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ON FRIDAY, Disney+, Hulu, and Star+ released Prey, the latest film in the Predator franchise, which functions as a prequel to the previous films. Set in 1719 on the Great Plains, a predator will have to confront Naru, a young Comanche girl who dreams of becoming a hunter.
Considering Hollywood’s left-wing influence, when we first learned about the premise of Prey, it was to be expected that it would be a new vehicle for feminist propaganda with an empowered woman as the protagonist. Then, when the first paid reviews started coming out praising it and calling it a “masterpiece“, our detector of Wokeism began beeping madly. We were not wrong.
After only 10 minutes of viewing, all suspicions are confirmed and, in addition, we already know exactly what is going to happen in the film and how it will happen. If there is something about the woke narrative is that it is very predictable; in this case “prey-visible”. In any case, we warn that this review contains spoilers.
Prey: Predator v. Feminism. Feminism wins
The film begins by showing us the life of young Naru in her Comanche tribe. Naru is an excellent nurse who knows every medicinal herb there is, but she dreams of being a hunter like her brother, undoubtedly the best hunter in the tribe.
Amber Midthunder plays Naru in Prey (EFE/EPA by Caroline Brehman)
In the spare time between her womanly chores that she hates so much, she takes walks in the woods with her dog to practice with her axe. She has not yet been able to hunt a deer, but when she sees the Predator spacecraft entering the atmosphere through the clouds, she is convinced that this “thunderbird” in the skies is a sign that her time has come to prove that she is the best hunter in the universe
When she warns of what is to come, the men of the tribe don’t believe her, but the women do (of course) because they have innate wisdom, but they didn’t dare to support her. They even mock her by telling her to go cook. We do not rule out that, driven by feminist fervor, the script originally said that she was sent to “prepare sandwiches”, but that some advisor clarified that this was a dish and a word unknown to the Comanches.
Reluctantly, her brother’s hunting party agrees to let Naru accompany them to hunt a mountain lion that is attacking the tribe’s hunters. Gratefully, she gives them lessons on how to be smarter hunters and devises a far superior plan to what they, the experienced hunters, had in mind to kill the mountain lion.
Although her plan was foolproof, of course, a flash of light from the Predator (who is watching them) knocks her out of focus as she is about to kill the cougar, causing her to fall and become unconscious after the blow.
Naru wakes up at home, as her brother has taken her back and left to hunt the mountain lion. When her brother returns with the cougar’s head in one hand and its body on his shoulder, the tribe cheers him and gives him recognition as the best hunter. They do not know that Naru has actually mortally wounded the puma before falling unconscious and that his brother has only scored the goal.
A Woke Culture Plot
We viewers aren’t supposed to know either, but if you know how Woke Culture works out, you know for a fact that her brother will confess to her later to instill in her the confidence she’s never been given because she’s a woman.
Indeed, this is how it happens, but many other things happen to Naru first. It is clear to her that her village is very machista and heteropatriarchal, so she decides to run away and go alone with her dog and an axe tied with a rope to hunt Predator.
In her quest, she discovers a skinned bison and is suddenly attacked by a grizzly bear—made with very bad CGI, by the way. On the verge of being devoured to death, she witnesses the Predator killing the bear. Now fleeing from the alien predator, she encounters people from her tribe who have come out to find her, whom Predator kills one by one with ease.
Naru continues to run away and is caught in a metal trap that leaves her as easy prey for the Predator. Luckily, the Predators‘ code of values prevents them from taking advantage of a helpless victim they haven’t caught themselves, and they leave leaving her with perhaps the biggest threat in the film: the white man.
It turns out that the traps were being set by some evil, cartoonish Frenchmen, and now that both Naru and her brother have been apprehended by them, they discover that they are also responsible for the slaughter of the bison. This is the film’s way of perpetuating the myth of the bison’s extinction at the hands of the white man, because Prey not only had to be feminist, but it was also an opportunity not to be missed to sneak in an environmentalist agenda.
During her stay with the evil white French, Naru has several epiphanies. On the one hand, she realizes that both her own tribe and the French do not see her as a threat because she is a woman. Connecting the dots, she realizes that Predator is also macho to the core, and of course that will be her undoing.
Since she is very smart, she also figures out how the aliens’ advanced thermal vision technology works, as well as how their helmet’s laser guidance works. After all, this laser guidance technology is not unlike the idea she previously had of attaching a string to her vegetable chopping axe, is it?
Afterwards, Predator starts killing dozens of Frenchmen with absolute comfort. Naru’s brother takes a little longer to kill him, because he is now a deconstructed man who trusts his sister. But still, he sacrifices himself and dies so that she can still have options. The little dog also heroically sacrifices itself but doesn’t die, because…. How are you going to kill a poor little dog?
In the end, Naru not only manages to hold her own in hand-to-hand combat with the Predator longer than a coyote, a grizzly bear and dozens of armed men, but also ends up defeating it by using her own technology against it, thanks to the power of feminism.
Back in her village, she convinces her tribe that they have to flee because of the new threat, but does not make it clear whether she means the giant alien predators, or the evil white men who are coming to destroy their ecosystem and their peaceful society of good savages.
Thanks to the release of Prey, we have learned that predators are rivaled only by the xenomorphs of Alien, one of the deadliest creatures in the universe; the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the 1980s, when he was at his muscular peak and unbeatable; and now also by an empowered proto-feminist Native American teenage girl armed with a vegetable chopping axe tied with a string.
Ignacio Manuel García Medina, Business Management teacher. Artist and lecturer specialized in Popular Culture for various platforms. Presenter of the program "Pop Libertario" for the Juan de Mariana Institute. Lives in the Canary Islands, Spain // Ignacio M. García Medina es profesor de Gestión de Empresas. Es miembro del Instituto Juan de Mariana y conferenciante especializado en Cultura Popular e ideas de la Libertad.
Social Networks: @ignaciomgm