The series about an alien who comes to Earth to hunt humans has been around for more than two decades, but Prey is the most recent entry. There are six Predator films that have been made before Prey.
Prey is a critical and audience success, which is 92 percent on the Tomatometer. Prey is reported to be the most watched TV or movie premiere in history. There are stunning landscape photography, compelling performances, and tense and exciting action in the movie.
Prey is viewed favorably by viewers because it shows members of the often vilified Comanche tribe as heroes. They are not depicted as the savage Indian of cinema's past, nor the mystical Native American figure, nor the white man's sidekick in a story told from his point of view.
We must first consider Native American representation throughout movie history to understand how rare this is.
Native Americans were among the most popular subjects of early U.S. cinema, but they were often portrayed in a negative light. White filmmakers used to vilify them in Westerns as savage barbarians who stood in the way of the progress of the white man and the progress of the white woman. Many early films, such as those by film pioneer D.W. Griffith, condemned the racial mixing of Native American and white people.
He was not the only one. John Ford, one of the most prominent figures of cinema whose career spanned much of the 20th century, vilified Native Americans in some of his films. He tried to paint them in a more human light when he was bad about it. Ford, along with thousands of other Westerns, depicted bloodthirsty American Indians who whooped and hollered and killed.
The Searchers is one of Ford's most notorious movies, in which John Wayne's character hunts down the Comanches and their leader "Scar" after they kill his family and burn their frontier homestead. Is she going to be saved byEthan? He wants to kill her along with the Comanche that took her.
The Searchers is a great American movie. George Lucas paid homage to it with his Star Wars movie. The depiction of the Comanche in The Searchers made them into monstrous figures of popular imagination, but it was not the only movie to do so. They were depicted as barbarians by Comanche. Both movies criticize the actions of white men, but they don't go far enough in showing the Indigenous characters.
Prey subverts racist depiction of the Comanche by showing them as not only as heroes and warriors who respect the land, but as people with conflicting impulses, something American movies have rarely done.
American Indigenous actors play the majority of the characters in Prey. Redface has been used in American movies and culture for many years. It is another way that the dominant culture has stereotyped indigenous peoples as they were not allowed to play themselves.
The Searchers had a white actor named Henry Brandon play the Comanche villain. The use of redface is not limited to the past. There is a new controversy every few years, whether it is Emma Stone and Johnny Depp playing characters of Asian heritage in The Lone Ranger or Ghost in the Shell, respectively. According to the film's director, Dan Trachtenberg, Prey features an entirely Native American cast for the first time in the film's history.
Redface and cultural appropriation have been used to make American Indians look like savagea. The figure of the noble savage is one of the stereotypes. The white man is unhappy because modernity is the cause of his unhappiness.
The noble savage was frequently seen in the films of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Little Big Man and A Man Called Horse. The films tried to come to terms with the atrocities of America's past in the context of the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War.
Native American women are willing to die for the love of the white hero, while Noble savages worship and assist the white hero, even though they don't have a hero of their own. Kevin Costner plays a white man in Dances with Wolves, a film about a tribe embracing a white man. Wind River is one of the more recent examples.
It is dehumanizing to see indigenous people as mystical beings whose purpose is to help shepherd the white man's spiritual journey and forgive his guilty conscience for the transgressions he has committed against them.
Prey doesn't feature the savage or noble Native American stereotypes. Some of the characters act forcefully. It was difficult. They are fighting a warrior. Some of them act oddly. There are a lot of examples of bravery and sacrifice. These characteristics are not defined by a white point of view. There are a lot of personality types represented by the characters. They act in the same way as anyone else.
The movie is being offered in both an English version and a version dubbed in the Comanche language, something that wouldn't have been possible with a theatrical distribution, and it would have been exciting to see it on the big screen. It's still beautiful to hear the language spoken even though the dialogue doesn't match with the mouth movements. This is a show of commitment and cultural respect on the part of Hulu.
The English version has problems as well. The dialogue and the way in which the actors deliver it can be heard from a CW show. The way in which the young woman must prove herself to all the men who don't like her desire to become a hunter/warrior feels too contemporary in the way it traffics in action movie and YA fiction clichés.
The ability to make a cliche-ridden genre movie is a victory for American Indigenous people. The filmmakers feel enormous pressure to make the movie into a cultural document that becomes all things to all people when they get the chance to represent little-seen groups on screen. They getbogged down in representation. They are afraid of making wrong decisions.
Prey isn't compelled to be sanctimonious about Native Americans. It shows us some of the life of the Comanches in 1719, and then goes on to show action. The actions of the character can show us what amazing people they are. White filmmakers have been allowed to make movies for more than a century if they have a few flaws. Artists can grow into something special if they have the resources to create multiple times.
Is Prey suggesting that positive representation for Native Americans should be changed? Based on the success of one movie, it is too early to say. Many outliers throughout history say that change never arrives or takes some time to show up. Marlee Matlin's Oscar win for Best Actress in Children of a Lesser God didn't lead to a widespread breakthrough in mainstream portrayals of the deafness community until last year's CODA, which won three Oscars including Best Picture.
The fact that Prey was made for streaming and not theaters suggests that studio execs don't think a movie with an all-Indigenous cast would make a lot of money. The signs are positive. The popularity of the film shows that viewers are hungry for familiar stories, even if they are not new in nature.
A number of recent productions may signal a different representation. Reservation Dogs is a comedy-drama about contemporary Indigenous teens living in Oklahoma from the minds of Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi. Chris Eyre, who directed Smoke Signals, is an executive producer of Dark Winds, which is based on Tony Hillerman's novels about a group of police officers.
Creative control is the most important thing. Trachtenberg is an excellent director, and he does a great job directing Prey, but why didn't an Indigenous director make it? In the director's chair and in the offices where executives make decisions about what gets financed and made, there is true power. Change is going to come when more Native Americans share this power.
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