Because This Is Where I Write About Fandom...
Today, I saw the trailer for Prey.
What is Prey? It's a movie coming to Hulu in August, about a Comanche hunter named Naru, from before the colonization of the west. She discovers that, during the high heat of summer, a predator has come to hunt.
A Predator, I should say. Invisibility, lasers and presumably a last-resort pocket nuke on the wrist. Like Arnold as Dutch fought in the jungle, back in the 1980s.
It's hinted in the parts of the series I've seen that, when it's hot, these beings come back and hunt hunters. The Most Dangerous Game from Space, and from a wide variety of times.
I saw most but not all of Predator 2, for reasons. I had too-young children for Alien vs Predator, and I have been actively avoiding the later sequels, for no good reason.
This one ...
First of all, there's heavy Daughter of Sineya vibe here. I love writing and reading the stories of fictional Slayers, and for a woman to insist she's a hunter and warrior when her people tell her she's not, and then going after not only an anachronistically-overpowered foe, but an otherworldly overpowered foe, is just everything.
But that's not all of it.
Remember that movies have rules and the Predator has rules. The team that Dutch leads are organized to save kidnapped people, but Dillon lies to them, tricks them into doing an assault to rescue people who are not there. To just go in and destroy everyone. This brings them into harm's way, of course, but it also marks them as soiled. Like kids who have premarital sex, they're in a horror movie, they've done wrong, and they must be punished.
The Predator has rules. The targets are predators. They are people holding weapons. They have captured a revolutionary, Anna (Elpidia Carrillo). She's small, especially compared to the muscular man-mountains of Dutch (Arnold Schwarzenegger), Dillon (Carl Weathers), Mac (Bill Duke), Blain (Jesse Ventura) and Billy (Sonny Landham). She could be armed - Nature made Humanity, but Mikhail Kalashnikov made them Equal - but she isn't, so we can know that she's "safe" and the others are not, because Movie Morals and Predator Ethics make it so.
However, what that also does is make the removal of agency of the only woman - moreso, a woman of color - a crucial element of the plot.
Prey seems to give that agency back, in an extreme prequel where she's hamstrung with "stone knives and bear skins", to quote Spock - actually a bow with a flint arrowhead and a stone, maybe flint axe - but with agency.
I can't wait.