One Thing I Love About Prey

The new Predator movie is set 300 years ago in the Comanche nation and is fantastic

A screenshot from the movie Prey, with an embedded subtitle in which the main character Naru says "I'm smarter than a beaver."

I’d been seeing so much praise about Prey, the new Predator movie streaming on Hulu, that I was sure that it wouldn’t possibly be able to live up to the hype. I was mistaken.

It’s really, really good, and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t consider himself a fan of the Predator series1I realized tonight that I don’t think I’ve ever seen either of the first two all the way through, even though I’ve seen enough of each to get the idea. They’re also streaming on Hulu, so I should probably correct that ASAP.. It’s a great screenplay for a great story: perfect in scope, delivering exactly what you’d want from an action/suspense movie like this, but with a core story and characters that you can actually get invested in.

I love the way that new ideas and new plot developments are introduced and interleaved — this is the type of story where you know essentially what’s going to happen from the start, but it’s presented so well that it never feels obvious or undeserved. There are lines of dialogue that you know full well are going to get a dramatic callback later on near the climax, but the movie stays one step ahead of your predictions, and puts the callbacks in different places.

And even though you think you know how it’s all going to play out, the movie manages to play with those expectations in interesting ways. It absolutely doesn’t lack in tension — there’s one particularly tense moment that plays with your expectation of what’s going to happen, then cleverly sidesteps it with a punchline.

Anyway, the One Thing I Like about the movie is something that seems fairly inconsequential, but affects everything: the main cast of characters, who are all Comanche in North America in the 1700s, speaks mostly in contemporary American English. They frequently use words and phrases in Comanche, presumably for ideas of great significance or which are otherwise translatable, but the bulk of the dialogue is modern, conversational English.

It probably says more about my expectations of how Hollywood treats Native American characters than anything else, but I was pleasantly surprised. Based solely on the still images I’d seen, I was expecting that they’d be speaking in heavily-accented English with an attempt to affect the 1700s dialect. Or that it would be completely without dialogue, making it like an extended art movie. Or that it would be entirely in Comanche2You can, in fact, watch an all-Comanche dub of the movie on Hulu..

Some of those might’ve been interesting, some would most likely have been awful, but to a modern English-speaking audience, all of them would’ve been othering. This movie is told completely from the perspective of its Comanche characters, and our easy familiarity with them subtly stresses the idea that they were real people. Not like the alien depictions we’re used to seeing from Hollywood — which usually reduces Native Americans either to ruthless savages, or noble savages. The characters here are smart, occasionally funny, clever, and have a set of skills that makes them uniquely capable of standing a chance against super-powerful alien hunters.

There’s another interesting layer to the way the movie uses language, but it requires minor spoilers. If you haven’t seen Prey yet, and you’re a fan of the Predator franchise in the slightest (or just a fan of tight, interesting, well-scripted, mid-budget action or suspense movies) then I highly recommend it.

I’d assumed that the movie would be entirely about the main character vs the Predator, so I was surprised to see the inclusion of French trappers. And I was especially pleased that they all speak in untranslated French3I don’t know French well enough to even guess whether it was modern or made to sound like the version spoken in North America in the 1700s..

It was a great way to re-introduce the idea at the core of the Predator movies, which is that greater numbers and contemporary weaponry aren’t really any advantage against one of these creatures. You have to outwit them. It also cleverly reinforced the most interesting idea of the franchise, in my opinion: that the Predators live by some weird code of honor that determines what is or isn’t a valid target.

The total destruction of a buffalo herd made little sense until it was revealed that it wasn’t done by the Predator, but by the trappers. It was a clever parallel to the creature itself, since they acted in a way completely alien to the Native Americans — why would you kill so many animals at once, and especially why would you leave the meat? — and were clearly trying to dominate nature instead of existing within it4This reminded me of how much I dislike the similar scenes in Dances With Wolves, juxtaposing a buffalo hunt from the natives’ perspective and a scene lamenting how the Army had murdered an entire herd of buffalo and left the carcasses to rot. It’s bugged me in the 30 years since I saw that movie. And sure, intellectually I get the point, but with the way the sequences were filmed with swelling music and everything, the point was lost in favor of “Damn it’s fun to kill buffalo!” Prey‘s approach was infinitely better..

And the refusal to translate them into English drove the point home even harder. We in the audience are aligned with the Comanche, and we have nothing in common with these monsters who invade peaceful land to destroy everything. They might as well be aliens.

A screen grab from the movie Prey, with a man looking frightened into the camera and an embedded subtitle reading "Merde"
  • 1
    I realized tonight that I don’t think I’ve ever seen either of the first two all the way through, even though I’ve seen enough of each to get the idea. They’re also streaming on Hulu, so I should probably correct that ASAP.
  • 2
    You can, in fact, watch an all-Comanche dub of the movie on Hulu.
  • 3
    I don’t know French well enough to even guess whether it was modern or made to sound like the version spoken in North America in the 1700s.
  • 4
    This reminded me of how much I dislike the similar scenes in Dances With Wolves, juxtaposing a buffalo hunt from the natives’ perspective and a scene lamenting how the Army had murdered an entire herd of buffalo and left the carcasses to rot. It’s bugged me in the 30 years since I saw that movie. And sure, intellectually I get the point, but with the way the sequences were filmed with swelling music and everything, the point was lost in favor of “Damn it’s fun to kill buffalo!” Prey‘s approach was infinitely better.

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