ARQ – Bitch Flicks

10. Lilo & Stitch, Moana, and Disney’s Representation of Indigenous Peoples by Emma Casley

…The 2002 film Lilo & Stitch features sisters Lilo and Nani, who are of Indigenous Hawaiian descent as two of the central characters. Looking at Lilo & Stitch can provide a valuable lens in which to analyze the upcoming Moana, as well as other mainstream films attempting to represent Indigenous cultures.

Lilo & Stitch has been heralded as a film that avoids many of the harmful stereotypes of Polynesian culture that so many other white-produced works perpetuate. However, it is also worth considering how Lilo & Stitch as a film exists in the world, beyond the content of its storyline. Regardless of its individual merits, Lilo & Stitch is a money-making endeavor to benefit the Disney Company, which has not always had the best relationship (to say the least) with representing Indigenous cultures or respecting Indigenous peoples.

9. How Anime Produced Two of the Best Interracial Love Stories of All Time by Robert V. Aldrich

Two of the greatest love stories in anime are interracial relationships. … While the industry as a whole generally eschews characters of color, that hasn’t stopped some series from featuring prominent people of color characters in narratively significant stories. This has led to interracial couples being featured in two of the greatest anime series of all time: The Super Dimension Force Macross and Revolutionary Girl Utena.

8. A Love Letter to Dr. Callie Torres on Grey’s Anatomy by Cheyenne Matthews-Hoffman

GLAAD reported LGBT representation on scripted broadcast television that year at a measly 1.1%. Against a backdrop of a television landscape lacking in queer representation (especially queer women of color) emerged Callie Torres’ anxious and exciting adventure of self-discovery. … Callie Torres is a fully fleshed out resilient, sensitive, complex, and unapologetic bisexual Latina woman. … Callie’s journey was an iconic one that helped to not only change television, but to cement the oft forgotten notion that bisexuality is very real.

7. Interracial Relationships in Star Wars: The Force Awakens: The Importance of Finn and Rey by Sophie Hall

To have a Black character like this to not only be the co-lead in an iconic franchise but to also include him in a healthy, positively portrayed relationship with a white woman is a brilliant statement. Finn and Rey can be just as adventurous as William Turner and Elizabeth Swan, bicker as much as Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger, wax as poetic as Aragorn and Arwen and take as many names as Rick O’Connell and Evy Carnahan. Finn and Rey’s difference in race doesn’t put any limitations on what this couple can and do achieve.

6. Beware the Sexist Celluloid Quilt that Is Nocturnal Animals by Katherine Murray

The most generous interpretation of Nocturnal Animals is that it mimics the conventions of sexist storytelling in order to criticize them. If that’s the case, the criticism is buried too deep for me to see it and I’m left with the feeling that Tom Ford’s second feature film is a love letter to sexist movies instead. … Like a lot of sexist stories, Nocturnal Animals is vague about its attitude toward women, because it doesn’t truly regard women as anything but objects – things that derive meaning only through their relationship to the real subjects, men.

5. The Girl on the Train: We Are Women, Not Girls by Sarah Smyth

Perhaps the depiction of “the girl” in The Girl in the Train will reassure my fears by allowing the woman to literally “grow up” on-screen. Yet, the title makes me very pessimistic. Presenting women as “girls” continues to fetishize women’s powerlessness in cinema. By situating this girlhood in a similar way to the male fantasy construction of the Final Girl, and by enforcing an infantilizing return to post-feminism’s “girliness,” these films offer ultimately disempowering images of female subjectivity.

4. Supernatural‘s Scariest Monster: Bisexual Erasure by Hannah Johnson

I won’t spend too much time trying to convince you that one of the main characters, Dean Winchester (Jensen Ackles), is bisexual — or would be, if the writers and producers would allow him to be — and that the show is queerbaiting. I’m not arguing that Dean Winchester counts as representation at this point. Queerbaiting absolutely does not count as representation for marginalized sexual orientations. What I am arguing is that queer people do not need a character’s sexuality to be canonized in order to identify with that character and recognize literary tropes that are generally used to align characters with queerness.

3. Let’s All Calm Down for a Minute About The Hateful Eight: Analyzing the Leading Lady of a Modern Western by Sophie Besl

In an action movie, violence is due to befall all characters. Is violence against any female character inherently woman-hating, inherently misogynist? … It’s possible that subconscious sexism makes people quick to see her as a victim, and then criticism of the trope of women as victims may be getting in the way of seeing the agency and complexity of a character like Daisy Domergue.

2. Who Controls the ARQ in the Time Travel Sci-Fi Thriller? by Katherine Murray

The characters are thrown into an adrenaline-fueled, confusing, science-fiction quest from scene one. They don’t have time to make anything more than impulsive decisions, there’s a plot twist every time they think they know what’s going on, and every double-cross turns out to be a double-double-double cross instead. The story doesn’t always make sense, but it’s a wild ride that holds your interest from beginning to end.

1. The Women of Deadpool by Amanda Rodriguez

The newly released Marvel “superhero” movie Deadpool is more of a self-aware, raunchy antihero flick that solidly earns its R rating with graphic violence, lots of dick jokes, and a sex scene montage. It mocks the conventions of the genre while still giving us its warped version of a superhero origin story, a tragic love story, and a revenge story. Basically, it’s a good time. While Deadpool is entertaining, self-referential, self-effacing, and full of pop culture references, how does it measure up with its depiction of its female characters? The movie sadly does not pass the Bechdel Test. However, there are four prominent female characters worth further investigation.

Written by Katherine Murray.

ARQ, Tony Elliott’s new Netflix movie, delivers about what you’d expect from a writer for Orphan Black. The characters are thrown into an adrenaline-fueled, confusing, science-fiction quest from scene one. They don’t have time to make anything more than impulsive decisions, there’s a plot twist every time they think they know what’s going on, and every double-cross turns out to be a double-double-double cross instead. The story doesn’t always make sense, but it’s a wild ride that holds your interest from beginning to end.

The protagonist is a man named Renton (Robbie Amell) who invented a powerful generator called the ARQ (pronounced “ark”). There’s a fragmented back story about how he stole the ARQ from the evil corporation he used to work for, in a dystopian future where power and food are both hard to come by. The ARQ could be the difference between winning and losing a war between the corporation and a rebel army called the Block, but Renton’s concerned about some anomalous readings it’s giving off. Just as Renton’s house is stormed by Block members who want to steal the ARQ, the ARQ creates a three-hour time loop, trapping Renton and his attackers inside. Renton is the only one who remembers what happened in previous loops; he needs to figure out how to survive, protect the ARQ, and reconcile with his mysterious, newly-returned partner, Hannah (Rachael Taylor).

I have some questions about how the time loop works in ARQ, which I won’t ask here, because they would spoil some of the surprises in the latter half of the film, but, suffice to say, the rules get more complicated as they go, and the complications don’t always make sense.

What I do need to spoil a little bit is Renton’s relationship with Hannah, because the way it plays out isn’t especially thoughtful. At the start of the film, Hannah’s sleeping beside him, just before the Block bursts in, and we later learn that she tracked him down only the night before, after a long absence that began when she was arrested by the corporation. She has an agenda of her own that’s revealed as the movie goes on. But she’s mostly an ally to Renton and – to be completely frank about it – something else he has to carry through this situation, so that it isn’t too easy for him.

Early in the film, Renton is the only one who remembers the time loops and he literally leads Hannah through the house by the hand to evade the Block – this pretty much makes sense, because he knows what’s around each corner and she doesn’t. Later in the film, Hannah starts to remember the time loops as well but, for some reason, this doesn’t change the dynamic where she follows his lead on every single decision – even when they have contradictory goals. On the one hand, Renton is the best chance she has of ending the time loop and anything she does will be for nothing as long as the day keeps resetting, so it makes sense to cooperate with him. On the other hand, Hannah’s primary function in the story is to be an extra person that can die, thereby preventing Renton from stopping the time loop, because he wants to find a solution where both of them live.

It’s a little bit reminiscent of Edge of Tomorrow, except that Emily Blunt’s character was a lot more active in that movie, and the writers got mileage out of the idea that the one person who could remember what was happening was also least suited to do anything about it. In ARQ, it seems like Renton would be better off on his own and Hannah exists to be an extra obstacle that slows him down.

There’s also a love triangle in the story that’s more of a line with a dot beside it. Or a symbol like x_x. In the time Hannah’s been away from Renton, she’s changed a lot, due to some rough experiences, and fallen in love with someone else. That person, happily, is also trapped in the time loop and keeps getting killed. After the first time it happens, Hannah hardly bats an eye at that or at the idea that she and Renton should end the time loop anyway, as long as they both survive. Taken to its natural extreme, this could have been an interesting idea – if Renton keeps resetting the loop because he loves Hannah, and Hannah loves this other person, and this other person loves someone else… on and on until he has to find three hours where nobody in the entire world dies. Unfortunately, the story has a laser focus on what Renton wants, and Renton only wants Hannah to survive. It’s actually better for him if her partner doesn’t make it.

ARQ isn’t a bad movie, and it fits within the Netflix wheelhouse in that it’s so addictive you won’t want to stop once you’ve started. It does suffer from the same kind of emptiness beneath Orphan Black. Once you strip out all the plot twists, there isn’t much of a message underneath and the characters mostly seem motivated to make the story work. The film also doesn’t seem like it reflects on the situation very much, beyond trying to build a framework for more double-crosses and plot twists.

Still, if you’re hungry for more Orphan Black, because you miss feeling confused and enthralled, ARQ is worth checking out.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies, TV and video games on her blog.

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Who Controls the ‘ARQ’ in the Time Travel Sci-Fi Thriller?