Out of Pod Experience

None of these was ever in a Disney film, except Lindsay Lohan in the rather good "Freaky Friday" remake with Jamie Lee Curtis.

Like the original with Jodie Foster, a great kid's film with a cast led by 2 women (well, one woman and one girl).

Tell that to those who Kickstarted the "Veronica Mars" movie.

Morpheus: Intellectual Property is the crock that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
Neo: What truth?
M: Ideas can't be owned.

Now if you want to talk about distribution rights... that's another story.

In the second movie? Sure, but the whole "seriously mentally ill" thing was a wrench.

In the first movie she spends the entire time running until the last 10 minutes when she finds her spine.

Welp, there is the entire "Expendables" series.

The first Terminator movie was pretty trashy and chauvanistic. Sarah spends all her time running around scared and being protected by a big strong man. It makes sense from a story perspective, sure, but that sort of plot writing was beyond typical those days, nay it was the bread and butter of the movie industry--even science fiction which is usually known for being more culturally mature than that.

The second Terminator movie really made a great turnaround as they showed how Sarah turned around and stopped running scared, and started actually taking a stand to defend herself. Not only did they make her strong, they revealed her to be a very caring and selfless person. Not many people in her position would have fought to save the world like she did, especially when she already knew she wasn't going to live to see the fall of society.

Alien was an obvious attempt at showing people that women could play major roles in movies. They didn't make Ripley into a female action star, they made her into a male action star played by a woman. Sigourney Weaver's character in the first movie was rather reminiscent of Ed Harris' character in The Abyss, except Ripley was more masculine than Bud. In later releases they made Ripley more feminine without taking away her badassness or destroying any previously existing elements of her character. I think that's pretty amazing and overlooked.

There are a lot of movies with powerful women stars, but there is still a majority in which women are at least slightly marginalized. Of course, most of that is simply because movie characters tend to be similar to real people. Women in '60s film are a pretty uncanny representation of real women in the '60s.

I think the Mortal Kombat movie actually has one of the best representations of a realistic female action hero. Ignoring the fantasy elements and superhuman fighting prowess that humans possess, you have a female action hero, Sonya Blade, who is well aware that the men around her expect her to be weaker than they are and to need help. She hates this because she's had to fight it all her life. As one of the most powerful women in the world, she has lived a life of showing men that she's not to be trifled with. But just the same, there are several or even many men that are stronger and more powerful than she is. When it comes to elite world-class fighting against superhumans and immortals, she needs more help than Johnny Cage does. But that's not to say she is weak. On the contrary, she showed us what she is made of multiple times throughout the movie. She is feminine, human, strong, powerful, skilled, intelligent, brave, independent, feminist, challenging, and outgoing. These are the traits you can expect to see in a top-class warrior woman who isn't exceptionally manly hormonally.

So true. It was sad watching the movie and seeing years of content and character development condensed into a couple hours. It was not unlike when a woman gets tired of sex and the man tries to finish up really fast.

That's also the film that sent out harbingers of the badness to come. Mainly Ewoks. So, what's a person to do ?

So JJ Abrams believes it is his duty to uphold the male-centric-ness of the Star Wars franchise? Where was his sense of duty when he decided not to uphold the gender diversity of the Star Trek franchise?

After reading that article you just linked, Krixtal, I found myself visiting the Bechdel test site. After a journey of discovery, I came to the conclusion that I've hated male-centric movies all my life and never realized it. I had always had a certain distaste for a wide variety of movies that I couldn't explain. I examined their traits thoroughly and found nothing "wrong" with them that I could see. So why didn't I like them? Well apparently what they all have in common is that they fail the Bechdel test.

JJ Abrams' take on Star Trek was a huge díck-slap to Star Trek fans everywhere as it subverted nearly everything that made the series great. I have often agreed, however, that if the movies were exactly the same except for the movie name not being "Star Trek" and character names not including Star Trek characters, that it would have been a pretty good movie. But there was always something more that I disliked about it. Now I know what it is. There's hardly any women, and the few there are are flat and featureless characters.

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On another note, I found a link to a flowchart for female characters, to see what type they are. I decided to use the chart to label one of my favorite characters, Amy Wong from Futurama, who most people have told me they find very annoying and generally just a lousy character. Well I'm not sure if she passes the first item, I am half and half on whether or not she could carry her own story. If she can, she passes the rest and is a strong female character (according to the chart). If she can't, she goes down and winds up at wild card. I think the two together are actually a pretty good descriptor of her character. She's individual and self-centered (but not mean about it), and is also very much one of the wild card characters that the writers use to build random stories for episodes. She has some backstory, but it's mostly still unwritten and the writers seem to prefer that.

You want strong female lead you say. I present to you one of the strongest female leads in my mind

I spit on your grave.