Predator and Prey: Power, Survival, and Indigenous Resistance in “Prey” (2022)

Part A — Prey
A1. Hunting as Power, Survival, and Resistance
Prey treats hunting as a grammar of power. The Predator makes power spectacle—trophies prove
dominance—while Naru redefines power as knowledge, patience, and adaptation. Survival
becomes resistance when she turns careful observation into counter-tactics: reading tracks, testing
remedies and tools, and using terrain as collaborator rather than backdrop.
A2. Three Hunter Models and Masculinity
Predator. Hyper-technological dominance—cloaking, sensors, ranged weapons—equates might
with mastery (Hussey, Richards and Scott, 2022).
French trappers. Extractive, cynical brutality; hunting for commodity and control.
Comanche warriors. Communal, land-attentive ethic, though some young men posture through
bravado.
Across these, the film subverts the old “hardbody” template: muscles and firepower no longer
guarantee victory; calibration, restraint, and ecological literacy do. Battles hinge on timing a baited
step, exploiting mud and sightlines, and blinding sensors rather than outpunching an opponent.
A3. Predator–Trapper Parallels
Iron traps mirror energy snares; gunpowder echoes plasma bolts; stacked pelts rhyme with flayed
trophies. Both treat nature as scoreboard. The Comanche lens instead reads wind, water, and
animal behaviour as living intelligence. Naru weaponises that intelligence: orange blossom
medicine cools the body to confuse heat vision; a tomahawk tether converts a tool into a modular
device; bogs and ridgelines become terrain hacks that flip technological advantage (RodriguesMello et al., 2021).
Both Predator and trappers stage the same ethic: domination measured as yield. One calibrates
lasers; the other calibrates steel jaws. Each outsources awareness to devices, which dulls sensory
humility. The Comanche counter-model ties technique to reciprocity—take only what proves skill,
honour the animal, return waste to cycles. Naru exploits the asymmetry. She studies the Predator’s
sensor stack—heat, motion, line-of-sight—and feeds it false inputs: cooled blood, misdirection,
occlusion. She reads water as cloak, mud as camouflage, tree roots as leverage. Where the trappers and Predator escalate force, she reduces information. Victory arrives not from bigger weapons but
from better questions asked of the land.
A4. Naru as Protagonist and Archetype
Naru moves from excluded apprentice to tactical author. Power is accrued, not bestowed: she forms
hypotheses, treats failure as data, and iterates. This construction resists common clichés that reduce
Indigenous characters to mystic shorthand. Language, craft, sibling bonds, and women’s labour
carry plot weight. The film largely empowers its Indigenous lead by letting her drive cause and
effect, though any Western genre frame risks validating competence only when it beats the
coloniser at his own game (Ilieva, 2022).
A5. Three Notable Shot-Segments
i) River grass stalk. A low gliding track at Naru’s shoulder turns the environment into a coconspirator; edits match her footwork so silence reads as action (Wojnicka and de Boise, 2025).
ii) Ambush carousel. A circling camera around the trappers’ kill-zone, smoke slicing the frame,
reveals traps within traps; accelerated cuts visualise extractive chaos meeting adaptive warfare.
iii) Night duel. Sparks and green blood light longer takes that showcase learned timing; we watch
Naru wait, misdirect, and spring. In Prey, the best hunter is the best listener.