I love that there are fans of the Predator franchise who are totally on board with an intergalactic green-blooded alien bounty hunter who fights Xenomorphs, but have decided that the half-competent female character is too unrealistic for them.
@Elmo 3000 Which is kinda funny when you think about how the Alien franchise rides on the back of a half-competent female character. Ellen Ripley wasn\'t a superhero, she had common sense, and a hell of a lot of luck on her side. Seems peculiar how some female action protagonists are given a pass, but others get shot down when they\'re barely halfway out the door.
A lot of it has got to do with the date. It wasn`t until 2015 that geeks started getting told that feminists had an evil agenda for popular entertainment, so it is only stuff made from that point onwards that gets automatically associated with SJW/Woke/PC/Feminazi meddling. Anything made before then already has an established fanbase, so they got grandfathered in as exceptions to the rule about women leads. They then wind up as the automatic defence against any accusation of sexism. "No see, I can't be sexist because I can list several movies from 40 years ago where I liked the women leads!"
If the Alien movies came out today, the nerds absolutely would have been complaining how a woman got to be the only survivor, or how obnoxiously feminist it is to have Ripley and Vasquez show up the men by being able to operate heavy machinery and guns. Hell, they complained about Terminator: Dark Fate, even when it had Linda Hamilton back in her old role.
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Elmo 3000, that's not a very well reasoned point.
Magic, superpowers, and aliens are not some "narrative switch" that somehow make the principles of good writing optional. Their existence in a story does not compel the audience to accept any character action, no matter how ridiculous, without criticism. Harry Potter bench-pressing 500 pounds would be absurd. Saying "Uh, are you really complaining about that in a universe where magic exists?!" would be quite an unacceptable excuse.
Whether this particularly film or this particular franchise as a whole contains any such ridiculous actions, I have no idea.
Maninahat, you sound like you're on the verge of imagining conspiracies. Lots of and lots and lots of modern fiction is released with female protagonists and so forth, and the vast majority goes uncriticized.
Counterpoint: Naru never does the equivalent of bench-pressing 500 pounds, so yeah, it\'s literally \"Wah, woman competent! I\'m no sexist, but this upsets me for some reason!\"
It is emphatically not a conspiracy to notice that a certain subset of fans of action films and comic book movies seem to reserve most of their ire for films headlined by women.
Harry Potter literally teleports, time travels, and comes back from the dead, but magical super strength is unreasonable?
As I said, I really have no idea whether this franchise contains any such actions or not. Certainly plenty of characters are poorly written, and certainly plenty of those poorly written characters are women.
No, Tuckerscreator. Regular super strength is unreasonable. Harry Potter being able to lift 500 pounds with his regular human muscles would be absurd, and quite inexcuseable by an justification of "Uh, magic exists, lifting 500 points is a lot more plausible than doing magic."
Anyway, just from watching the movie, I’ve kind of got the impression that Nauru actually isn’t a great fighter, and she just wants to be one because she’s bitter about the way she’s treated by other people.
But I’m also only about half an hour in. I’m a little worried, not being a Gorehound, but I do like other predator movies, so we’ll see.
I liked that they showed Naru as winning through intelligence, not brute strength like her male counterparts tried and failed at. It\'s especially fitting as her build doesn\'t realistically make the latter a good idea. She is a good female action hero-I hope other films follow the precedent. We have had many good ones of course, but I don\'t think any were quite like her (certainly no Native Americans). So yeah, I liked it a lot.
Of course Naru has plot armor. So does Dutch. So does Harrigan. So does any final protagonist in a Greatest Game or Dwindling Party plot, be it Predator, Deathrace 2000, John Wick, James Bond, Jason Bourne, The Hunt, Captain Kirk, Squid Game, Hunger Games, Mad Max, name your franchise.
The point is, the movie does a good job of inviting suspension of disbelief.
Part of it is Naru. We see her fail. We see her level up, repeatedly. We see her innovate and reason. And she is badass in that she is determined and brave even against impossible odds.
And part of it is that yes her physical endurance is great, and she definitely gets Made of Iron, given that a type of bear trap used by the French trappers, which cuts her bonds, cuts off a trappers head, makes the predators leg spurt green blood, barely nicks her and doesn't break her leg or seriously injure her. Simply jumping from such a great height, whether onto the Predator or whatever, should injure her probably. So she gets Made of Iron like basically every protagonist in these tropes, or they wouldn't survive.
But it's not unreasonable in that we are given good in universe reasons to buy into the fantasy. There's nothing which feels unearned.
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I Have to Praise You Like I should
SO GET THIS, another of our classic hyper-masculine manly man movies for men has been RUINED by having a woman main character, who - GET THIS - is occasionally good at things!
Prey came on my radar, like a lot of movies these days, due to the disproportionate amount of whining it generates on the internet from people who have to complain every time they see a woman or person of colour on their tv screen. If I had any business nous, I would start a youtube movie review show to capitalise off of all the internet geeks who reflexively hate any kind of diversity. It turns out they like nothing better than spending hour after hour of having their own hateful opinions fed back to them.
Prey is a movie that asks what would happen if a Predator alien landed in 18th Century America. The answer comes within a refreshingly tight 90 minutes, and involves a lot of dismembered wildlife and Comanches. Our protagonist, the one causing so much ire, is Naru, a Comanche woman who wants to prove to her tribe she can roughhouse as well as any of the lads. Meanwhile, those around her, including the Predator, think she's a bit of a pushover as they battle each other to the death.
After a somewhat slow start the movie picks up momentum, gaining a tight focus on Naru's fight for survival. The Predator is never far from her, looking for bigger and bigger trophies amongst the local fauna. Those looking for a more grounded and realistic movie aren't going to get it here. Prey never reaches the absurd gloriousness of Schwarzenegger's commandos, blasting away a whole jungle with grenades and machine guns, but Prey has plenty of its own moments of crowd-pleaser Hollywood violence. The Commanche tribesmen and woman are no slouches, and get plenty of cinematic battle moments as they and the Predator take turns outsmarting each other with spears and arrows. The film is also suitably gory and cruel for a Predator entry too. We are treated to the sight of a Predator turning into some kind of blood ghost after his invisibility suit ends up drenched in human offal.
Prey is not a sophisticated film, and nor does it reach the zenith of modern action movie spectacles. But it is well made, it understands its purpose as a Predator movie, and it makes a welcome change. Most of all, it recognises that a reboot/sequel need not be this bloated, self-important spectacle that goes on for two and a half hours; it is content being what it should be, which in a word, is fun.