drst:
ok the thing about the Bechdel Test and Pacific Rim…
It’s not that failing the Bechdel Test automatically means that it’s a bad movie- in fact, it was an awesome movie, and I love the fact that the female character had her own arc that wasn’t just a tool in a male character’s arc. It was a wonderful and refreshing way to develop a character.
The thing that bugged me, and messed with my experience with the movie, is how few women there were. Again, this does not make PR a bad movie. It was just something I noticed again and again and it threw me off balance time and time again (this is probably a sign that the media I’ve been exposed to has a decent amount of female representation, and that’s why it felt so strange to me.) It just hit me constantly that there weren’t very many women, and it distracted me from the otherwise gorgeous movie.
And on the logical/realism side of things, how come it’s reasonable that countries and corporations (I scoffed audibly at that) would put aside their self interests for this threat, yet it’s apparently not reasonable that women would be just as interested in protecting the Earth as men? I counted two female Jaeger pilots, including Mako, out of at least 11 shown in the movie. So, where are the women?
So it’s not so much that it didn’t pass the Bechdel Test that’s the problem. Women are not treated like props here. There’s just so few of them that it’s unnerving.
I agree and don’t agree with this. As I’ve mentioned before, there are actually tons of women in all the scenes in the Shatterdomes. Any time there are a lot of extras, except for the construction crew on the wall, there are women in the crowd.
But, yeah. Given how little screen time the Wei triplets got (and they should’ve gotten more because they were awesome in their own right and also Asian rather than more white people) but why couldn’t they have been women? Why is the only other woman in the movie with a name and lines a married woman?
On the other other hand, I know there are plenty of female Jaeger pilots in the universe (Tamsin, Pentecost’s copilot, for one). But, they were in the universe not in the movie itself.
Then my brain gets confused and I think “I am thankful for Mako Mori and will consider this a good start and hopefully if they make a second one and it happens as a prequel, which is my desire, we will see far more female pilots and POC.”