Prey: The Significance of Naru's Pistol

gamerant.com:

Franchise media often builds most of its cultural cache off of continuity, callbacks, and winks to older material. Bad versions of this technique rest the entirety of a story on stuff fans remember in a desperate attempt to succeed off nostalgia alone. Good versions build an interesting story and find fun ways to tie it into what came before.

Prey is easily the best iteration of the popular Predator franchise since the first, possibly even stronger than the original. It's a prequel that explores the first encounter between the human race and the iconic Yautja hunters almost 270 years before the first film's events.

Prey Review

Prey follows the adventures of Naru, a skilled Comanche warrior who seeks to prove herself in a hunt against a deadly foe. When a new threat emerges from the depths of space and begins to demonstrate its lethal capabilities, Naru finds herself against something much tougher than a wild animal. Through her hunts, Naru comes across simple metal traps, outside the typical techniques of her people, yet well beneath the alien's capabilities. As she struggles against multiple threats, she discovers that violent settlers have set up camp just outside the bounds of her people's native land and set to work devastating the local ecosystem. As if their many crimes weren't bad enough, once Naru comes across them, they take the young lady hostage and begin tormenting her. Except for Raphael Adolini, a bilingual translator who is slightly less cruel.

In short order, the Predator arrives and lays waste to the settler camp, easily butchering the armed crowd. Their theoretically superior firepower still pales in comparison to Yautja technology, their tactics break down almost immediately, and their insistence on combat