Prey
Prey is the best Predator film since the 1987 original. That's not a low bar at this point. And it's also a film that requires honest assessment of what it's doing ideologically, because it's doing something real and it's doing it well enough to take seriously.
Full analysis below
Prey carries a +7 TRAD margin and a TRADITIONAL LEAN verdict. A woke trap requires a negative margin with woke content concealed past the 50% runtime mark. That's not what's happening here. The film's woke signals, particularly Naru's female warrior arc and the framing of French colonizers as cruel and exploitative, are present from the earliest sequences and are not hidden. The tribal community expresses skepticism about Naru's hunting ambitions openly from the beginning. The film is transparent about its gender and colonial themes. Disagree with those themes if you want; they don't become a trap just because they exist. The traditional content is also substantial and genuine: the warrior-proves-worth arc, the ingenuity-beats-power structure, the physical and tactical discipline Naru demonstrates throughout. Prey is a genuinely debatable film that lands on the traditional side of the ledger by a real but modest margin.
Our Verdict on Prey
Prey is the best Predator film since the 1987 original. That's not a low bar at this point. And it's also a film that requires honest assessment of what it's doing ideologically, because it's doing something real and it's doing it well enough to take seriously.
The premise: 1719, the Great Plains. Naru is a young Comanche woman who wants to be a warrior hunter when the tribal structure reserves that role for men. Her brother Taabe is the tribe's celebrated best hunter. She's at least as skilled as he is, possibly more so, and she knows it. Into this tension arrives the Predator, an alien apex predator who visits Earth periodically to hunt the most dangerous game available. In 1719, on the American plains, that means bears, wolves, and eventually humans.
The traditional framework here is genuine. The film is built on one of the oldest heroic premises in storytelling: the unproven warrior who gets a chance to face something no one else can handle, and succeeds through preparation, intelligence, and refusal to quit. Naru's advantage over the Predator is not physical superiority. She watches it for the entire film before she fights it directly, learning its patterns, its technology, its vulnerabilities. She uses a plant-based anticoagulant she discovered observationally to exploit a biological weakness she identified through patient study. This is the warrior-who-earns-it narrative, and it's executed with real discipline.
Dan Trachtenberg directs action sequences that rank among the best in recent franchise filmmaking. The tethered tomahawk fight, in which Naru uses a weapon that returns to her hand to fight armed French trappers while the Predator watches, is genuinely inventive. The spatial logic is impeccable: you always know where everyone is, what they're armed with, and what the tactical situation is. That's rare in contemporary action cinema.
But the film has ideological baggage that the honest score cannot ignore. Naru's female warrior arc is not incidental to the story; it IS the story. The tribal community's skepticism about her hunting ambitions is presented as misguided at best, and the film's resolution vindicates her completely. Her brother Taabe is presented as respectful and ultimately supportive, but the general community resistance to female hunters is the resistance the film asks you to root against. This is gender-ideology content embedded in the premise.
The French colonizers are depicted as categorically cruel: they torture a captive Comanche for sport, trap beaver to near-extinction with no regard for the ecosystem, and treat the indigenous people as sub-human. This is historically not inaccurate. French colonial practices in North America were genuinely brutal. But the film presents zero European characters with any sympathetic dimensionality whatsoever, and the framing of Naru's final victory as a defeat of both the Predator and the colonial encounter is an anti-colonialist statement that the film makes without qualification.
What keeps Prey from tipping fully woke is the quality of its traditional content. The warrior ethos is genuine, the earned-through-competence arc is satisfying, the tribal structure is depicted with cultural respect rather than patronizing idealization, and Naru's victory feels earned rather than granted. The film takes the premise of the Predator franchise, which is fundamentally about martial excellence and the hierarchy of predators, and applies it honestly. Naru wins because she is tactically superior to everything she faces, including the alien. That's a traditional outcome regardless of who the protagonist is.
Amber Midthunder's performance is the film's single greatest asset. She carries physical and emotional demand without apparent effort, and she makes Naru's intelligence visible in every scene. When Naru watches something, you can see her analyzing it. That observational intelligence is what the entire film depends on, and Midthunder makes it believable.
Prey is a film worth watching and worth arguing about. The TRADITIONAL LEAN verdict reflects a genuine tension: substantial woke content in the premise, substantial traditional content in the execution, with the traditional side winning the weighted calculation by a real but not comfortable margin.
Woke Tropes & Content Analysis
Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier
🔴 Woke Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Female protagonist challenging traditional male warrior role | 4 | High | High | 5.04 |
| Gender barrier-breaking as explicit narrative theme | 3 | High | High | 3.78 |
| European colonizers depicted as uniformly cruel with no sympathetic characters | 3 | High | Moderate | 2.1 |
| TOTAL WOKE | 10.9 | |||
🟢 Traditional Tropes
| Trope | Severity | Authenticity | Centrality | Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Warrior earns status through proven combat excellence | 5 | High | High | 6.3 |
| Individual ingenuity defeats superior force through preparation and observation | 4 | High | High | 5.04 |
| Tribal warrior code and cultural tradition honored | 4 | High | Moderate | 2.8 |
| Clear predator hierarchy and martial excellence as supreme value | 3 | High | Moderate | 2.1 |
| Sacrifice and commitment to protect the tribe | 3 | High | Moderate | 2.1 |
| TOTAL TRADITIONAL | 18.3 | |||
Score Margin: +7 TRAD
Director: Dan Trachtenberg
MIXED. Trachtenberg is a craftsman-first director whose ideological commitments are not pronounced in his work. His feature debut, 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), is a tightly constructed thriller with no discernible political agenda. Prey is his most politically loaded film, but even here the ideology is embedded in the premise rather than in the execution. Trachtenberg wanted to tell a Predator story set in 1719 with a Comanche female lead, a premise that carries obvious progressive signaling. What he delivered is a film that largely transcends that signaling through craft: the action sequences are exceptional, the creature work is genuinely frightening, and Amber Midthunder gives a performance that earns her protagonist status through demonstration rather than assertion. The gender and colonial themes are real, but Trachtenberg does not editorialize from behind the camera. He tells the story and trusts the audience.Dan Trachtenberg began his directing career through short films and digital content before breaking into features with 10 Cloverfield Lane, one of the most effective low-budget thrillers of the 2010s. That film announced a director with real skill for confined spatial tension, character-based suspense, and genre surprise. Prey expands his canvas considerably: a period action film shot on location in Canada with an all-indigenous cast and a practical creature design that ranks among the best in the franchise's history. His choices in Prey reflect a director who genuinely cares about the craft mechanics of action filmmaking. The sequence in which Naru uses a tethered tomahawk to fight multiple Predator-armed French trappers is inventively choreographed in a way that uses her weapon's limitations as a tactical advantage. That's smart action filmmaking, not ideology.
Content Breakdown
Adult Viewer Insight
Prey raises a question that the review-industrial complex has largely refused to engage with honestly: can a film with progressive premises execute a traditional story? The answer, as Prey demonstrates, is yes, with caveats. The warrior-proves-worth arc is one of the oldest stories in human storytelling. It predates gender ideology by several thousand years. Prey is trying to attach that ancient arc to a contemporary gender narrative, which is a real ideological project, but the ancient arc has enough structural gravity that it partially rescues the film from its own messaging. Naru earns her victories through the same mechanisms that every traditional warrior story requires: patience, observation, sacrifice, and commitment. The fact that she's a woman in a warrior role traditionally held by men is the film's progressive argument. The fact that she earns that role through demonstrated excellence rather than receiving it through ideological mandate is the film's traditional rescue. Whether you find that rescue satisfying or feel the progressive framing poisons the well is a legitimate disagreement. The VVWS numbers say +7 TRAD. Your mileage may vary.
Parental Guidance
Rated R for strong bloody violence throughout. Prey is not appropriate for younger viewers. The violence is sustained and graphic: the Predator kills with dismemberment-level force throughout, and several human characters die in explicitly brutal ways. The French trapper sequence is particularly intense. For mature teenagers 16 and up who have engaged with the Predator franchise or other R-rated action films, Prey offers a genuinely compelling warrior story with excellent action craft. The protagonist's intelligence and preparation are depicted as the keys to survival, which is a good message delivered in a very violent package. No significant sexual content. Strong language throughout.
Is Prey Safe for Kids?
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