A Marine Story

Backstory time! Ned Farr and Dreya Weber are a married couple. Farr is a director and Weber an actress and very accomplished aerial acrobat. Much of Farr’s career involves showing off the athletic skills of his muscular wife. His three full length features star Weber as not only someone athletic, but someone interested in women. Two of these films are The Gymnast and its sequel, The Aerialist. But the one we’re talking about today is Farr’s uneven message film, A Marine Story which is sort of about don’t ask don’t tell but mostly about how strong his wife is.

In A Marine Story, Weber plays Alex. Alex is an ex-marine returning to her small hometown. It’s revealed that she was pressured to leave the army as there was an investigation into her doing some gay stuff. Now home in a small, conservative town, Alex reconnects with old friends including Holly. Alex and Holly begin making steps towards being more than friends. Additionally, a local police officer tracks down Alex to assist with a troubled young woman. Saffron has a meth head boyfriend, a series of small crimes and has been giving the chance of jail or boot camp. Alex takes up the task of readying Saffron for boot camp both physically and behaviourally

The biggest relief in A Marine Story is that the lesbian relationship isn’t Alex and Saffron. Alex is about 50 and Saffron is 20. Their relationship begins with Alex ordering Saffron about like a drill sergeant. Unless you’re going to go full horny with that premise, it’s a pretty questionable relationship. Luckily, Alex and Saffron do get very close but their relationship never goes beyond mentor/mentee. Instead, Alex has an age appropriate love interest! Very good work, A Marine Story!

The other big positive is really just uh, muscular ladies good. There’s lots of films about strong and badass women but few who look as genuinely jacked as Dreya Weber and Paris P. Pickard who plays Saffron. These women’s abdominal are insane! It almost feels out of place for this fairly small drama movie to have women who look fully ready to kick Chris Hemsworth’s ass in a comic book movie. Seriously, somebody get Dreya Weber a big action franchise role. She is READY. I’m iffy on Ned Farr’s ability to tell stories but I genuinely am a big fan of his focus on showing how strong and capable his wife is. Hell yeah, dude! Celebrate your muscular, omnisexual wife. I genuinely support Farr continuing to write features starring Weber as a muscular WLW.

But as far as the Farr/Weber WLW collaboration movies go, I didn’t love the themes of this one. I’m not American and up to my eyes is liberal SJW bullshit. This means any movie about the American military is not my bag. And A Marine Story’s take on the American military was really mixed. It outlines the ways in which the military is bad. Alex got kicked out for the suggestion she might be a lesbian and there’s an implication she was assaulted during her time as a marine. The film also touches on a high level of sexism directed at female service members. Yet the happy ending for Saffron’s character is that she joins the military. In some ways, blatant patriotism would’ve been better. This weird mixed message about how the military is pretty bad but also it isn’t didn’t work.

Everything in this film feels very surface level. There’s some surface level critique of the military which fails to dig down into the organization as a whole. On the character side, it’s likewise weak. Characters will spend scenes espousing views like gay marriage should be legal that do nothing to advance them as characters. I don’t really care about any of them or the overall story. The last act gets pretty intense. Saffron’s boyfriend is a small-time meth dealer. He threatens Alex and Saffron and ties Alex up before Alex gets free and beats the shit out of him. Then his meth lab explodes. It’s a lot for a pretty small drama about sexuality in the military and ladies with six packs. Because of how shallow the lead-up was, even this dramatic third act failed to make me feel anything.

I’m giving this film a mild passing grade because Farr is a decent director visually and the muscular women were top notch. It is definitely a weaker film than The Gymnast and I’m not just saying that because a WLW film about acrobatics interests me more than one about the American military. Farr’s refusal to deal with the military aspect or his characters or plot on a deeper level overall is a major let down. But at least we always have Dreya Weber and Paris P. Pickard’s absolutely slammin’ abs.

Overall rating: 5.1/10

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