Okieinexile's Blog

By Bobby Neal Winters

I am in Paraguay teaching Elementary Statistics again.  I am alone in a room 5000 miles from my family, my office, and my woodshop.

On one hand, I am lonely. The silence around me expands to fill all available space.  The fact that any conversation that rises through my window will be in a different language than the one I think in intensifies this.  

On the other hand, I can watch anything on television that I want.

This is not to be wasted.

Last night I watched “Prey” which is a 2022 entry in the “Preditor” franchise.

I would never have watched it at home. The potential violence and the gore would be too much for the gentler people in my family.

But I had heard good things. 

Those things were accurate.

For those of you who don’t know, the Predator franchise began in the mid to late 1980s.  (I could look this up, but I am doing this from lived experience.) The premise is that there are aliens who come to earth from time to time to hunt the wildlife here–of which we are a part–for sport.

While one might imagine that this could be used as an argument against hunting, that is not the vibe that I get. 

Not at all.

The first Predator movie featured Arnold Schwarzenegger as one of the humans that was being hunted by the alien. This spawned a franchise and there have even been crossovers with the Alien franchise.

Until “Prey,” the original was the only one I’d seen. 

“Prey” could be considered a prequel to “Predator” because it is set in an earlier time.  Whereas, “Predator” was set in the 1980s, “Prey” goes back to the 1700s in the Great Plains of North America.  Our heroine, Naru, is a teenage Comanche girl who is very bright and very driven.

Let me digress here for a moment.

The Comanches are one the the reasons the United States is shaped like it is today.  To make a long but very interesting story short, they kept first the Spanish and then the Mexicans from controlling the part of their claimed territory that is now part of the United States. The United States was simply lucky enough to develop the revolver at the right time. We didn’t beat the Comanche because we were better, smarter, or more ruthless. 

We had more guns and more people. 

That having been said, I had to smile when I discovered that the heroine of this movie was Comanche.  There is someone in Hollywood that has a proper appreciation of history.  

The Predator doesn’t know what he is in for.

I waited to watch this alone because I was afraid that it would be too violent and/or gory for the gentler members of my family. While it was violent and there was some gore, there was not as much as I expected. Indeed, it is a well-written movie that takes its time to establish characters.  There are well-written Comanche characters that are played by indigenous actors.  The lead actress, Amber Midthunder is Sioux. 

When Schwarzenegger does stuff like this, they make him cartoonishly strong. By way of contrast, “Prey” takes its time to establish that Naru is smart, disciplined, and never gives up.  She is given a supporting family and a smart dog who she has trained well.  (The dog lives, by the way. In my family it is a deal-breaker if the dog dies.) 

Her mind is her tool. Her mother says at one point that she can do anything but hunt and wonders why she persists in her desire to hunt. In the film there is a subtle question that, perhaps, she is just so much smarter than the rest of her tribal band that they can’t perceive her full abilities.

This is one of those all too rare moves that presents Indians without the cowboys and all of the baggage that comes with that.  There are French trappers, but they don’t come with the same set of tropes.  I do love westerns–don’t get me wrong–but the lack of that element makes “Prey” a lot fresher.

You may not appreciate this movie as much as I do, but if the notion of a human-hunting alien versus the Comanches doesn’t scare you off, I recommend you try this one.

Bobby Winters grew up near Harden City, Oklahoma.  He teaches mathematics and computer science, does woodworking, and blogs at okieinexile.com.