PREY: This Ponca’s Review by Cliff Taylor

I saw the first Predator with my parents at the drive-in movie theater in Columbus, Nebraska when I was six years old. It was clearly awesome. Better than Superman. More rugged, hardcore. Arnold/Conan versus the scary, invisible, ultimate alien hunter. My buddies and I watched it over and over on HBO, lights off, machine-gun fire washing over us, making us shudder, making our hearts thump fast. It was a piece of 80s genre perfection, like Big Trouble in Little China and, uh, the Goonies, haha. Arnold slathered in mud to cloak himself from the Predator’s infrared vision, staring him in the face, unforgettably saying, “You’re one ugly mother-f*cker.” It was a showdown for the ages.

But as a comic-book reading Ponca kid growing up in the Midwest, infinitely hard-up for Native representation of any kind, there was one scene that was like a visitation from the ancestors spliced into the movie. You know the scene, and if you don’t you should. So Arnold’s crew of special-ops guys are getting picked off one by one and they’ve put it together that they’re up against something not of this world, and there’s a Native with them, a tracker named Billy Bear. The Predator is right behind them and Billy stops, drops his bag and gun, pulls his shirt off, rips off his medicine bag from neck and wraps it around his hand, and then grabs the huge blade he has sheathed at his hip and pulls it out. Then, staring in the direction of the Predator with a total fearlessness in his eyes, he pulls the tip of the blade across his bare chest, drawing blood and stating, in no uncertain terms, that he is ready to fight the unkillable beast, that he’s ready to die. Hoka hey! Arnold and the few surviving others hear Billy’s scream behind them as he succumbs to the Predator. And thus concludes one of the greatest Native scenes in all of cinematic history. Greatest because every Native knows Billy. Every Native has that same spirit as Billy. We’re strong, we’re fearless, and we’re ready. Hoka Hey.

I loved Danny Glover in Predator 2, because Danny Glover has real soul that translates onscreen and he was a non-traditional casting choice for the next lead to take on the Predator. It would be 20 years before the next movie in the franchise, Predators starring Adrian Brody, which I actually like, followed up about a decade later by The Predator, which had potential but was basically a mess and a major misfire. There were also the two Alien vs. Predator movies but both of those were also pretty terrible; they had so much potential but were corny, forgettable, lacking in the coolness and the spirit of either of the original films of their respective franchises. Somewhere in there I also read a bunch of Predator comics, including an utterly rad Batman/Predator crossover where the Dark Knight has to invent a special armored suit to take him on. I didn’t know when we’d get another Predator film and then I heard of PREY and about crapped my pants.

Like all things, I heard about it online first. From what I understood, PREY was going to do the thing I was always imagining my favorite franchises doing: it was going to take its big bad wolf and set it among our Indian people, see what happened when it went up against us. Nothing gets our blood going like imagining what it would be like if Hollywood actually made a movie with us (in both senses of those two words) where we got to be the stars and we got to be in all the cool action scenes and we got to have the kick-ass mythological battles with the Predator/Freddy Kruger/Leatherface/Aliens/or what have you. We know what a bunch of bad-asses we are and we’d love to have a fictional celluloid face-off with some crazy killer force that seems unstoppable; just let us paint our faces and have our chances and we’ll show you what we got, haha. You feel me? PREY was said to do just this, pit a young Comanche woman against the off-world Predator back in the day, in the 1700s, when her people were still free to live the life the Creator gave them. When the trailer came out, I didn’t watch it. I wanted every bit of it to be fresh, alive, brand-new, electric. Like so many Natives and non-Natives, I waited. Hoping Hollywood wouldn’t f*ck it up, I waited.

And then today, it came out on HULU and I watched it. No spoilers here. I’ll just say, I loved it. How the director ever got the people in charge of the property to give him the greenlight and the frogskins to make this entirely Native-centered Predator film (including releasing a version of it that’s totally in the Comanche language from start to finish; an Industry-shaking miracle in my book), I have no idea. But it is a beauty. Amber Midthunder, the star of this film, its Arnold Schwarzenegger, its Danny Glover, its Adrian Brody, is stunning, adept, and she carries the film in way that’ll have myself and probably half of the Natives on Mother Earth at any given time returning to watch this film over and over again. She’s like Billy from the first film’s granddaughter, only she’s not vanishing off-screen as another screaming victim of the worldless, clicking alien killer; she’s ready to turn the tables, to intuit how the hunter needs to be hunted. And the rest of the cast is stellar and memorable too, including Dakota Beavers who plays her brother. It was such a powerfully well-crafted and successful film that I can only imagine it’s going to spark and ignite all sorts of filmmaking brains, bringing on more and more big-budget, bad-ass, beautifully made Native-centered films. And who would’ve ever guessed that the Predator franchise would’ve been the big Hollywood film to do such a thing? Who would’ve guessed?

In closing, go watch PREY and have yourself a damn good time. If you’re Native, you especially deserve it. I’ll be honest, I watched it by myself on my laptop and by the end, when climatic battle was happening in the land as it was before this modern world stomped all over it, I was war-hooping unabashedly at full-blast, shaking the timbers of my house, feeling a gigantic soul-explosion of Native power, all sorts of energy and feelings coursing through my body. I want to quote something that gets said at the end but I won’t, so that you can experience it for yourself; I’ll just say that it sent shivers through me, was something that’s been echoing through the minds and souls of our Native people every day and every night since Columbus and colonization and the boarding schools and Standing Rock and on up to everything that’s going on today. Some tears wanted to come but on some days I just can’t go there. What a sublime gift for a Native person to find at the end of a Predator film, right? PREY is more proof that the floodgates of opportunity for Native creatives are swinging open and off their hinges and that now is our time to tell our stories with all of the talent and imagination and heart that we possess. PREY, like Reservation Dogs, is just the beginning. Now quit reading this and go watch the movie. Watch it and see what happens when a Predator decides to f*ck with a Comanche.

By Cliff Taylor

Cliff Taylor is an enrolled member of the Ponca Tribe of Nebraska. He is the author of The Memory of Souls, a memoir about the Sundance and his life/walk with the little people. He can be reached through his website @ www.cliffponca.com