The Girlbossification of Predator
what Prey gets wrong about the final girl
This has spoilers, but honestly if you’re surprised by any of the plot, you probably haven’t seen a movie before.
In this issue: Prey (2022, 100 minutes, available to stream on Hulu)
The original 1987 Predator is a triumph of male violence, a spectacle about the hunted and the hunting. Set in an anonymous South American jungle, it’s littered with 80s colonial tropes: the Indigenous tracker, the Spanish-speaking damsel in distress. Predator was followed up by several lesser sequels, none of them able to match the supreme and stupid masculine genius of the original. When Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Dutch and Carl Weathers’ George clasp hands, their biceps bulging in a now-memeified still, it’s a tense signifier of how these men (and the audience) are obsessed with their bodies, how indestructible they seem under pounds and pounds of cultivated muscle. The violence, the gunfire, the bodies: it all means something to them. And they’re about to be confronted with a new reality where it doesn’t.
Prey is set in an 18th century Comanche community on the Great Plains. White colonists are loitering on the edges although we don’t see them for a while, just what they’ve left behind. Naru (Amber Midthunder) is our protagonist, a young woman at odds with the rules of her society. As a woman, she’s not expected to hunt along with her brother, even though she tells us she’s as good as any male warrior. That swiftly proves not to be true: Naru misses shots, trips, falls, and gets knocked unconscious several times throughout the movie. She might not be as helpless as the damsel in the original Predator, but her weakness is used multiple times as a plot point—at least until the final showdown when the movie suddenly remembers that she’s an intelligent tactician.
Prey is being lauded as a return to form for the much-maligned series, but I found little about this movie to celebrate. This is just the most recent entry in an unending cinematic race-to-the-bottom, a desperate attempt to profit off of established IP by broadening the casting without reimagining the tropes that got us here in the first place.
It is obvious from the jump that this is a movie directed by a white man with a screenplay by a different white man who is best known for working on the Jack Ryan series. Naru does everything but burn a bra in her stale, male-imagined resistance. She is smart, capable, and strong—but only when the plot calls for it. She moves through the movie without a hair out of place, even when she sinks into mud pits and flees into rivers. Her hunter makeup smudges into perfect eyeliner, her hair remains glossy and flowing.
I’m hesitant to claim all of Naru’s styling as just misogyny, as the warrior men are equally flawless. Rather I think it’s a continuation of the bland action aesthetic pioneered by Marvel and Netflix: the removal of all grit and sweat in favor of flat, sterile beauty that will pop on a phone screen. Real blood and real stunts are replaced by weightless, illegible CG effects captured by an inert handheld camera. It’s only when we see the French fur traders that we see real ugliness, although they look about as threatening as animatronics on a Disney World log flume. Portraying the Comanche as modelesque beauties is a welcome rejection of racist tropes that Hollywood has repeatedly perpetuated, as well as an opportunity to see some thoughtful production design. But by totally stripping the Comanche warriors of any nuance or patina, it renders them action figures, not people. Any potential dynamism in the acting is neutered by direction that discards three-dimensionality in favor of off-the-rack archetypes. Instead, we get a series of beautiful, nameless warriors who roll their eyes at Naru and are subsequently slaughtered.
Besides Naru’s brother Taabe (portrayed by electrifying newcomer Dakota Beavers), we have no reason to care about any of the characters who are killed. They exist only as obstacles to Naru’s journey. This is something modern slashers continue to get wrong: it is boring to see faceless hordes sent to a CG slaughterhouse. If the violence is not going to be interesting or well-shot, then the characters need to be engaging. This is something Predator does well: even though many of our future victims are unlikeable or flatout irredeemable, they still have depth. Their deaths might not be emotionally resonant, but they are at least thematically resonant because we knew their backgrounds, their strengths and weaknesses. In Prey, the non-Naru warriors are wholly disposable. They’re cannon fodder, reduced to flat stereotypes of stupid, arrogant young men that are not differentiated from each other except by their appearance and the relative scale of their misogyny.
The result is that Naru’s victory is hollow. We’ve barely seen her character develop because she doesn’t exist as a character, she’s only there to represent a standardized opposition to male dominance. Her training montage, where she crafts the new weapon that will help her take down the Predator, is brief, sudden, and most disappointingly—alone. It’s a frustrating adherence to tropes about a self-made hero, no different from the dozens of stories we already have about male chosen ones, except this time it reinforces the old Hollywood notion that we can only have One. Why can’t Naru’s brother survive? Why must Taabe be reduced to a martyr and Naru, again, to a damsel? Is it too threatening to let us have two Indigenous survivors, two fighters whose bond and skill keeps them alive against their predators?
Naru is the Final Girl for the Girl Boss age: a woman surrounded exclusively by men who manages to do it all on her own, even when it doesn’t make sense. She’s no different from Wonder Woman, or Rey, or the string of hashtag-Strong-Female-Protagonists Netflix hawks on their Twitter feed every International Women's Day: a beautiful and literally one-of-a-kind woman, invented by white men, whose popularity does not challenge racist or sexist Hollywood structures.
Prey misses what made Predator great, that it was a humid pot-boiler fueled by desperation, blood, and sweat. It reduces the danger of an unrelenting landscape to perfume-ad tracking shots, and the menace of the Predator to computer-generated animals that look straight out of Zoo Tycoon. Predator was about the terrifying ordeal of being hunted. Prey is not about anything but its IP.