Woman of the Month: Naru

Naru from Prey

As soon as I saw the trailer for Prey I knew I was going to a. watch it ASAP and b. make Amber Midthunder’s Naru the next Woman of the Month.

As far as female protagonists go, she has a fairly typical starting-point: the spirited tomboy who wants to prove herself to her skeptical community. We’ve seen this a hundred times before. What we haven’t seen is it play out with a young Comanche girl living in 1719 on the Northern Great Plains as she hunts, eludes and then confronts the Predator.

The film is a masterclass in laying out its stakes, keeping the narrative focused, paying off its Chekhov Guns, and never once breaking its own rules in how Naru operates. I’ve already mentioned in my reading/watching log for August that the inevitable “Mary Sue” claim is preposterous and demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of what that term means, and the sarcastic whines of: “oh, so a little girl is going to take on the Predator by herself?” ended up being the equivalent of an egg in the face, since no one at any point thinks Naru can go one-on-one against an alien hunter – not even Naru herself.

The best thing about her arc is that she eventually realizes she has to stop trying to meet the boys on their own terms and instead start compensating for her physical limitations in other areas of expertise: observation, stealth, speed, agility and wits. As she explicitly states at one point: “you don’t think I’m a threat – that’s how I’ll beat you.” She turns her own weakness into a strength by allowing herself to be underestimated.

In my favourite detail, she utilizes knowledge from the women’s circle, with her familiarity of a flower that lowers body temperature and therefore renders her invisible to the Predator’s heat sensors. In this, only a female character with that specific know-how could have stood a chance against such a formidable foe, making this the best arc for a female character entering a male-dominated franchise since Mad Max: Fury Road.

I’ve already watched it twice and will probably watch for a third time just to take in all the clever details and Midthunder’s great performance. Oh, and it warms my heart that her dog Sarii was also a girl. This means the Predator got taken out by two badass bitches.