Action Movies Can Have Women
How sad is it that we praise a big-budget action flick for having a whopping total of two female characters with more than one line? I’d say pretty sad. Sure, Thor 2 managed to have a total of four women (Four! Out of a cast of, like, ten dudes with speaking roles! Holy crap, you guys, that’s almost half! /sarcasm]), but most of them don’t. Thor 2 seriously the only movie I can think of with that many female characters. The standard seems to be two. Or less.
Why is this acceptable? And I’d like to not hear the crap about “But these movies are FOR guys so obviously they’ll have GUYS doing GUY stuff. Psh, girls don’t pilot starships or fight robots or get eaten by dinosaurs.” Except that they do.
Jurassic Park was made in, what, 1996? (Which put my scarring for life at age 11?) 1996 and they managed to have two major female roles, one of which was a paleobotanist who fought off velociraptors (technically they should have been deinonychus but I forgive you, Michael Crichton and excuse me while I go cry in a corner for a few minutes). The other was a nerd girl who literally saved the main cast from being eaten with her hacker skills. Both of them contributed to the story. Both of them had a function that was more than “gets menaced.” Jurassic Park 4, coming out in 2015, I think? I haven’t seen a single one. Not one woman. It seems, for now, to be a total sausage fest.
Transformers 4 has one female that I’m aware of and her only scenes in the trailers are “looks pretty” and “gets menaced.” That’s not cool. I know, I know, it’s a Michael Bay movie, Mr. “I introduce my leading ladies ass-first, what do you mean that’s sexist?” But why? Why does the down-on-his-luck machinist have to be a guy? Why can’t the movie be about a kick-ass mechanic, her rebellious I’m-not-following-in-your-footsteps daughter, and her scruffy-yet-charming boyfriend? Or about a dad, his daughter, and her girlfriend? (Michael Bay movie, I know, it’ll never happen.)
We used to be “happy” having at least one woman around to talk words and stare longingly at the heroes manly muscles. Then we started getting two ladies with screen time. I’d like to see it go further. I’d like to see a major Hollywood blockbuster where the main character is a woman, who has side characters (that she has a relationship with and talks to) who are also women. And while some movies manage to pull that off, I’d like to see it in more than two or three a year. Seriously, people, we make up half the population. I’d like to see that on film, please.
(And please stop making all the women white. There are other ethnicities.)
