What James Cameron doesn't understand is ... well ... apparently a lot of things! First of all, putting every female character to the scrutiny of "does this actually advance female representation in movies with deep themes and three dimensional characters?" is kind of ridiculous. Not every movie is supposed to advance an entire demographic through a role, or do it in a nuanced way. Now, I understand why he critiqued the movie for this, because almost all everyone talks about is how awesome it is to have a female lead. But there's a clear difference between the character in a movie, and what that character symbolizes for the market.
Speaking of which, the second thing and the most important, is James Cameron's misunderstanding of how Wonder Woman "progresses" female empowerment. It's not about representing the entire female population as this deep complex multi-threaded narrative(and again...that would be focusing too much on one demographic unnecessarily). It's about merely existing as an alternative in a market mostly led by males.
Now the problem is ... he's not technically wrong. I mean, thematically in the movie, nothing really progresses female representation. It just puts her at parity with male roles. But his rant about how she was "objectified" because of it is insufferable. Progressive icons are always contradicting themselves. They want something equal to men, but still feminine enough, but if it's feminine then the only difference is that she's a woman, then you're objectifying her women-hood! It's all a bunch of random nonsense for the most part.
The thing is, I think gender in Hollywood has mostly become arbitrary. The reason most big movies stare males is because most big movies star males. The reason most superhero movies star male heroes is because the A tier list of heroes belongs almost exclusively to males. In a way, you could see it as tradition continuing, but moreso as an after effect rather than some bigoted notion. Because of this, I don't know how much I could say Wonder Woman is really "progressing" anything. The only way it can be progressing anything is through it's commercialism and not through the art itself. Even films of the past that were seen as progressive by in large because of the reaction they got in public, only got that reaction because of what was in the film, not because of a thought that lived exclusively in the real world. I'd prefer a movie that is "progressive" to make a connection between a film's theme and it's real life equivalent, so that you can justify the praise by the movie's actual content.
That being said ... something that I don't think anyone talks about is the effects of "fake" progressiveness. Even if James Cameron was 100% right and the movie wasn't progressive at all, the amount of praise it got for being progressive has led to so much cultural affiliation with progressive values that the affect is that it actually BECAME progressive. Let me put it this way. If you tell someone that something isn't true and so it shouldn't have an input on the market, but the mere impact of people thinking it was true already had an effect on the market, then whether or not that effect came from the actual characters of the film doesn't matter, because the mere existence of it changed the market. A film's reception can change the market entirely.
This is why I'm glad that Wonder Woman was considered progressive, because even if i'm personally not a feminist, it will lead to a market where the mere existence of Wonder Woman insures Hollywood directors that they can put their vision of a female role into a movie. As true as it is that Hollywood usually favors male stars in big movies, how many directors might have been falsely ... or even rightfully scared ... that they couldn't make a movie with a female protagonist, and ended up changing it? That's the thing. I don't like the fact that so many "female empowerment movies" are simply renditions of similar male roles. It could lead to a cynical situation where Hollywood directors start to cash in on the idea and just make the same but with a female. At the same time though, I'm glad they're being made because it creates a scenario where the false-perception directors or audiences had that movies can't succeed with female roles would be gone. It's like growing up as a kid believing in a ghost in the closest. Even if the fear is irrational, it does have an effect on you. So when you finally grow up and the ghost is gone, it does effect how you manage yourself positively.
Anyways, I think it's funny that James used Ripley as an example of his strong female character. You didn't invent the character, and yet she's the strongest female character you've worked with. Haha.
