Quote:
Originally Posted by Chieficus
The all female cast for the crew doesn't bother me, but rather the fact that the jokes they've shown in the trailers have played down to the lowest common denominator. On the one hand they want to say, "Look at how smart these women are," but then they have them do the dumbest crap.
And in the original, Ernie Hudson played a nice foil to the others--no, he wasn't a scientist but he wasn't presented as this dumb, male bimbo. But that's basically all the trailer clips have done with Leslie Jones. It's like the writers sat around and said, "Hey, the black lady--let's make her as loud and dumb as possible, but she knows the streets."
So you get lines like, "The power of Penny compels you!" and "I don't know if it's a race thing or a lady thing but I'm mad as hell!"
I'm neither black nor a woman, but their presentation of her makes me feel offended on their behalf.
Yeah, GB and especially GB2 had dumb moments, but not at the expense of bottoming out the characters. They had the chance to do that with this, and show true empowerment: ladies who are smart and putting their skills to work to save the city, with humor mixed in. Instead the trailers feel as if they made the characters as dumb as possible, but then tried to say: "Oh, hey, they're smart (at least the white ladies), see all the equations they can do!"
It's insulting both to those they're trying to "empower" and to the legacy of the franchise...
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Kind of interestingly, Ernie Hudson's character was originally written as another scientist with multiple PhDs, etc. They never really give you his history in the movie, but in subsequent iterations of the Ghostbusters lore (novels, cartoons, video games, etc.), the Winston character is very much a scientist.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winston_Zeddemore