So, they're making a Warcraft film. The first thing is that they told Uwe Boll that he wasn't making it, which is kinda amazing. I do not know why people allow him to touch their video game franchises; it's like looking at that kid who just finished wiping his hands on his feces-fouled shirt and thinking, "Hey, I can trust him to hold onto my sandwich."
You cannot.
The other thing about this film is that they are setting it between WarCraft III and World of Warcraft and they are telling it from the Alliance's point of view. The former makes sense because WoW's story is already being told in the game and has been well-traveled by the game's nations' worth of players and I don't feel like it needs to be transposed to the screen. It's a rich world and other stories can be told! The latter irks me because I have a strong urge to cheer on the underdogs, the Horde, and would like a fantasy film that really tells the story from the side of the monstrous folk that are easily marginalized by the self-righteous Alliance. (Not that portraying the Alliance as the stereotypical straw racists would be preferable either.) But it makes sense because telling the story from the Alliance's side allows them to use mainly human characters, i.e., not spend as much time and money on heavy makeup and CGI.
To get to my main point: This Warcraft film is telling a previously untold story that takes place on Azeroth featuring new characters. The characters are completely open. The story itself is relatively open. So what does this mean? We are probably going to get another film about white dudes with beards and swords spouting clichés in English accents and maybe there will be a dwarf with a Scottish accent. Women will be significant in relation to the main characters and expose a lot of skin. I will probably go to see it and I will probably come back to complain a lot.
So, instead, here is the Warcraft film I want to see: I only played WoW on and off for about a year, but play it I did and my first main character is Fariath, a black woman paladin. So, I don't want her specifically in the film, seeing as I don't roleplay so she has no personality. But imagine a film where the protagonist was a black woman who kicked ass.
I'm imagining Gina Torres plays her.
In platemail, wielding a giant warhammer.
There is a method beneath all this besides thinking Gina Torres is hot and amazing as all get out and she needs to be cast in more things now.
The Bechdel Test posits a very simple standard for films: It portrays 1. two women who 2. have a conversation with each other 3. about something besides men.
Seems simple and obvious: I am sure any woman reading this can give an example of how she had one—just one!—conversation with another woman and talked about something besides men. But if you think about it, so few films and television shows pass this test. Because women appear in media almost exclusively for the male gaze, meaning they exist for the purposes of straight men, meaning they are sexualized in ways male characters are not and they have no real interests outside of men.
Which is why so many women characters in romantic comedies could have their job be replaced by any other job and the film would not be impacted much at all. Because a woman's life outside of her romantic relationships is no more significant than the choice of frame for the picture on her desk.
I suspect that this is why so many women in romantic comedies are writers (seriously, think about it), because being a "writer" in the collective imagination of audiences is such a nebulous occupation that it presents almost no pressure and represents no force in a woman's life, freeing up all her time to pursue her lead, or rather, the lead man. At best, a woman's career that actually means something is also an obstacle to the woman's love life and she needs to discover love.
(One reason why The Devil Wears Prada is amazing is that Anne Hathaway SPOILERS chooses to leave her job not for love but because she realized she wasn't who she wanted to be or where she wanted to be anymore. When she meets up with her ex-boyfriend, she does not expect or demand him back. She changed (back) for herself and her ex recognizing that and loving her is a side bonus.)
So, Gina Torres' character would have a woman best friend who was also a Knight of the Silver Hand. Maybe the best friend would be focused on the healing arts in contrast to the combat-focused Gina Torres (holy paladin versus ret/prot paladin for WoW players). And most importantly, they never talk about men. They don't have to dish about the men in their life. They can talk about slaying the Undead Scourge and debate the founding of Orgrimmar.
They will fight in boots with no height to the heel, at all.
I just really want a fantasy film that does not involve white dudes who get more realistic armor and women only get to cast spells or fire arrows in midriff-baring armor. I want a film where women can be something not auxiliary to men.
The problem is that it is not just that nobody is writing stories that pass the Bechdel Test; it's that the film industry does not want to pass the Bechdel Test. And it does not even make sense because action and speculative fiction films that star strong woman characters that are not there for men do well.
And men in the industry persist in dismissing the truth, labeling solid films that profit with strong women as "exceptions" and continue to produce shit films with more of the same actors that look like the people with the most money and power in the industry (i.e., white and male). All to deny that flat-out sexism (and racism) that motivates the decision-making process here.
Silent Hill, which has mixed and mostly poor reviews, is a horror film based on a video game, which was surprisingly well done in my opinion. It captures the spirit of the games and, interestingly, passes the Bechdel Test. Because the main characters are two women and a girl, and both of these women are badass. The father-husband character was even only included because of corporate pressure to include a male character.
When I showed my casting choices (including Ruth Negga, the Ethiopian-Irish woman actor in Breakfast on Pluto, and Zhang Ziyi, a Chinese actress probably best known in the US for Memoirs of a Geisha, and Vin Diesel because what is a WoW film without the man) for this Warcraft film to someone online, they answered that this would not be a WoW film anymore. Which is sad and true. What is WoW without its night elf women in bikini armor? Without its extremely exaggerated musculature for male characters? What is a WoW film without the male gaze, basically?
In my mind, something amazing.
