A Lot of Women in Movies are Weak Today, Not Strong

This is Rey.

Rey has carried the torch as the last Jedi from Luke Skywalker. She is the new Jedi prodigy in the Star Wars trilogy about the rise of a new era of Jedi, one that came to our screen several years ago.

In this scene I just posted, we find that Rey can, without any training or backstory, pull moves from a Superman movie, and use the force like Yoda. This is all well and good but it took Yoda 600 years of life in the universe to master those skills and Luke at least 20 long years of intensive training. Rey can fly the milenium falcon without any help and weild a lightsaber like a pro. Rey has no flaws whatsoever and flies through Star Wars on easy mode.

The actress that plays Rey doesn't believe in "weaknesses" when pressed about Reys lack of inherent flaws in one of her interview's she did with a prominent media outlet. In fact, she thinks suggesting others have flaws is sexist and misogynistic.

This might be true for some people but I think that most of the audience would just like to get to know her a little better. Having no flaws, and doing everything first try makes not for an interesting film. The writers have been incredibly lazy with this girl.

Contrast Rey with Princess Leia 40 years ago and we have a completely different story. One may argue that because princess Leia wasn't the main character it doesn't matter, but it does and I'll tell you why. Princess Leia would have worked as a main character if she wasn't a supporting actress.

Take Leia for example. We start off knowing Leia just as Darth Vader completely obliterates her home planet as a show of power because he can. Her mother, her father, gone in an instant. We see Leia wrestle with her high and powerful Royalty status yet fall in love with a low down dirty scoundrel hustler merchant that owes some serious money to some real bad people. In the first episode of Star Wars mostly all Leia does is scream and be protected, but by the third episode when the resistance wins we can see Leia with all the battle scars that an epic saga should have. She's been captured, ransomed, made as a sex slave, and successfully pulled off rescue missions.

We all absolutely loved Princess Leia, but hated Rey. And it was mostly because Rey had no depth. She started off as perfect, and ended as perfect. I hated the last trilogy so much I didn't watch the end episode. In fact this scene turned me off so much that I didn't want to watch any more of it.

This is Sarah

Sarah was massively flawed. So flawed in fact that we start off in Terminator 2 when Sarah was in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.

Sarah's story began when she was just a young haphazard waitress, enjoying life to the fullest. Unfortunately for her she was about to find out that the future had sent a killer machine back to destroy her, and by god is it hard to take down.

Sarah was the ultimate badass. One that we can all relate to in seperate ways. How she began her story as just a young scared little teenage girl, but ended up being the ultimate crazed badass - but not through having an easy life.

You see, we all start off as weak; men and women. It is the struggles we have and how we overcome them that makes us stronger. You don't get to the top of your game from winning everything all the time. You get to the top by coming to barriers and vowing to overcome them. Sarah for example had a massive barrier. She had a trained assassin robot come to kill her little teenage self. She needed to get good at escaping and get sronger as a human being, and fast.

Had all of this not happened to her then she probably would have been as soft and natural as any other girl, married some guy and had a relatively normal life. But it is our struggles that make us stronger as people.

That's why when we see characters with no struggles we just can't relate to them. A huge part of film and fantasy making is getting your audience to relate to the characters in some form.

This is SheHulk

She Hulk tells her cousin Bruce Banner in this scene that she has had a harder life than him because her employers explain her expertise back to her. Oh wow, what a hard life!

He remains surprisingly calm in this episode because we all know Bruce watched the love of his life die, lost his family, his friends, and pretty much the only thing left in his life now is himself, and well, of course, his cousin. I'm not too sure if the writers were aware of how tragic Bruce's backstory is but this only seems to fan the flames of the lack of depth females seem to have in modern films.

One may even ponder that the modern writer can't think of the struggles other people can have but get too overly hung up on their own internal struggles.

I'm no misogynyst but I really can't wait until leading females are written in with depth and quality again. I'm so tired of the modern star that has zero depth and no backstory and get far too hung up on racism or sexism rather than the job they were supposed to do.

The Hero's journey isn't one of just existing as a hero, the end. The Hero's journey is a tale of loss and bereavement, of overcoming impossible barriers and facing internal enemies most people would give up with. And the most important part is everyone can relate with it.

So I'm all for female leads in all forms. Just not the way they are currently written.

Posted using CineTV