good hunting

By Zach Hagadone
Reader Staff

The plains of North America are a big stage on which many of the most dramatic episodes of our continental history have been played. Much too often those episodes have been depicted on film as binary conflicts between “cowboys” and “Indians” — reducing both to cartoon images that would be laughably ahistorical if they weren’t so harmful as sinister forms of white triumphalist propaganda.

In place of the “cowboy-and-Indian,” “cat-and-mouse” landscape drama, the impeccable action flick Prey (released only on streaming service Hulu on Aug. 5), centers a community of Comanche people in their home in 1719, pitted against the one-and-only Predator — that otherworldly hunter who we first met 35 years ago when it went toe to toe with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the jungles of Central America.

Courtesy photo.

The original Predator touched off a long-running franchise that has only gotten hokier and more cash-grabby the longer it has been allowed to exist. With Prey, ostensibly as its prequel, the story is not only returned to its essential form but made orders of magnitude more compelling by its historical, geographic and cultural context.

Our protagonist in Prey is in some ways the opposite of Predator: rather than the cigar-chomping, muscled mercenary with a heart of gold, we have Naru, a feisty, keen-eyed, loyal daughter and sister who wants nothing more than to move beyond her tribal position as a gatherer to become a hunter, like her older brother Taabe.

Played with coiled strength and whip-smart energy by Amber Midthunder, Naru and her devoted dog roam the land digging roots and picking medicinal plants, but in every spare moment practice the arts of tracking and ax throwing. While everyone else in the community has their roles, she yearns to become something more. Her trials begin when she sees a fiery object descend in the clouds. She doesn’t know what it is, but she knows it’s important.

A series of odd encounters with the animals of the area leads to a search-and-rescue operation (a plot retread from Predator), during which Naru’s suspicions are confirmed that there’s something unusually sinister in the woods.

Setting off on her own, Naru commences to hunt the hunter, in the process battling not only the creature, but the environment, a particularly aggressive grizzly and a stinking band of grotty French fur trappers who in some ways are even more evil than the Predator, but not nearly so effective.

The action is always taut — which really ought to be the baseline for any of these kinds of movies — but in the hands of director Dan Trachtenberg and his star, Midthunder, it not only feels gripping but also worthy of emotional investment. Unlike Arnie, Carl Weathers, Jesse Ventura and the rest of the machine-gunning “cowboys” in Predator, Naru’s conflict is deeply felt as a quest for self discovery and transcendence, just as much as survival. I don’t remember feeling like cheering when Schwarzenegger slugged the Predator in the swamp, but I sure as heck did when I saw Naru undergo her own swampy ordeal.

Much of that humanity comes from the relationship Naru has with Taabe (played with real big brother energy by Dakota Beavers). She wants him to be proud of her, and he wants her to succeed. Their sibling connection feels real and relatable from their first scene together.

The beauty and familiarity of the surroundings is also a critical component of the success of Prey — viewers in our neck of the woods will recognize these kinds of woods, rivers and valleys. They’ll also recognize the connection between Naru and her surroundings, as she reads the subtle signs of the landscape in a way that only someone who knows and loves their home can. This is not a foreign backdrop, as was the jungle in Predator, it is Naru’s place, and so she not only fights the hunter to save her life and the lives of others, but to maintain the integrity of where she lives.

For fans of the Predator franchise, Prey is a departure from the grip-in-and-rip-it bullet fest it has always been, but in its quieter approach to the same themes, smarter writing and excellent casting, it makes this a film to seek out.