The movie became the best opening content in the history of Hulu in the US. In fact, the movie became Disney+’s best opening movie under the Star brand in all countries globally.
In the movie, living in the Comanchi region 300 years ago; It tells the story of young Naru, who fights the Predator to protect his land and people. What makes this movie of the series interesting is that the only warrior who defeated the Predator, Naru, is a woman. Come to the review of this adventurous movie, which I started to give spoilers from the very beginning, let’s look at it together.
You can click here to watch the movie on the Disney+ platform.
Men’s warriorship is more easily accepted, while Naru must first prove himself in order to become a warrior.
The most striking point for me in the movie was that Naru wanted to be a warrior like his older brother, but because he was a woman, he could not easily accept himself. In fact, I can say that the male characters in the movie represented a more primitive version of the characteristics accepted in the gender order. Because the public sphere belonged to warrior men, and most importantly, features such as ‘power, success, warrior, struggle, rationality, activity’ were attributed to men. Naru and his mother, on the other hand, develop healing herbs in the tribe’s habitat. This shows us that the woman is actually squeezed into a fiction belonging to the private sphere.
Ultimately, these indicators show us that the acceptance of gender roles, that women cannot fight like men, is also embraced in Naru’s tribe. Naru, like his brother and his friends, has repeatedly expressed his readiness to be a warrior through his speech or behavior, but people are not very interested in his request because they think he will not succeed.
I don’t want to give too many spoilers. Therefore, if I move on to the main topic here, I can say that the arrival of the Predator to the lands where Naru is located will completely break the roles of men and women. For example, Naru, who first saw the Predator, tried to explain it to his tribe and his close circle, but no one took his word seriously. I think this not taking it seriously is due to the fact that the word of the man has a social superiority over the word of the woman.
Finally, our characters, who somehow become aware of the existence of the Predator, try to fight the Predator from all sides. Surprisingly, we also see Naru among the fighters. Of course, this war is a bit of a necessity for reasons that I will talk about in the next chapter. How Does? Namely, because Naru is dragged into the war, he can enter the war, so we can watch his fight. Otherwise, Naru might not even have been able to go to war at all, if not for necessity.
Victory is never easy for a woman: what we see from Naru’s battle…
Before Naru begins to fight the Predator, he encounters armed bandits in his own area and is detained by these bandits. This is because Naru sees the Predator and the bandits are after the Predator, so they ask Naru for information.
The bandits tie Naru and his brother to a tree as bait to capture the Predator. Because this detail is important, I gave spoilers because Predator doesn’t fight anyone it doesn’t see as a threat. Guess who Predator does not see as a threat among all the male characters and warriors? You got it right, Naru! In fact, here we are watching that even a non-human being from outer space does not see a woman as a threat to him. Of course, I think that the sub-message to be given is that women are in a secondary position next to every power-holding entity everywhere.
Naru is a female warrior who turns the disadvantage of all difficulties into an advantage.
As we see in the movie, those who try to fight and oppose the Predator are usually male warriors. When Naru realizes that he is not a target for the Predator, he finds ways to turn this situation to his advantage with great difficulty. Throughout the movie, we see Naru’s struggle to prove himself to his tribe and to protect his tribe against an extraterrestrial existence.
But among all these struggles, Naru has a struggle not to lose his self-belief despite all the negativities he has experienced. Let me explain why I made this analysis with a forced spoiler: Naru and his brother went to the forest to kill a tiger at the beginning of the movie, and his brother’s friends did not want Naru because he was a woman and did not know the job. Naru’s older brother, on the other hand, told his boyfriend group that he knew Naru’s treatment methods and followed well in order to get Naru accepted. Now I want to draw your attention here; Naru’s older brother now gives Naru a message that I liken to say, ‘You have to find that tiger because I made my friends accept you, in an environment where I actually have authority, when I actually thought you were unfit for war’.
In short, Naru was always trying harder to be accepted. Therefore, we can see that Naru draws strength from his struggle to prove his own existence while fighting a creature.
When we get to the end of the movie, what Naru’s brother said to Naru during the death scene is the proof of this struggle for existence. Naru’s older brother tells Naru that it is actually Naru who is gifted, not him. He says that when they went to kill the tiger, he killed the tiger with the tactic suggested by Naru, that is, he implemented the idea he got from Naru.
As you can see, Naru’s strength and abilities as a woman are always obvious, but the patriarchal structure in which she lives does not want to easily accept the existence of someone stronger than herself. Moreover, if the talented person is also a woman. We can make this inference because Naru’s older brother also accepted this fact at the time of his death, when his weakness was revealed.
On top of that, even the Predator is killed by someone he finds weak and does not see as an opponent, and actually suffers from the point he underestimated. In the movie, we can feel the sub-messages that women should not be taken lightly and that women have power, through such scenes. Likewise, finally, when Naru returns to his tribe with the Predator’s severed head, we see that those who didn’t even believe he could fight before now believe in him and declare Naru a hero, just like when the other male warriors won the war. As a result, Prey shows through the character of Naru that many of the features attributed to masculinity in the patriarchal mentality are not only found in men.
You can click here to watch the movie on the Disney+ platform.
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