What a great movie. OK, not. But, as I was saying last night, I actually found everything pre/historically fine until the guys showed up with metal tools and weapons. And then the boats. And then the big stone edifices, about 6 or 8,000 years too early. But as soon as someone said "they're from Atlantis" (or the stars, to be fair to my E.T. brethren), I just relaxed and decided I was watching a Conan story.
I agree that the lead woman was kind of a sap. Women from Stone Age-equivalent tribes (19th-c. Amer. Indians, or above-the-falls Amazonians) are stoic and fierce, even if not hunters themselves. And some say that early agricultural societies were matriarchical, so it's not too much of a stretch to claim positions of authority for women in hunter-gatherer groups.
Speaking of women in authority, I disagree that the Old Mother was a passive figure. All that time she was freezing or bleeding, she was using her magic to keep the people safe! And she actively changes things quite a bit at the end, through force of will. (This was a weak story moment, but not on account of her.)
In this paragraph, I will not bring up "300." I will just say that a strong leading woman in that story had the historical leeway to be much more "Girl Power" than they wrote her for. Okay, I guess that is bringing it up.
Does "Terminator 2" count as both being about women and having a band-together theme? "Serenity"? Of course we're just talking about _pop culture_ movies here. Maybe it's our current war-against-the-world era that encourages all these man-vs.-society (lone wolf, superhero) and men-vs.-society (armies, movements) movies. For all that, superhero/loner women are not uncommon.
Of course, "10,000 B.C." was about much, much more than fighting oppressors. It was about fighting weird, alien oppressors. The freakishly large, god-like master needed his pyramids (with the gold nibs at the top) to bring his two dead Atlantean companions (no doubt entombed inside) back to life. The poor, misguided Egyptians built mere copies of these resurrection engines 6,000 years later, without any knowledge of what really made them tick.
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I agree that the lead woman was kind of a sap. Women from Stone Age-equivalent tribes (19th-c. Amer. Indians, or above-the-falls Amazonians) are stoic and fierce, even if not hunters themselves. And some say that early agricultural societies were matriarchical, so it's not too much of a stretch to claim positions of authority for women in hunter-gatherer groups.
Speaking of women in authority, I disagree that the Old Mother was a passive figure. All that time she was freezing or bleeding, she was using her magic to keep the people safe! And she actively changes things quite a bit at the end, through force of will. (This was a weak story moment, but not on account of her.)
In this paragraph, I will not bring up "300." I will just say that a strong leading woman in that story had the historical leeway to be much more "Girl Power" than they wrote her for. Okay, I guess that is bringing it up.
Does "Terminator 2" count as both being about women and having a band-together theme? "Serenity"? Of course we're just talking about _pop culture_ movies here. Maybe it's our current war-against-the-world era that encourages all these man-vs.-society (lone wolf, superhero) and men-vs.-society (armies, movements) movies. For all that, superhero/loner women are not uncommon.
Of course, "10,000 B.C." was about much, much more than fighting oppressors. It was about fighting weird, alien oppressors. The freakishly large, god-like master needed his pyramids (with the gold nibs at the top) to bring his two dead Atlantean companions (no doubt entombed inside) back to life. The poor, misguided Egyptians built mere copies of these resurrection engines 6,000 years later, without any knowledge of what really made them tick.