Image: Warner Bros. Pictures

Ocean’s 8 – Does It Matter?

Ocean’s 8, a gender-swapped version of the Ocean’s 11 franchise, is currently hitting the silver screen this month, and some of the first reviews are in. Their verdict? A big meh. The film does what you’d expect, but it’s underwhelming to an extreme. Not that you’d get this from the reviews – reviewers are falling over themselves to big the film up because it’s an important movie. Is this a fair reflection? And, is it necessary to protect this gender-swapped movie from the inevitable hostility it has faced?

I’ve never seen a critic try so hard to avoid saying a film is dull

Look at some of the reviews that are out there. At Entertainment Weekly, Leah Greenblatt writes that the films “girls-just-wanna-have-grand-larceny conceit is the kind of starry, high-gloss goof the summer movie season was made for, even if it feels lightweight by the already zero-gravity standards of the genre”. In other words, the idea of the film is good, even though the movie is completely insubstantial. Alonso Duralde writes for The Wrap: “the right people have been hired, and everyone is where they’re supposed to be. That level of planning makes the heist in Ocean’s 8 run fairly smoothly. As for the film itself, similarly curated with care, it gets the job done without ever being one for the record books.” I’ve never seen a critic try so hard to avoid saying a film is dull.

Obviously, the textbook case of fans not liking a gender-swapped film is the 2016 version of Ghostbusters. It was met with scorn from the get-go, with online commentators hurling abuse at the film’s stars and screaming that the movie’s existence had ‘ruined their childhood’ or sentiments to that effect. In the end, it turned out to be a fairly poor film anyway, but its reception wasn’t helped by the director, Paul Feig, stating in an interview that the only reason people could dislike the film would be because they hated women.

Despite claiming that these films are empowering women, they’re doing anything but

I do not think the reaction to these films is down to them having an all-female cast – in the past, films like A League of Their Own, Thelma and Louise, and The Help (to give just three examples) were big commercial and critical successes, and they all featured primarily female casts with interesting characters. No, the issue is the implication that people will only go to watch female-driven films because they are fooled by brand recognition and that the male version has done all the groundwork. Despite claiming that these films are empowering women, they’re doing anything but; is it not condescending to suggest that people are not willing to watch an all-female cast or female actors in films based on their own merits?

Despite the poor reputation these films have, reviewers are still keen to hype them up because of the motivations for making them – they are important, and so they deserve praise regardless of their quality. The same thing happened with A Wrinkle in Time. It was hyped up as a big Disney blockbuster this year, with tons of articles being written about why it was an important film because of the Help Hel choice of director (Ava DuVernay, the first woman of colour to helm a live-action $100 million production) and the casting of a biracial girl as the protagonist (in the books, she is white). The movie was a giant flop because it was boring, but critics had a different array of explanations – it tried too hard, it was too ambitious, the audience was inherently biased against it, or, according to one of the most patronising articles I’ve ever read, the system was rigged against it and wanted the film to fail. Now in the era of #MeToo, it’s the turn of women-led movies to be important.

Women deserve better than men’s sloppy seconds. The responsibility falls on Hollywood to make films that are interesting, original, and enjoyable, to make people want to watch them. Look at something like Annihilation, Lady Bird, or Hereditary, to give you just a few recent examples; there are tons of fantastic female-led films out there without needing to gender-swap existing ones to be able to claim that it is somehow ‘progressive’. Don’t try to make excuses if a female-led film flops and then claim that its audience is instinctively biased against women. The audience does not want to watch lazy retreads of existing franchises.

If you want to support women, Hollywood, give them substantial and interesting roles. It can be done, and it’s frequently done. Swapping the names on a script isn’t good enough, it will only lead to more rubbish like Ghostbusters and Ocean’s 8.

Comments (1)

  • Agree on a lot of this that films like Lady Bird etc should be lauded and that the media can react stupidly sometimes (esp. as mentioned with A Wrinkle in Time and the Ghostbusters remake). Indeed overall I agree with and really like the article.

    I don’t think however its fair to say either Ocean’s 8 was a meh or that critics said as such. See the reviews from critical titans like Mark Kermode, as well as others in Rolling Stone, The Mail who enjoyed if not adored the film and even that on critical aggregation sites like Rotten Tomatoes it polls higher (67%) than the mess that was Ocean’s 12 (54%) and just short of Oceans 13 (70%) in a survey of reviews generally.

    Personally I can say I wasn’t blown away by Oceans 8 and but I would say it was definitely not the worst in the franchise; certainly not a testament as to why all-female remakes are bad. Whilst the cast never fully gelled as much as those in the original film, it really was miles better than Oceans 12, and whilst James Corden’s character among several others felt painfully redundant, by and large it was a reasonably enjoyable film. Indeed I thought having Anne Hathaway play almost fictionalised version of herself informed by all the unfair impressions the media and people hold was actually inspired.

    But point is:
    Many would argue that films like Ladybird with female acting, plots and directorship are laudable but are also too few and far between, and as the industry slowly changes, what is the harm in remaking franchises with an all-female cast if done, at least reasonably, well? I mean surely its no worse or lazy than studios pumping out cash grab films and esp. sequels like they do all the time with franchises like Fast and Furious?

    It’s certainly a query I personally can’t find a reason to disagree with

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.