First draft of independant study

How has the role of female characters changed in action adventure movies and become more dominant over the years with reference to resident evil extinction.

“Mankind faces extinction, one women, is the final hope, for our survival” [1]

‘In 1970s action-adventure shows, only 15 per cent of the leading characters were women’ [2]. This shows how rare it was for women in the past to have a lead role in movies. This proves that women were under-represented and hardly had a value in society. However this had changed over the year as number of women in leading dominant roles was exceeding this shows change in society as in ‘1995-1996 43% of major characters were female’ [3].Males have dominated the action genre for many years, playing the protagonists in every film. Therefore females were given roles in action films purely because of their physical attraction and to be used as sex objects. Women were stereotypically given the passive roles whilst men were given the active roles; however this is not particularly the case in Russel Mulcahy’s film Resident evil extinction in which women are portrayed differently in this male dominated society the women in this film oppose Propp’s theory as women are not princesses but the ‘heroes’. However as the film has a male director it can be seen that the women are also under-represented as sex objects for the male gaze, this can be shown through the costumes and suggestively the props used.

[1] “Resident Evil Extinction” (Russel Mulcahy, 2007)
[2] Gauntlett, David (2002): ‘Media, Gender & Identity: An introduction’ Routledge
[3] Gauntlett, David (2002): Media Gender & Identity: An introduction’ Routledge

Para 2
Resident Evil Extinction is a contemporary film that portrays women as dominant, for example when we see Milla Jovoich in the last seen of the movie she is killing many zombies. She is shown as a display of the “ass-kicking female empowerment” [4] who needs to save mankind from extinction. This proves Jovovich as a powerful and assertive female character. However women have not just been shown as strong characters recently, this has also been the case in some films from the past such as Aliens, Terminator, and fatale attraction.

[4] http://www.movieviews.org/reviews/may-july2003.shtml