James Cameron, who is not just the director of big-budget spectacles like Avatar, Titanic and Terminator 2: Judgement Day, but also the writer of such strong female characters as Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), is not really fond of the brouhaha surrounding Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Women.
In a recent interview to The Guardian, Cameron called Wonder Woman an “objectified icon”, and declared that the “self-congratulatory back patting” surrounding the DC character played by Gal Gadot is “misguided.”
“I’m not saying I didn’t like the movie but, to me, it’s a step backwards. Sarah Connor was not a beauty icon. She was strong, she was troubled, she was a terrible mother, and she earned the respect of the audience through pure grit,” Cameron said referring to the iconic character from his The Terminator movies.
Immediately, Twitterati responded negatively to Cameron’s comments.
Jenkins waded into the debate through her Twitter profile. She tweeted that there is no right or wrong kind of powerful women and that female characters can be all the things that male characters are allowed to be: attractive and loving. Jenkins also wrote that the huge female audience who made Wonder Woman a blockbuster have the good sense to “choose and judge their own icons of progress”.
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