Hollywood awakens to girl power
FOR the true Star Wars geek (me) the list of great things about the newest addition to the canon, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, is too long to mention. But one thing stands out a mile. We have a new girl hero and she has forever busted the myth women can’t be blockbuster action leads in mass-audience classics.
If Princess Leia blasted away at stereotypical ideas about what women in action (or any) movies could be in the original Star Wars in 1977, Rey, the scavenger girl-turned-warrior-star of The Force Awakens, has smashed what’s left of them to smithereens.
As Rey, Daisy Ridley builds on the legacy of recent powerful female leads – such as Charlize Theron’s fierce Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road and Jennifer Lawrence’s tough-as-nails Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games franchise – and establishes young, strong and powerful women as equal to anyone or anything that comes at them. Or anything that would be thrown at a bloke.
When a “girl” (as she’s referred to throughout the movie) has the confidence to grab the controls of the Millennium Falcon and drive it like a boss, you know progress has been made.
Doing everything a male hero could do (and zero screaming at any point) is natural and normal for Rey.
The assumption she is strong and in charge is never questioned.
It’s not that she doesn’t have feelings, Rey is a three-dimensional young woman with a heart that aches for the family she lost – we’re not told how. She’s capable of love and fear but she is as pragmatic and driven as Princess Leia or Han Solo were and still are. They are people in the teeth of a crisis, so it’s her survival instincts that count and come to the fore.
Rey has the guts and self-belief of any male action star.
She has none of the wimpy “save-me-my-prince-ness” of Twilight’s Bella Swan and all of the metal of Sigourney Weaver as Ripley from Aliens – whose character comes constantly to mind as Rey powers on.
Her character is as physically accomplished as any dude in the movie, she’s an electronics whiz and brilliant pilot, she’s independent and wears no visible makeup.
Riley is beautiful and her character has the lithe frame Hollywood adores, but so little regard is paid to making her appearance part of her appeal.
Rey has zero costume changes until the last scene ... in which she’s still decked out workaday pilot-style.
What’s to be celebrated is not that characteristics traditionally demanded of Hollywood’s female leading characters good and bad – femininity and sexiness, signs of serious self-doubt – have been dispensed with by Disney as it crafted Rey, it’s that these things are never needed to make her compelling or userfriendly.
Also very positive is the fact that given the acknowledged key market for Hollywood is young men, the fact producers knew a film in which a non-sexily presented girl was the hero would be embraced without question shows real progress has been made.
Rey is a good thing to happen for our girls ... Take them to see The Force Awakens.