Wie net als ik een die hard fan film is zal een bepaald patroon in films herkennen, soort van ongeschreven regels die altijd weer terug keren. Dus voor de website Cracked.com om even vijf van deze vooroordelen op een rij zetten. Dingen zoals:

#4. Only the Pretty Girls Are Allowed to Live

On one hand, the "strong woman" character is all over action movies now -- audiences have no problem seeing ladies kicking dudes in the face. So that's one area where we've made progress, right? The fact that women don't need to be dainty little flowers probably died with Rosie the Riveter. So what's the problem?

Well, there's something these tough survivor girl characters all have in common. Take Aliens. There are two main female characters: Ripley and Private Vasquez. One is a hardened soldier with combat experience, a butch haircut and a Rambo-esque bandanna tied around her forehead, and the other is a more traditionally feminine civilian who has no real business being in a combat zone at all. Guess who dies? Here's a hint: It's the one TV Tropes named a section after.

Examples are endless. In The Descent, the least feminine character is the first to die, and the grieving mother is the only one to live. The Matrix kills off the androgynous Switch, but leaves (the more feminine) Trinity.

And then we have Michelle Rodriguez, who has built her entire career around this, dying gloriously in Resident Evil, Avatar and Lost, each time leaving room for a more delicate girl to survive.

So What's the Deal?

The best point to make about this whole thing has already been made by Ms. Rodriguez herself:

"... people can call it typecast, but I pigeonholed myself ... Saying no to the girlfriend, saying no to the girl that gets captured, no to this, no to that, and eventually I just got left with the strong chick who's always being killed, and there's nothing wrong with that."

You read that right: She's limited her roles to interesting, strong characters. For a male actor, that means "action hero." For a woman, it means she has to die -- over and over and over again, each time making way for the petite model to take down the villain with her Waif-Fu instead. That's the phrase TV Tropes coined to describe the martial art that allows a woman to thrash trained soldiers twice her size while having no musculature on her frame at all. It's considered empowering when Joss Whedon includes ass-kicking females in everything he writes, but when he needs a badass kung fu killing machine, he casts the pretty, wispy Summer Glau.

The women who develop careers as action stars are not just pretty, but are pretty in the most feminine way possible: Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Uma Thurman, Milla Jovovich, Michelle Yeoh and Halle Berry. We're guessing that 70 percent of the people reading this article can take each of those women in a fight because we're guessing at least 70 percent of you are not unnaturally thin wisps of humanity. Doesn't matter. The only women we'll consistently let star in action movies also happen to be women so beautiful they get their own cosmetics campaigns, like, all the time. Michelle Rodriguez is pretty, but she's not might-be-an-alien pretty, and so she has to die.

We've convinced ourselves that there's such thing as "ass-kicking supermodels" for the same reason female slasher movie survivors tend to spend the last hour of every film running and screaming at the top of their lungs. There is so much psychology behind that concept of the lone female slasher movie survivor that there is an entire book about the phenomenon and what it means (Men, Women and Chain Saws). The author points out that when the last person standing in a horror movie is a man, you never see him screaming or crying with fear (imagine Arnold's character in Predator doing that), but with women, it's required. For the most part, we won't sympathize with her unless she spends a certain amount of time helpless and terrified.

Joss Whedon can pretend like the ass-kicking supermodels were created as a reaction to the helpless victims, but he's just substituting one weird male fantasy with another. It's as if there's nothing in between "beautiful victimized woman crying while splattered in blood" and "beautiful invincible woman kicking people while wearing skintight fetish gear."