You know these heels right? The other week I watched Jurassic World fully aware of the Claire Dearing’s heels had caused. I also went in expecting nothing but a monster movie, with Owen saving the day. Not so much.
When the movie ended, I had a newfound appreciation for Claire’s character, because let’s face it: the promos, here in Australia at least, focused on Chris Pratt and his rising star. Claire Dearing was the stuck-in-the-mud corporate mindset, the one the ‘real’, ‘human’ characters tend to fight against and the movie showed she was anything but.
Owen was muscle. He was muscle wrapped up in Chris Pratt package, but that’s all he was. He ran around trying to save the day, but had no actual idea on how to do it. Really, four raptors and a big gun were going to kill the Indominus Rex? Four hundred raptors and guns might do it.
Then there was Claire — saddled with annoying kid characters, (why is this a staple of every Jurassic movie? What a waste of space that could have been spent on Owen or Claire. Even 20 years later, kids are as stupid as ever when it comes to dinosaurs in that world) that were supposed to define her humanity. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: if she can’t be bothered about two kids related to her, she’s cold. Except for the part where she had 20,000 people to keep safe and was focused on that. Because you know that’s her job: if she’d ditched it, she’d be thrown in jail in the next one or killed off for not being able to save the day and the 20,000 people’s lives. OR blasted for focusing on her family — was she really ever going to win anything in this argument?
And, those heels. I came out of the movie reminded of this scene in The Xfiles, Hollywood AD:
I can’t remember whether her heels had caused as much a fuss as Claire’s did, but if they did, it barely registered for me because Scully was so much more than shoes. You know like Claire:
When in her heels and all she figured out how to stop the Indominus Rex. Owen was the one in a hut trying to protect the boys and Claire was the one ordered the doors open, put herself in harm’s way to get the T-Rex’s attention.
She’s kind of a bigger deal than her heels, I think.
It’s something like a Black-Widow storm I think — Widow is the consummate liar, we saw as much in the first Avengers. And in the Age of Ultron, we saw her lie to Bruce to get him to open her cage door, before she pushed him over the edge of a something-or-the-other to get the Hulk out for the greater battle going on. She’s focused on the bigger picture there, even at the expense of her relationship with someone she genuinely cares about.
Are these movies portraying the women perfectly? God no, Claire’s evolution in the movie as much as Widow’s is nto done well at all — but they do evolve, which is more for characters like them in previous sorts of movies like these. But, it’s not enough. It’s a long time before movies are ever going to be good enough to portray strong women, I think, whether they’re in heels or in love.
Verushka I watched this with the family last week as it was school holidays and I really enjoyed it and it’s funny you’d mention the high heels because Hubby mentions it through the movie because you notice that she’s wearing her high heels through the running and so forth LOL