Make It a Movie May: Storm

May is almost over, and so too is this article series coming to a close. Not because I ran out of material, mind you. More because I'm starting to feel like I'm repeating myself.

Blah blah interesting character blah compelling story blah blah male counterparts suck blah.

I think at this point most of you could write this article for me.

Still, there is one major character I didn't get to that I'd really like to tackle, and I think it's important to talk about her. So, last for now, but definitely not least: Storm.

Storm has the dubious pleasure of being one of the more recognizable X-Men, and one of the few characters from that vast universe already to be immortalized on film. I'm not saying they did a bad job with her character in the movies. 

I'm more saying that I want more.

Ororo Munroe has one of the coolest and, yeah, weirdest backstories in comics. Forget Wonder Woman, Ororo was stranded as a child in Africa, where her ability to control the weather had her worshipped as a god. That's right, the supernaturally serene Storm is that way because she spent her teenage years being told not to be angry, because her wrath might smite the unfortunate. And she is a kind god, not a capricious one.

There's some stuff in her background that's icky, stuff that comes and goes. In one version, she was sexually abused, and I think there's one where she was forced into a child marriage. All of that is painful, but it makes for a really good story. Storm rose above it, she got out, and she learned to teach other kids how to deal with their pasts.

She's a role model.

It's not just that Storm is powerful, and has a cool childhood, or even that she's a genuinely lovely person who from time to time actually leads the X-Men, but more that she's one of the few characters that falls into no obvious stereotypes. She's a character of color, superheroine, and eventually wife, but at no point is she stereotypically anything. She's just herself. And that's what makes her so amazing to read about.

Yeah, there have been missteps in the story, like the weird punk phase she had in the 1980s, when the writers were pretty obviously on cocaine, and sometimes she gets a little hippie-dippy for her own good, but still. She's pretty much always the most interesting girl in the room.

Give me Zoe Saldana, a couple of months in Africa, a healthy budget, and the cast from X-Men: First Class, and you'll get a hell of a movie.

Here's the other reason I saved Storm for last: she is the character out of all of these who is actually most likely to get her own movie.

With the X-Men franchise currently rebooting just about everything, they still want to find a way to squeeze some money out of the characters people are familiar with, but not necessarily sick of. A Storm movie would be the perfect way to do that, fitting in well between the events of First Class and the other X-Men movies. Origins didn't exist, obviously.

In terms of the whole project, though, there are lots of other characters that I would kill to see on the big screen. What about Kate Bishop from Young Avengers, who called herself Hawkeye in honor of our Jeremy Renner-shaped friend? Or She-Hulk, Bruce Banner's cousin who was infected via blood transfusion and is actually much better at keeping control than he is? Angie Harmon from Rizzoli and Isles has expressed interest in playing her.

There's Renee Montoya, The Question, as I mentioned in my post on Batwoman. There's actually Batgirl, the Cassie version, who's out of touch and angry and fighty and one of my favorite things. Hell, there's Ms. Marvel, even, who's a little dull sometimes, but always tries so damn hard that it just breaks your heart.

There aren't enough women in superhero movies, and that sucks, because women, just as much as men, and sometimes more, need heroes to show us who to be. And our daughters need to dream.

How does this fabulousness not have a franchise?! [Hawkeye II]