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Powerful Women and the Men Who Love Them
“If this movie doesn’t make money, it reinforces a stereotype in Hollywood that men don’t go see women do action movies.” That was what actress/producer Elizabeth Banks said in response to her film Charlie’s Angels tanking at the box office to the tune of 13 million dollars and change.
Huh? Wait a second. I’m a man, and I have a coffee mug named Ripley.
Ripley was the no-nonsense leader from Aliens. She single-handedly took out a colony of Xenomorphs. She went toe to toe with their queen.
I freaking loved that.
And I’m not alone. Ask any guy to list their favorite action movies and I’ll bet you’ll get votes for films from the Star Wars, Alien, and The Terminator franchises. Several of these contain incredibly strong female main characters — Ellen Ripley, Sarah Connor, Rey, Princess Leia, and Jyn Erso, to name a few.
So Elizabeth Banks is wrong. Men will spend money to see women in action movies, with one caveat: The movies must not suck.
Her logic is based on a misguided perception of misogyny, which is ironic, considering that Banks’ most profitable role to date was in The Hunger Games franchise, a wildly popular series of films with a strong female lead. The later Hunger Games films didn’t do as well as the first two, but that wasn’t because men didn’t want to see strong women; on the contrary, Katniss, the main character, became increasingly unlikable as the story moved on. The Hunger Games franchise went from being a fun action movie to a thoughtful message film filled with pseudo-psychological commentary.
Whatever. I just wanted to see more exploding arrows.
Don’t get me wrong, I love many genres of film. But with an action movie, all I really want to see is, well, some cool action with characters I care about. I want to root for them, and I couldn’t care less whether or not their armor is designed to fit curves.
Here is a shocker: Success at the box office has little to do with the gender of the cast and much more to do with good writing and quality acting. Making a film with all-female leads for the express purpose of making a statement about female empowerment always looks dumb, because it is. The Marvel Cinematic Universe has tons of great female characters, but the girl-power-pander scene in Avengers Endgame was cringe-worthy. So was the record scratch cue up of No Doubt’s I’m Just a Girl playing during Captain Marvel’s main fight scene. Both scenes were overtly in-your-face ways of saying, “See. We’ve got girls. And they’re really tough, too.” The scenes were unnecessary, and they actually served the opposite purpose of marginalizing the characters on multiple levels.
Great action movies don’t beat the protagonist’s gender over our heads. The characters shine because we care about who they are and what they’re going through. Gender may play a significant role in a certain hero’s journey, but that is not why we love them. Case in point: Sarah Connor.
Sarah Connor’s journey began in The Terminator (1984) where she was depicted as the farthest thing from a hero one could draw up. She played the damsel in distress for most of the film; tried to run away, was very much the victim. We watched her evolve as she learned of her importance to future events and went through a little hell before finally stepping up in the movie’s third-act, becoming the unlikely hero. She was feminine, she was frightened by scary things, but she learned how to push past that fear to accomplish the mission.
By the time Terminator 2 came around, Sarah Connor had surpassed Leia Organa as the second most badass woman in film (it’s hard to top Ripley) and we — men who love action movies — adored her. She wasn’t sexy, she wasn’t funny, and she was emotionally unstable. That’s pretty much the archetype of the girl you want to avoid. But Sarah Connor got away with that, because she could pump a 12-gauge pistol-grip shotgun with one arm. She could look a killer cyborg in the eye and tell it to go [expletive] itself. And her motivation wasn’t some modernist notion of social justice girl power. No, she fought for the most basic, the most feminine of all motivations: To protect her offspring.
The most recent film to elicit this kind of reaction to a strong female character was Emily Blunt’s performance in A Quiet Place. That film ended with her character wielding a shotgun as well, but that wasn’t what made her amazing. What impressed guys like me was the way she managed to deliver a baby all by herself, in relative silence, with killer aliens in the next room. That was awesome. Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley would have given her props for that move.
There is a deleted scene on the Director’s Cut of Aliens where we see Ellen Ripley returning to Earth after being marooned in deep-space cryosleep for fifty-seven years. She discovers that while she was away, her daughter died an old woman, and it’s a loss that ignites her motherly instinct later in the film when she chooses to postpone her own escape to take on that massive colony of acid-spewing Xenomorphs a third time — alone, because all but one of her Marines have been killed — to rescue a little girl.
A little while ago I went with some men to see the latest iteration of Sarah Connor on the big screen in Terminator: Dark Fate. Sarah Connor is now in her sixties, with grey hair and wrinkles that Clint Eastwood would appreciate. Once again, she was awesome. She was tough, vulnerable, made mistakes, and had to swallow her pride a few times. But she could still go toe to toe with a Terminator.
That is the kind of female action hero we want. Not the kind that denies her femininity, but the one who gains power from it.
Published in Entertainment
It’s the truth. Men couldn’t possibly be capable of any emotional investment into a story where a woman’s survival is at stake.
Whether women live or die has just never had much of an effect on us.
The actual content gets going around the 1.45 mark.
I think the whole interview is worth watching, but, for those of you short on free time, the first couple minutes gives a sense of what genuine analysis can tell us about the spectacles we like to see.
The other problem with some woke feminist empowerment movies today is the dread Mary Sue symptom, which you’d think after being around for 45 years now screenwriters and directors would avoid like the plague. But both Captain Marvel and, to a greater extent, Rey in the current “Star Wars” trilogy suffer from the problem of the people making the movies wanting us to love powerful female characters without giving us any reason to empathize with those characters.
Ripley and Sarah Connor shared the same thing as male characters like Luke Skywalker or Tony Stark, in that before their triumphs, they have to suffer threats and/or outright defeats and endure, which bonds the audience with the characters. Too many of the today’s filmmakers want the triumph, but don’t want to write in the setbacks or failures, because that’s somehow seen as creating negative images of those female characters.
So Captain Marvel essentially cuts in line to become the most powerful character in the MCU, just in time for Avengers: Endgame, but where the negative reaction to the character and to Brie Larson’s SJW diatribes against critics apparently caused the studio to extremely limit her participation in the final movie, and re-think plans to make her the lead character in MCU v2.0.
Same deal with Rey — she essentially goes from knowing nothing about The Force to the Universe’s most powerful Force-aware being in the span of about two weeks in Episodes VII and VIII, and the effort to finally explain why, which appears to be the key to Episode IX’s plot, will likely make things worse, not better (i.e. — Rey’s power comes from being a spawn of Palpatine, who she apparently is going to kill at the end of the new chapter … which negates everything Luke and Darth Vader did to battle and defeat Palpatine at the end of Episode VI. The triumph there now was no triumph at all, simply because wokeness kept them from making Rey into a truly flawed/vulnerable character that audiences could bond with).
The previous versions of Charlie’s Angels made good money. Did humans change a lot in the last 20 years? Or, maybe this specific movie is not good or fresh enough.
So true.
I love Ripley and Sarah Conner. Their toughness was more real than say, The Bride (Uma Thurman) in Kill Bill 1 (but still fun to watch).
The video game Alien: Isolation gives the player a fairly realistic feel of what it’s like to be trapped on a busted space station with one of the creatures. One add-on even lets you recreate the end of Alien, where Ripley escapes the Nostromo.
But yes, the transition of Sarah Conner from young working chick trying to live her life into a still-frightened but determined to survive fighter is great storytelling.
Listen: Elizabeth Banks had a major role in The Hunger Games films. Those were action films with a strong female lead. They grossed nearly $3,000,000,000 worldwide, according to Wikipedia. So…she’s just flat wrong.
The first Charlie’s Angels reboot grossed $264M and was mildly entertaining.
It’s sequel brought in just under $260M. I never saw it.
It may be that the world didn’t need a third reboot.
Why would one version of Charlie’s Angels be more popular than another? Hmmmm . . . could it be casting?
Yeah. I watched the first few minutes of the pilot episode of “LA’s Finest,” which is on SpectrumTV On Demand, and supposedly “from the Bad Boys Cinematic Universe,” what ever that means (🤣). I turned it off pretty quickly, though, because they had just swapped out Martin Lawrence and Will Smith for Jessica Alba* and Gabrielle Union, and two (petite) women cracking wise while getting into a shoot out in a convenience store and tossing bad guys around is just… not believable. It’s not actually fun to watch women do impossible physical things. That’s what was great about Alien and Terminator. Ripley and Sarah Connor are real women put in difficult situations and don’t suddenly have unexplained superpowers.
This is also why I did not like the first Star Wars movie with Rey. She’s a Mary Sue. (A term referring to a female character who can magically do everything perfectly.) Yeah, yeah, the Force, etc. But the Force didn’t make Luke an expert light saber dueler. He had to train. Rey didn’t, she just suddenly vanquished Kylo Ren the first time she literally ever touched a light saber. Eh, no. Not believable, even in the Star Wars universe.
Speaking of which, the trailer for Black Widow just came out. The most interesting thing in it, I think, is David Harbour (the Sheriff in “Stranger Things”).
But, oh, yeah, back to the point: does anyone think Black Widow is not going to do absolute gang busters at the box office?
Also, I really liked Wonder Woman. Since Diana is a Demi-God, I waive the “not fun to watch women do impossible physical things” rule from my previous comment. However, I did skip Captain Marvel due to the gross comments made by Bree Larson. I did see Avengers: Endgame, and thought it was just absolutely absurd how Captain Marvel is so powerful that the scriptwriters literally had to send her to the other side of the universe (for no reason) in order to have a story arc. Otherwise the movie would have been 35 minutes long.
After watching “License to Kill” I decided that Carrie Lowell was my favorite Bond girl. Mrs Tex says it’s solely because the 12 gauge: (about 0:45)
I’ve tried watching it three times now, and I just get bored part-way in and turn it off. There’s nothing there for a viewer to identify with or latch onto. Which has nothing to do with it being about a woman and everything to do with really bad writing.
They could have gotten away with Episode VII, since they were mimicking the story arc of the original trilogy there, and while Luke had some emotional setbacks in “A New Hope”, he really doesn’t get physically and mentally beaten up until the second half of “The Empire Strikes Back”.
So flaws of “The Force Awakens” aside, they could have gotten the audiences to care about Rey in Episode VIII if they had given her the same type of physical/mental obstacles to overcome. Instead, Rian Johnson decided Rey being more powerful than Kylo wasn’t good enough; now she’s able to defeat Luke after about 45 minutes of training in The Force. Which still left Snoke as supposedly a more powerful force-user than Rey … except that Johnson has him so force-unaware, he gets bisected by Kylo, and now, there’s no overriding user of the dark side powers around in the entire story.
That’s why J.J. Abrams had to bring Palpatine back. “The Last Jedi” left Rey with no challenges worthy of the powers she’s been given by the scripts, but in resuccrecting Vader’s boss after killing Kylo’s boss, Abrams is going to make Luke and Vader’s victory over Palpatine meaningless (What’s next for Episode X — we see Rey go back in time and secretly put down the kill shot to destroy the Death Star that Luke thought he accomplished? Perfect, unflawed characters only work as a source of parody and mockery, but Lucasfilms and other woke outlets don’t get that).
Very few women actors have the potential to be the heroes in action movies.
I am fascinated by the casting function in movie making. I used to think it was odd to see that category among the Academy Awards, so I’ve paid better attention to the casting of movies and television shows than I would otherwise. I can now see why now it is so important. Even if the set and script and direction are perfect, if the actors are wrong for the parts, the production will fail.
(Having drawn my husband’s attention to this aspect of movie production too, we now laugh when we notice that all the supporting cast members look alike–“When are they going to realize that they need more than one casting director!”)
The most important ingredient for action movies or television shows is casual and funny banter among the heroes. I can’t think of any women actors who are good at that other than Helen Mirren.
People watch action movies for the jokes in the face of pending doom and annihilation.
I think there’s also a bit of exhaustion at play. We’ve had “GIRL POWER!” jammed down our throats for a couple generations now, and it’s getting worse all the time. We’re supposed to simultaneously accept girls as badass towers of strength, but also perpetual victims of the patriarchy who need to be constantly reminded of their victimhood through the construction of contrived barriers everywhere, and then shoved through all the glass ceilings they encounter, mostly imaginary.
It’s so tiring to be endlessly lectured.
I recently read a review of a movie that was essentially “This was a great film, but it fails the Bechdel Test, so I have to rate it low.” Because entertainment now is about ticking all the boxes.
I think that might have been one of the things that bored me about Captain Marvel. There was snark, and lots of it. But there was no wit.
I thought Sandra Bullock and Melissa McCarthy did it well in The Heat. But Helen is fabulous . . .
My daughter, 19, is a huge Marvel fan. Watches all the movies, knows all the story lines, has all the Pop figures. She hates Captain Marvel and Bree Larson. That’s enough for me.
I wanted to look like Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2. I thought she had the ideal body for a BA woman. She was my standard for fitness.
I didn’t go see the last terminator because… well… goodness. There have been a lot of terminators. I also heard it was all about “girl power” in the way that you describe the “bad film,” and I am a woman!!! (I hate the entire GP phrase now–makes me want to hit someone in the face with a frying pan–which seems ironic.)
If this last terminator flick is a genuinely good movie, though, perhaps I’ll take the time to see it at some point.
I went in with a high degree of scepticism based on the woke comments of the director, and a bunch of YouTube videos hating on it. I was ready for the worst but was pleasantly surprised. It was good because Linda Hamilton and Arnold were good. I even liked the new twist they put on the franchise going forward (if it survives, the numbers haven’t been kind) with the young protagonist.
I saw it with my good friend who is also a passionate Terminator fan and he agreed. The last film Terminator: Genysis was pretty awful though.
Is that the one where John Conner was a terminator?
Captain Marvel is Superman, minus the interesting origin story, minus the weakness to Kryptonite, minus the complicated relationships, minus the survivor’s guilt, minus the interesting villains, etc. etc. etc.
It’s not just women. This is also the primary factor that separates good James Bond movies from bad James Bond movies. The worst James Bond movies are the ones where 007 breaks the freaking laws of physics. He’s not supposed to be a supernatural being.
Personally, I’m a Michelle Yeoh fan.
If you’re going to have a female action star, the actress should actually know a thing or two about stunts and martial arts.
Oh, yes. Don’t get me started on Halle Berry walking out of the Cuban surf with the same outfit that Ursula Andress wore in Dr No. A plethora of worthies. This deserves its own conversation.
BTW, somehow the comment was someone else’s.
I’m not generally a fan of action movies, and especially not of superhero movies, so my awareness is limited. But it appears to me that many if not most of the modern “strong woman” roles are simply male characters (with mostly male motivations and psychology) into which a female actor has been cast. They make no sense. Sarah Connor’s character made sense for the reason you note, which is also the reason the fierce “mama bear” protecting her cubs is a well understood characterization.
I also dislike the unrealistic portrayal of 120 lb. women knocking around 200 lb. men in defiance of the laws of physics (absent some pre-established and specific superpower usable in specific circumstances).
Your final comment perfectly summarizes what makes the recent crop of “girl power” pseudo-heroines so dull and uninteresting. They are not powerful women. They are feminized superannuated boys shorn of every trace of femininity except the secondary sex characteristics.
And it was reassuring to read someone else finally noticing the connection between the death of Ellen Ripley’s daughter and her almost instant “adoption” of Newt in Aliens.
I’m surprised it was cut from the theatrical release. It seems such an important part of her character arc.
Yeah, but in the 80’s action movies were rarely over two hours so they had to trim something. Glad we have so many viewing options today.
Have you seen “In The Dark” yet? It’s a series perhaps originally on Showtime but Netflix picked it up. Might be over on Amazon now.
No super heroes, but the lead character is a dynamic individual who is ascerbic in her approach to life and won’t stop at anything until she finds out who killed her young AA friend. It is set in Chicago, where friendships between white people and AA are organic, as this relationship was portrayed. (None of the phoney baloney “We need one Asian, one AA, one gay person, one American Indian and two blacks” nonsense plaguing everything from commercials to TV sit coms these days.)
Her back story relates to her losing her eyesight at the age of 12.
My spouse and I are big Terminator fans and this is one series we enjoyed almost as much. We haven’t watched it since she solved the murder, but it was well worth the ride while it lasted.
Don’t James Bond movies almost always break the laws of physics?
I mean, how likely is it that a countdown to nuclear holocaust will always stop at six seconds before detonation?