Category: Entertainment
How Hollywood tries to masculinize femininity — and makes everyone miserable
We are told, repeatedly, that woke is dead. Piers Morgan even wrote a book about it, so it must be true. Right?
Wrong.
Strength, by Hollywood’s current definition, must weigh a little over 100 pounds and look perpetually annoyed.
If in doubt, please watch the trailer for “Apex,” due for release in April. With it comes Hollywood’s most exhausted fantasy yet: the indestructible badass woman who outruns youth, outpunches men twice her size, and shrugs off biology like it’s a clerical error.
Mission: Implausible
This time, it’s a 50-year-old Charlize Theron sprinting through the Australian wilderness and scaling cliffs as if she’s Tom Cruise circa “Mission: Impossible 2.” Gravity is optional. Muscle mass is negotiable. Aging, it seems, is strictly forbidden.
We’ve seen this act so many times that it barely registers any more. Swap the title card, rotate the backdrop, keep the same choreography. A lone woman wronged by men. A past trauma. An axe to grind, sometimes literally. Six-foot brutes wait their turn to be neutralized. The music swells. The credits roll. And with them go the eyeballs of nearly every viewer still capable of respecting basic reality.
The point is not that women can’t be strong. Of course they can. Strength is not the issue. Hollywood’s definition of it is. Somewhere along the way, empowerment became synonymous with women cosplaying male action heroes, only with fight scenes that insult Newton and scripts that insult the audience. A petite actress body-checking men built like refrigerators — then calling disbelief misogyny — is not progress.
What makes “Apex” more revealing than irritating is how nakedly it exposes the broader frame. This isn’t about one film or one actress. It’s the result of a steady drip: years of female-driven nonsense poured into every genre until it became the genre. The same beats. The same postures. The same lectures delivered at gunpoint.
Form fatale
Hollywood has always run on formula. Nothing new there. It followed money, copied hits, and abandoned failures without sentimentality. But the formula answered to the audience. If people didn’t buy tickets, the trend was over.
Now the industry treats audience resistance not as feedback, but as something to be corrected — like a behavioral problem that needs retraining. Failure is no longer evidence that the formula is broken. It is treated as proof that the audience is.
Studios like to pretend this is audience demand. It isn’t. It’s institutional inertia. Executives terrified of being accused of regression keep recycling the same safe lie: If the movie fails, the audience is at fault. If it succeeds modestly, it’s a cultural victory.
It’s a system that makes the arrival of the new “Supergirl” later this year entirely predictable. Not because audiences asked for it. Not because there was pent-up demand. Not because anyone ever thought, yes, this is what’s missing. It is arriving because this is what the industry now produces by reflex.
The irony is hard to miss. The original “Supergirl” debuted in 1984, the same year Orwell warned us about systems that repeat lies until they feel inevitable. That film was a commercial and critical dud, quickly forgotten for good reason.
Four decades later, Hollywood appears determined to rerun the experiment, convinced that time, tone, and audience memory can all be overwritten. Don’t expect to be entertained. Expect scowls and sermons in spandex. Strength, by Hollywood’s current definition, must weigh a little over 100 pounds and look perpetually annoyed.
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Down for the count
We saw the results late last year. The box-office face-plant of “Christy,” the biopic of boxer Christy Martin, made the point brutally clear. Despite opening in more than 2,000 theaters, it scraped together just $1.3 million — one of the worst wide releases on record.
The film stars Sydney Sweeney, an American beauty inexplicably styled like a discount Rocky Balboa. Producers assumed her star power would draw crowds, then forgot why anyone — especially male viewers — watches her in the first place. It isn’t to see her absorb jabs, hooks, and uppercuts like a human heavy bag. It’s when she leans into what she actually is: feminine, magnetic, sexy. No one is buying a ticket to watch a gorgeous woman get beaten senseless.
This is the quiet truth studios refuse to say out loud: Men and women are not the same, and they do not want the same things on screen. Audiences happily watched Liam Neeson bulldoze Europe in “Taken.” They turned up in droves to see Keanu Reeves turn the death of a dog into a four-film genocide in “John Wick.” Nothing motivates a man like canine-related trauma and unlimited ammunition. Those films worked because they leaned into male fantasy without apology.
Equalizer rights?
What audiences don’t want is that same template awkwardly stapled onto a completely different body and sold as innovation. Denzel Washington was excellent in “The Equalizer” — cold, credible, and infinitely cool.
The TV reboot took that precision and desecrated it by turning the role into unintentional slapstick. A morbidly obese Queen Latifah as a silent, unstoppable angel of death is pure absurdity. This is a woman who struggles to climb a single flight of stairs, yet viewers are expected to believe she’s capable of stalking, subduing, and dispatching trained men without breaking a sweat.
Which brings us back to “Apex.” What makes the film accidentally hilarious isn’t Charlize Theron running through the bush. It’s the industry sprinting right behind her, desperately chasing a fantasy that stopped selling years ago. The humor comes from the sincerity. From the absolute faith that this time — finally — it will land.
And it will land. Just not gracefully. More like a Boeing falling out of the sky. Twisted metal, scorched wreckage, and stunned executives wandering around asking what went wrong.
And from that wreckage, there will be no reckoning. No pause. No course correction. Just a quick trip back to the studio lot to greenlight the next movie nobody requested and that everyone will forget.
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’28 Years Later: The Bone Temple’ brings new life to horror franchise
Like the post-apocalyptic Britain of the “28 Days Later” franchise, Hollywood has become a wasteland, teeming with the stripped-down, lethally efficient shells of once-vital creations. Nostalgia-driven reboots swarm the multiplex, satisfying audience cravings for familiarity and studio appetites for certainty — even as they leave the surrounding creative landscape increasingly barren.
This year’s “28 Years Later” could just as easily have been another of these living-dead productions. While previous installment “28 Weeks Later” (2007) — made with nominal participation from the original creative team — delivered competent scares, it hardly cried out for a follow-up.
The movie is littered with British cultural references — decontextualized and repurposed by survivors struggling to find meaning in a world they no longer understand.
But the return of director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland proved worth the wait. “28 Years Later” demonstrated that this universe could still surprise, ending with a tantalizingly bizarre coda in which our hero Spike is rescued by Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O’Connell) and his blonde-wigged, track-suited minions. Clearly the infected are not the only menace stalking the British countryside.
Charity cases
“28 Years Later: The Bone Temple” picks up right after this moment, confirming our suspicions that Spike’s troubles have just begun. After a gruesome kind of initiation, Spike is forcibly enlisted as one the “Jimmys,” who turn out to be a gang of satanic killers. Led by Jimmy Crystal, who believes himself to be the son of “Old Nick,” they prowl the land inflicting gruesome ritualized violence — which they call “charity” — on those unfortunate enough to meet them.
While Garland returns as screenwriter, Boyle (who stays on as producer) cedes the director’s chair to Nia DaCosta, whose striking use of lingering close-ups and tightly framed compositions inject the film with a raw, anarchic energy. The result is a legacy sequel that both pays homage to its origins and reimagines them — one that weaves graphic violence together with incisive observations on culture, faith, and survival in a world irreversibly altered by catastrophe.
Doctor Sleep
Many of those observations come straight from the kindly and philosophical Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), an eccentric recluse who provided shelter for runaway Spike and his dying mother in “28 Years Later.” In this grisly sequel, the iodine-covered, blowdart-wielding former physician is searching for a cure to the rage virus, using an infected “alpha” zombie — whom he names Samson — as his pet project.
He also continues work on the titular bone temple, a memorial to the outbreak’s victims, until his optimism and ingenuity is tested by the new and horrifying human adversary we met in the beginning.
While Boyle’s 2002 film focused on urban chaos, this installment widens its lens, exploring the virus’ impact across the countryside while delving into deeper philosophical terrain. Beneath the skin-flaying, stabbings, “Mortal Kombat”-style spine removals, and Iron Maiden needle drops lies a poignant meditation on a once-beautiful country sliding into social and spiritual decay.
This is England
DaCosta, an American director, deftly preserves the distinctly English identity of the original films. The movie is littered with British cultural references — decontextualized and repurposed by survivors struggling to find meaning in a world they no longer understand.
The Jimmys, with their blonde wigs, tracksuits, and gold jewelry, are intentionally modeled after Jimmy Savile, one of Britain’s most notorious sex offenders. In this universe — where society collapsed in 2002, years before Savile’s real-world crimes were exposed — the cult reveres him as a benevolent, almost mythical figure. Their so-called acts of “charity” grotesquely invert Savile’s public image of philanthropy, turning it into a rationale for cruelty and sadism.
The dynamic between Sir Jimmy and Kelson is magnetic. O’Connell and Fiennes deliver outstanding performances, moving seamlessly between surrealism and melancholy. Some of the film’s most compelling moments occur when these two simply share the screen in conversation.
Sir Jimmy and Kelson represent competing philosophies of survival. In desperate times, humanity creates belief systems — sometimes as tools of power, sometimes as mechanisms of self-preservation. Through these two figures, Garland weaves a thoughtful exploration of evil, faith, and meaning.
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Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images
Feral faith
Religious symbolism runs throughout the film. The Jimmys repurpose Savile’s catchphrase “Howzat!” as a ritual chant — stripped of its original meaning and reconstituted as a signifier of violence. Kelson, meanwhile, assumes the role of a secular creator. His humanist liturgy centers on music and literature, which function as sacred texts connecting him to the past and preserving his sanity.
Samson’s transformation becomes an allegory for rebirth: emerging from the hell of infection into renewal. Where the biblical Adam becomes aware of his nakedness after eating from the tree of knowledge, Samson’s recovery inspires modesty as he clothes himself with memories of his return. It is the Fall in reverse — self-awareness as ascension, rebirth without grace.
“The Bone Temple” manages to inject genuine life into a franchise nearly 25 years old. I may regret saying this, but I am genuinely curious to see where the story goes next — especially with Boyle returning to direct the third and final installment. The film’s closing scene teases the return of a familiar face, and John Murphy’s fuzzed-out guitar theme suggests that hope remains, for both the survivors and the fans.
