Technical Pass: X-Men Days of Future Past

[lilacsigil]

X-Men: Days of Future Past involves a lot of men talking to other men about each other and about a woman, Mystique. The movie does technically pass (a scene where Mystique has a discussion with a female nurse about being a mutant), but it may also pass on another scene where Mystique has shape-shifted into a male character and talks to his female personal assistant about a number of different things. Does it count if one of the female characters is temporarily presenting as male and is played by a male actor?



There are three female characters among the future X-Men (Storm, Shadowcat and Blink), but none of them speak to each other and Blink doesn't speak at all, which is a waste of the excellent Fan Bingbing, though at least her power is smartly used and visually spectacular.

In the past, the only female character who is not a walk-on is Mystique. Her role is a major one and the centre of the movie's climax, but the other main characters in this part - the bulk of the movie - are all white men.

In the revised future, Kitty speaks to a classroom of boys and girls, but they are not speaking back. Ororo speaks to a young male student, and Jean speaks to Logan and Scott.

There's certainly a lot of women around, but apart from the excellent scenes with Mystique they don't get a lot to do in this movie - more like XMFC, less like the excellent X2! I enjoyed it a great deal and I'm sure the fic writers will have lots to fill in with the female characters and the glimpses at their stories shown here.

Comments

[florahart]

That nurse isn't a named character, though, and neither is the secretary, so I think it doesn't really manage even a technical pass.

For a movie with at least six women characters we know (one of them a cameo, but we know who she is), wherein two of them are basically creating the circumstances for their race's own survival in the future part and another is what the plot revolves around at all, that's ...fairly terrible. Good grief.

[lilacsigil]

They don't have to be named in the original test! Otherwise, I completely agree: that's a rotten ratio, especially considering the sheer number of female characters available from the comics.