Predator is one of those long-standing franchises for both horror and science fiction. With the latest film, Prey, on the way it will mark seven official movies in the Predator canon (when you count the two crossover films with the Alien franchise). But director Dan Trachtenberg plans to try a slightly different direction, and with it comes a very cool alternate language track.
Before going into it, let’s talk about Prey. The film will follow Naru, a Comanche warrior who is hell bent on keeping her people safe from the deadly hunting alien that has breached into their world. John Davis, who is producing the film, has stated that Prey is an attempt to steer back to what made the first Predator movie work. The film will focus on the ingenuity of humanity and showing how a character that won’t give up, and who uses their brains, can outmatch an overall stronger and more technologically advanced enemy. You can see some of that in the trailer for the film below.
While the above is great to hear, what makes Prey stand out amongst the rest of the series is its handling of the Comanche language. The film will not only feature the characters speaking their native language occasionally, with English being the main dialogue, but the entire movie will be in Comanche. /Film spoke with Trachtenberg and producer Jhane Myers about the film. Myers, who is Comanche, spoke about the impact of utilizing the language in the movie itself rather than just blatantly having the characters speak English and ignore this important detail.
"That's really important to me being Comanche and working with our Comanche language department, also with working with Comanche language speakers. But just the fact that people will have a choice, the world will have a choice to listen to the whole film in Comanche is amazing."
Breaking New Ground
Disney+
The indigenous people of the United States have a long, ugly history with Hollywood. According to the Indigenous Language Institute, there are 175 indigenous languages that are still spoken in the United States. Once upon a time that number was over 300. While indigenous filmmakers are still out there and creating their own works, to have major movies being dubbed in their own languages is still an uncommon practice. According to Myers, Prey will be the first film made available in the Comanche language.
"That's never been done for my tribe, ever. There's only a couple of movies. I think 'Star Wars,' which was 30 years old when they transcribed it into Navajo, and then there was Navajo again for 'Finding Nemo,' which was 20 years old when they did that. But this is the first time for a brand new film to come out and have that option to hear it all in the whole language. So that not only inspires the young language speakers of my nation, but that inspires a lot of other people and shows them, and like I said, shows the world what our language is about. Which is thrilling for me."
Jhane also spoke with Comicbook.com about the excitement of bringing her culture into a big budget franchise. She noted that it was the first time she was involved with a project that allowed her to utilize her skills and knowledge in such a way.
“It's great because I have a great knowledge of our history, because I've worked with museums, I've also studied different aspects of our culture, but to put all of those in there at once it is just amazing. Even some of our stories, some of our language stories, all of those nuances is something really new to this franchise.”
Prey will be making its grand debut on Hulu on August 5th!