Quick, name the most memorable movie character of 2015.
Chances are, there are only two answers to this question. Either it’s Imperator Furiosa from Mad Max: Fury Road or Rey from The Force Awakens. There can be other responses, but no one would argue against these two being some of the most engaging cinematic heroes in recent memory.
That they’re both at the helm of excellent action movies, traditionally a genre dominated by male leads, indicates a shift in how these films are being written. Over the past year, we’ve seen a number of blockbusters increasingly make use of the Action Girl archetype, and while not all of them may be as effective or indelible as Rey or Furiosa, they’ve all contributed to a positive change in the role of women in a predominately masculine field.
While this year may have seen the Action Girl finally break through to the mainstream in a big way, the archetype has been around for decades, albeit in spurts. A few examples have passed into the pop culture lexicon, while most others have been unfairly ignored or forgotten. The evolution of the archetype is an interesting series of false starts and long stops, before finally finding its footing over the past twelve months. Now, then, is a good time to look back on the growth of the Action Girl, and how exactly we got here.
“Get away from her, you b—!”
With that immortal phrase, cinema found its first true female action icon, in the Alien series’ Ellen Ripley. It took more than eighty years for it to get there—the first Alien film was released in 1979—but there was really no looking back after that. Sigourney Weaver’s greatest role, all grit and toughness but with a kernel of vulnerability at her core, all but codified the Action Girl, and every succeeding iteration of the character inevitably has a little bit of Ripley in her.
Not that her popularity triggered a revolution or anything. The next three decades would be a slow climb for the Action Girl, with moviemakers only very gradually discovering the different permutations they could take the character. Many of these experiments proved to be misfires—Angelina Jolie’s Lara Croft, for instance—but that’s not to say there weren’t any quality female action stars before now; Kill Bill’s Beatrix Kiddo and the stars of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon made sure of that. Rather, like a child growing into his clothes, the movie world was still perfecting the nuances of a female-driven blockbuster.
“Out here, everything hurts.”
2015, of course, was when things crested. It began with Mad Max: Fury Road, which enraptured the festival circuit en route to a mainstream release that was met with much fanfare. Although Max is the character in the title, the film really belongs to Charlize Theron’s Furiosa, whose grizzled and greasy exterior masks a broken, checkered past. She’s an intricate character—equal parts tough and vulnerable, cynical and innocent—and an indelible cinematic anti-hero.
Six months later, The Force Awakens—easily the year’s most anticipated film—introduced audiences to Daisy Ridley’s Rey, an orphaned Jedi marooned on an alien planet. Unlike Furiosa, who’s been met with unabashed praise, Rey has been a much more divisive character: A byproduct of The Force Awakens being, by box office figures (over $2 billion, as of this writing), one of the biggest cultural events ever. There are some who believe she’s too much like Luke, and a very vocal contingent that thinks of her as being a bit too perfect for their liking. Multiple arguments have already been written in defense of Rey all over the Internet, so I won’t delve into specifics. Suffice to say, the haters are wrong.
Beyond Rey and Furiosa, many other Action Girls have cropped up on the big and small screens over the past year. Some, such as Spy’s Susan Cooper and Rebecca Ferguson’s character in Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, have been underrated gems, while others, like Bryce Dallas Howard’s turn in Jurassic World, have been tone-deaf misfires. Even the small screen has gotten in on the act, with two of the year’s best-reviewed new shows—Marvel’s Jessica Jones and DC’s Supergirl—being centered on complex female characters who are nonetheless fully capable of mixing it up.
If this is indicative of anything, it’s that Hollywood, while often still entrenched in its biases, is becoming more willing to diversify its product. The upcoming slate of films this year already includes several Action Girl-helmed features, with the Felicity Jones-starring Star Wars: Rogue One leading the charge. If any of them come up with characters as good as Furiosa or Rey, I’d consider them unqualified successes. 2015 was great for the Action Girl; the next few years, though, could be even better.
*All box office figures from Box Office Mojo.