Twitter Already Hates Your All-Girl Lord Of The Flies Movie
Hollywood is full of dumb ideas, and sadly most of them are unoriginal. The latest dumb idea is to let two dudes write and direct an all-girl version of Lord of The Flies based on the classic 1954 William Golding book you had to read in middle school. This dumb idea was greenlit by Warner Bros. and, unsurprisingly, the internet clapped back with a resounding “hells to the no.”
Everybody knows the story: boys get shipwrecked, a pecking order is established, and chaos reigns. If my memory serves, there is a conch shell that acts like a talking stick, Piggy gets his glasses broken and then gets stabbed. They already made this into a movie back in 1963, and then again in 1990 starring forgotten hot mess Balthazar Getty. So why bring it back now? And why with girls instead of boys?
Here, let those two dudes, Scott McGehee & David Siegel, explain (via Deadline):
“We want to do a very faithful but contemporized adaptation of the book, but our idea was to do it with all girls rather than boys,” Siegel told Deadline. “It is a timeless story that is especially relevant today, with the interpersonal conflicts and bullying, and the idea of children forming a society and replicating the behavior they saw in grownups before they were marooned.”
Yes, we get it, you had an idea to switch it up but whyyyyyyyy tho???? (Yes, read that as a prolonged girly whine). If it’s going to be a faithful adaptation, then changing the gender of all the characters is a terrible idea. It’s like these dudes read one-too-many think-pieces about mean girls, and then they saw the box office receipts for Wonder Woman and were all like “Bruh, bruh, chicks are totally hot right now, let’s bang this out.” Because that is how dumb Hollywood is.
As Variety reports, the ladies of Twitter were having none of it.
Fans of the book took to Twitter to express their anger over the Warner Bros. project, saying that the intention of the novel was to explore how the savagery, machismo, and competitive masculinity leads to the downfall of the young boys stranded on an island. According to the fans, telling the same story with all female survivors is implausible and misses the point.
Good point, women of Twitter! And Variety, you forgot the # on your #tooktotwitter, but imma let it slide this time. Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay, one of the proposed films most vocal critics, offered this:
If you want to tell a story about toxic femininity fine do that. But using Lord of the Flies as the container is lazy and stupid.
— roxane gay (@rgay) August 31, 2017
Since I really have no skin in the game on this one (I liked the book fine. Nobody LOVES this book. It’s fine), I’m kind of interested to see how it plays out. Unlike my feelings about #noconfederate, I can see no harm in it. There is no way they will ever successfully capture the female adolescent experience with two over-the-hill bros at the helm. So why not let them write it, shoot it, and then tear them a new one when the idea proves to be as dumb as it sounds? That’s a truly timeless Hollywood story!
Pic: YouTube