Friday Favorites: Women Warriors (Movie Edition)

In preparation for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever opening next Friday (I have tickets for opening night at the Art Houz in Vegas, where I saw the first Black Panther), I thought I would post a list of my favorite women warriors in movies (and TV). I’ve been enthralled by these characters ever since I was a little girl and wrote Lynda Carter my first-ever fan letter for her performance as Wonder Woman: and this was back in the day when my mom had to take me to the library to look up Carter’s agent’s address in some obscure directory (like what? The Celebrity Phone Book? The Yellow Pages for Los Angeles? I have no idea: we’ll have to ask my mom if she remembers).

I don’t know exactly what lay behind my early fascination with women warriors. I had a pretty idyllic childhood, but even so, I wasn’t blind to the world I lived in, and I may have already sensed that its scales were stacked against me as a girl. Maybe I longed for some powerful older sister to come put her thumb on my side of the balance. Any of these women could have done that trick:

• Technically, she was a bit of a bad guy in the film, but at least to my 14-year-old tastes, it was hard to beat Tina Turner in Max Max 3: Beyond Thunderdome for pure scenery chewage. Turner plays Aunty Entity, the leader of a town of outback outcasts who seizes on Max’s arrival as an opportunity to even the score with a rival warlord named the Master. Car chases and some awesome mullet-flipping ensue.
• Amanda Donohoe in Shame. I saw this TV movie in the early 1990s, and it made a big impression on me. It’s actually a remake of an Australian film from 1988 starring Hugh Jackman’s wife, Deborah-Lee Furness. Donohoe plays a lawyer whose motorcycle breaks down in a small town, and while she’s repairing it, she learns about the systematic violence against women in the town and emboldens them to defend themselves. Also stars a young Fairuza Balk.
• While we’re talking about TV in the 1990s, I watched a lot of Xena: Warrior Princess with the incomparable Lucy Lawless. Didn’t everyone? Poor thing, though: she basically wore that armor 24/7, and while it was refreshingly non-skimpy, it still had to be wickedly uncomfortable in the New Zealand humidity.
• And it’s impossible to talk about women warriors on TV in the 1990s without mentioning Buffy. My feelings now about that character are complicated by everything that has come out since about the way Joss Whedon treated the women who worked on that series and others he directed. But at the time I was all admiration, and I still am for the way in which Sarah Michelle Gellar has stood behind all the women Whedon decided to work out his mommy issues on instead of her.
• This is the recent Netflix movie that made me think of this list in the first place. Allison Janney plays Lou, a recluse on a Pacific Northwest island with a dangerous past who gets drawn into her neighbors’ problems when her renter’s little girl is kidnapped by her psychotic ex-military father. You never get to see a strong 60-year-old woman fight on screen, and it’s awesome.
• I’ve mentioned Gina Carano in Hardwire before, but I thought of it again when I watched Weird Al copy its diner fight scene in his new movie Weird last night.
• No list of film women warriors would be complete without the incomparable Michelle Yeoh being on it. There are just too many films to list here: my kung-fu favorites lists contain a few, but you can also see her still on Netflix in Gunpowder Milkshake and elsewhere in Everything, Everywhere, All at Once.
• Charlize Theron, despite how frail she appears physically, plays a compelling woman warrior through the sheer force of attitude. She’s been in a number of action movies that haven’t really been worth her talents, but Mad Max: Fury Road is. I did really like Aeon Flux as well. (She’s good in the Old Guard, too, but it’s not; she’s not given enough fight time in the Fast & Furious movies; and, I refused to see Atomic Blonde after the trailer made it clear it was just another tired male dominatrix fantasy).
• I just discovered Noomi Rapace as an action star. I really liked her in Black Crab, though as with Theron, the script is not equal to her acting abilities. But the film is moody and tense, and the way she acts out/through the pain and injury of fighting is like 1000 times more realistic than any male performance I’ve seen.
• The Woman King: This movie is a don’t-miss for martial-arts fans as it explores the little-publicized world of African martial arts–and their tradition of female warriors to boot. Viola Davis and Lashana Lynch are nothing short of incredible in this true-life story of a band of royal women warriors in Dahomey (present-day Benin) who threw slavers out of their kingdom in the early 1800s. Caveat spectator: be prepared for a lot of machetes and some pretty brutal applications of fingernails.