There’s a raging debate going on in the Internet world about the possible new Lord of the Flies remake. What about the remake is making them enraged, you ask? The adaptation will feature an all-female cast.
A novel by William Golding, Lord of the Flies is about a group of schoolboys stranded on an island who slowly revert to their primal instincts, going so far as committing murder. There are already two separate films based off the book, the last one produced in 1990.
The era of remakes of classic movies or books is upon us, and many of those adaptations have strong female leads, so this could be the next remake that will bring women toward the top.
Gender flipped movies are growing more and more common in recent years, with powerful women cast in roles men have occupied for years. Just take the upcoming film Ocean’s Eight, a spin-off of Ocean’s Eleven, where the main roles were cast by female actors like Rihanna and Anne Hathaway.
But Lord of the Flies features girls who are younger in age than the Ocean’s Eight. This version of Lord of the Flies could be the next step for little girls to see someone their own age rising to the occasion.
The one problem writers, bloggers and commenters alike on the Internet seem to have with this film is that some don’t believe girls would ever act as inhumanely as the boys did in the novel.
“Men tend to be more blunt, and violent in their savagery,” Dani Di Placido said in Forbes. “I imagine a group of women would be less physical and more emotionally devastating to one another.”
As many know, however, girls can be just as vicious and sneaky as men when they want to be. And on an island alone with no adult supervision, who knows what they would do to each other? To assume that girls would not act the same way as the boys did is just that—an assumption.
The film is going to be co-directed by two men, Scott McGehee and David Siegel, which has created controversy on top of the internal plot change.
If the gender switch is really about representing gender roles, wouldn’t it make much more sense for two women to write the script on how young girls would act in the wild, rather than two men?
The social dynamic between girls and boys is entirely different, and just as women can’t fully represent what little boys do, men can’t fathom what girls would do without insulting women in some way.
Whether they will realize this grievous error and correct it in time before the casting starts is up to McGehee and Siegel. The movie is only in the beginning stages of production with no cast hired—but with the backlash it has been receiving, will it last long enough to get cast and start shooting?u