But I do want to tell you quickly about Big Hero Six, which my sister and my parents and I saw today. We all totally loved it.
The movie was awesome for a lot of reasons: the setting (a cool Tokyo/SF hybrid named San Fransokyo), and of course Baymax the robot, but I'm going to cover two: women and science.
First, the female characters. All of the main team are college students working in a robotics lab (yes, even Hiro, the kid - he's a prodigy). I was particularly a fan of Honey Lemon, the blonde in the picture above. Take a close look. She's wearing pink, she's wearing high heels - and she's a chemistry whiz who's the equal of everyone on the team. How rare is that these days, that you can be girly AND scientific AND awesome? I also loved the other girl, cranky GoGo, though she seemed a bit more stock.
Second, the way it treated science. I probably only noticed this because I was supremely irritated by the recent Jurassic Park trailer, which features one of my least favorite storylines: the smug, polished female scientist who has invented some scientific monstrosity and then looks supremely shocked when it goes bad. And then the male lead usually shouts something like, "This is what you get for playing God!" And the female scientist is like duh, I somehow didn't consider that creating a monster would go poorly for me (see also the terrible film Deep Blue Sea. Or don't see it, actually. Save yourself the pain).
Well, let me tell you something.
(just change "windmills" to "science").
In this trailer it seems particularly dumb that they would ever breed two random dinosaurs together and make a predator for no reason - and they particularly do not do it on the same island as a bunch of children and other tourists. I understand this is only the trailer, so I could be missing two hours of context, but still, it irritates me.
Anyway! I'm supposed to be talking about Big Hero Six. What I meant to talk about is how awesome the science and the scientists are in this film. They work together, they share ideas, they act as a family (which is the case in all good college science labs), and their experiments go through many failures before they succeed. Most of all, even though the science is rather unlikely, everyone seems to have a great deal of fun in their processes of discovery, and approach the process (and each others' experiments) with enthusiasm.
In any case, all ranting and nitpicking aside, it's an awesome film, and you should all go see it. Just, you know, as soon as you dig yourself out from mounds of wrapping paper and recover from your sugar comas.
Merry Christmas to all.
I loved Big Hero Six. It did so many things well, and you articulated them all fabulously. Especially Honey Lemon. She rocked, although I didn't pick up on her name until you wrote this post.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm guessing you're the big green alien? Somehow I can absolutely imagine you shouting that during a news interview. :)