Saw the trailer for this movie right before Dead Snow 2. (Which was AWESOME by the way. AWESOME, My review for that will be doing up on the Skiffy and Fanty blog too and I’ll try to remember to link it here.)
On its face, there’s a lot of stuff that I should like. Draught apocalypse! Climate disaster! Science fiction! Western genre cues! But… ugh.
“She’s a flower. Someone needs to appreciate her for more than cookin’ and sewin’.”
Wouldn’t that be revolutionary. Or wait, you know what would be even more revolutionary? If instead of men talking about how a woman should get to be so much more than her stereotypical qualities, she actually got to fucking be more than that.
The men in this trailer do stuff. They seethe with manpain and point guns at each other! The women are pretty much objects in the trailer. We get mom, who is literally tethered to some kind of mysterious device (looks interesting, I admit I’m curious), and sister, who is apparently there for the men to squabble over. She pretty much never speaks for herself, just shouts at dad about his dad failings and then says a line I couldn’t quite catch at the end, but the men certain talk about who gets to have a claim to her.
Obvious metaphor alert! Blonde girl in white dress (possibly pregnant) that men are fighting over while they simultaneously clash over bringing life to the barren land!
Barf. Barf barf barf.
I’m just… aggravated. Just this entire trailer aggravates me. You know what’s just amazing and revolutionary? Women exist in the world as people. We are not just sister or wife or mother. We’re fucking people. We have an existence outside of whatever proprietary relationships men can claim.
Women characters should also be people.
This isn’t a new problem. And you know, sometimes I could even be on board about the walking metaphor if it weren’t just one. More. Goddamn. Thing. I’m just so sick of it that my tolerance has hit zero. Maybe I’ll change my mind about Young Ones after I see another trailer where Elle Fanning gets to do more than stare blankly at the camera. As it is, I have a feeling I’ll end up leaving the theater pissed off because I’m tired of seeing white dudes having manpain wars over a metaphor with flowing hair and tits.
You know, I saw “The Youg Ones trailer” and wondered how they were going to cope wit the loss of Rik Mayall and what the hell is Hollywood going to do with anarcolefties and skins. But, no, not the same one.