Grrrrl Power Movies - Alita and "Marvel"

For what it's worth, Cataline's review pf Alita is pretty much spot on.

That said, while the scene where she tries to rouse the hunters to fight together as soldiers as a groaner - I do not think it was misplaced. I am not sure if it was a deliberate piece of subversion, but it was deliberately awkward.

Instead, I found the repeated line about being tossed aside as just a nothing girl, further in light of another line about someone making the mistake of underestimating her, that made clear the feminist chops of the movie.

Also, yes. there is a bit that could read as being dismissive of gun control. Alita, being from an older age of storytelling, is actually feminine in behavior more often than not. Most of the "super action girl" problems are well lampshaded by the existence of cybernetics and the raw power of her internal lost-tech power supply.

That said, take a deeper look... Alita is the movie Elysium wished it could be.

Iron/scrap city is a multicultural vibrant wasteland. While some of the local bad guys are black or women, the two hunters that pose the greatest danger to Alita and her friends are both painfully white men, with one reminding me a bit of Billy Idol. Vector may be bad, but in the same sense that SVU paints any women who do evil as helpless victims taken advantage of by white men... as Nova, and everyone in the floating city, are painfully white.

There's also a strong transhumanist "love overcomes all barriers" including one party being a whole body cyborg that's harder to look for all of the crap Hollywood pushes at us today.

I gotta grant though that at the very least Cameron found himself a good director, and a good story, and told it with more truth, depth, and subtlety than Avatar or other recent works. The action is intense, the editing in my opinion better than it has a right to be.

I won't bother to see Captain Marvel though.

For other comments on what's going on, with the caveat that the final scores are somewhat closer than originally described, it's worth reading what the Didact has to say, as well as Cataline's analysis of how to do the all-powerful godlike hero, or the amnesiac hero.

As for me, the only things I needed to not be interested, and to know it was feminist agitprop, was the following:

The line in the trailer "what makes (her) a hero"

Discovering afterward that someone arranged the soundtrack so that a fight scene occured to - I kid you not - "I'm Just a Girl" by No Doubt, is just confirmation.

Why was this line a giveaway?

Feminist cant tells us that the only thing keeping women down is the patriarchy - that if men would just get out of the way we'd see how awesome women are. So yes, you can read "what makes her" with "her" fading into "a hero" as "find out why she's a hero", and if the film were more pulp than MCU and if this clearly wasn't an origin story, I'd believe in a chance I could be about a fully-fleshed character stepping onto the stage sans backstory.

But discovering her backstory is the story. It's only kindof the story of how she became a hero. They're signaling the possibility, strong probability IMO, that it's not so much the story of how she is a dramatic character who changes though the story and grows and we watch how she becomes and struggles and grows, but the story of how she rediscovers why she's just so awesome.

And that stupid flourish of fading from "what makes her" to "what makes a hero" is all you need to know that it's about "her" , not just in the sense of captain Marvel being female, but about being female in general.

Figure in all the scenes in the trailer where she's shown as amazingly knowledgeable and proficient, and cocky, and just so cool and all.

Think I'm kidding?

Read the following from a critic's review:

There are so many great scenes here, but also an incredibly amazing moment when you see Carol Danvers throw off the last of her doubts and realize the full extent of her power and IT IS ONE OF THE BEST THINGS I'VE EVER SEEN ON SCREEN.

Mar 11, 2019 | Full Review…

Amie Simon
Three Imaginary Girls

Is there any context where that makes sense other than "she realizes how awesome she is when she's not kept down by the patriarchy and stogy tradition". This reviewer positively crows it's not about her overcoming obstacles and struggling with foes, but overcoming all the times she's been told she can't because she's "just a girl" and how powerful she truly is if she just realizes that.

As opposed to those with male privilege who have to work out, train, take beatings, and struggle to overcome ourselves, physics, and others to truly have and wield power.