Ryan Johnson is Anti-Women – Part II

Don’t bother with Ryan Johnson’s movies. I have watched 3 Ryan Johnson movies, Brick, Looper, and The Last Jedi and this guy is a bad writer, a bad director, and misogynist. His reputation was “He writes amazingly fierce and independent women”, yet every female character except one is either needlessly violent, a plot device, or dies to motivate the hero. Let’s count them out: The Last Jedi: • Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) is a vigilante, assaulting people fleeing for their lives with a taser, dragging their unconscious bodies back and forcing them to fight and die. Isn’t the First Order the ones that kidnap people, brainwash them, and force them to fight and die for them? She later releases a pack of giant wild animals in the middle of a dense population center, crushing cars and crashing through stone walls, because she hates the rich. She does that instead of sneaking out covertly and does not free child slaves.

• Leia (Carrie Fisher) slaps Poe. Military commanders do not slap subordinates unless they are the villains. Leia enters into the bridge, sees Poe for 7 seconds, he puts his gun down, and she stuns him. She doesn’t talk to him and trying to resolve the situation like the trained diplomat she is, she just makes sure that he’s not a threat and stuns him. I guess she takes after her father and Snoke, as they are the only military commanders we've seen physically abusing their subordinates in Star Wars. Well done Rian, you've turned an inspiring Rebellion diplomat into a bumbling Empire toady.

• Holdo (Laura Dern) sacrifices two ships with their captains and many full transport ships instead of performing the Holdo Maneuver. She condescends to Poe and hides the plan from him as all his friends die around him, resulting in a mutiny. She sends an elderly woman with a head wound from a coma bed to breach a barricaded room and fight. • Captain Phasma (Gwendoline Christie) can’t be a professional and execute prisoners quickly and efficiently, she has to choose a more painful form of execution, beheading. • Rey (Daisy Ridley) attacks an elderly man from the back, beating him over the head, loses, and then draws a lethal weapon with intent to kill.

• Maz Kanata (Lupita Nyong'o) has exactly 60 seconds in the movie where she is resolving a “union dispute” by shooting a lot.

• Paige Tico (Ngo Thanh Van) dies to motivate Rose who motivates Finn. • The movie fails the Bechdel test really hard. There are 3 conversations between two females, all of them about men. Maz Kanata talks to Rose about having sex with the master codebreaker while stroking her big gun. Holdo and Leia talk about how much Poe is a bad boy and how much they “like” him. Leia and Rey talk about Luke.

Movie Tally: 5 female characters being needlessly violent and one Woman In Refrigerator. Finale Tally: Women In Refrigerator 3.5, murderous Super Bitches 2, female characters being needlessly violent 5, prostitute 1, women bringing men their food 1, real female characters 1. These scripts were written by Rian Johnson only, the shaping of characters was 100% under his control. He chose to create 14 named female characters, 13 of which are murderous, violent, dead, whore, and food delivery. How is this empowering, or feminist, or anything except woman-hating? For comparison, in Clerks Dante has a mini-arc of getting over his current girlfriend and ex-girlfriend’s liberal sexuality and not calling them sluts for it. Kevin Smith is telling men to get over the complexity of female sexuality, in his first movie, that he financed on his own. If Clerks would have failed, Kevin Smith would have no career and a big debt to pay, but he had something to say and it was pro-women. That’s empowering. That’s the sacrifice a real ally is willing to make, instead of quacking with fear of “what if the men get insulted by the message?”

I was going to watch the rest of the Rian Johnson written movies like The Brothers Bloom and Knives Out for the full picture, but there’s no point. Johnson was anti-woman to make back an indie budget (Brick, 450,000 USD), Johnson was anti-woman to make back a blockbuster budget (The Last Jedi, 317,000,000 USD), he is simply anti-woman. 93% of the Rian Johnson written female characters make Leave it to Beaver look progressive, but he called himself a feminist so that’s ok. Hey, Rian, maybe your next movie could be about African-American prostitute bodyguard assigned to defend Lincoln from birth throughout the civil war, dying to inspire his work? Nope, too much potential for fun, you’ll fuck it up.