10 Movies Where The Girl Saves The Guy

It’s no secret that since human beings were apes, women have been coming to the rescue of their fumbling counterpart, no matter how much it may pain or embarrass some of them to admit it. One need only to walk down the street or turn on a good movie to see this phenomenon taking place.

The heroics of these ten women are a testament to how a world without women would plunge into chaos and despair. Here are some moments where women flipped the trope and saved the men.

10 Belle – Beauty and the Beast

In a shift from some of the more action-oriented characters, Belle shows the healing power of a woman’s love. She nurses the Beast back to health after a pack of wolves attack them. When Gaston, the best-animated example of toxic male machismo, storms the Beast’s castle and nearly kills him, it is Belle’s tears that save the Beast and lifts the witches curse.

9 Black Widow – Captain America: Civil War

Black Widow enters the Avengers universe in Iron Man 2 as a duplicitous double agent, so it’s in her nature to play both sides of the fence. That’s exactly what she does to save Captain America, turning against Team Iron Man. Leave it to the woman among the Avengers to have the conscious and emotional intelligence to realize that a difference of ideology is no reason to want to kill your friends.

8 Diana Prince – Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman’s first display of her heroics after leaving her secret island homeland of Themyscira comes when she saves an American air pilot, Steve Trevor, who is shot out of the sky by enemy German soldiers.

She then goes on to defeat an entire German regiment single-handedly, climbing out of the trenches and embarking across No Man’s Land, deflecting bullets with her shield and titanium armor. No other female character transitions so quickly from saving the guy to smashing a group of bad guys in spectacular fashion.

7 Lisbeth Salander – The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

When asked how he got away from the psychotic Neo-Nazi Martin Vanger, the hardened investigative journalist Mikael responds “someone saved me.” Mikael is of course referring to the misanthropic computer hacking titular character Lisbeth Salander. After Mikael breaks into Martin’s house to search for incriminating evidence, Martin imprisons him in his basement torture chamber. Lisbeth hacks into Martin’s surveillance system, realizing Mikael is in danger. She golf clubs Martin to hell and then shoots him dead, but not before politely asking Mikael “may I kill him?”

6 Hermione Granger – Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1

One cannot count on two hands the number of times that Hermione bails out Harry and Ron throughout the series. The most dangerous scenario where Hermione yet again rises to the occasion as the boys’ savior is when against her advice, Harry insists Hermione and him visit his parents’ house where Voldemort murdered his parents. Voldemort’s beloved snake Nagini is staking the place out disguised as Bathilda Bagshot. If not for two perfectly timed spells and a quick escape from Hermione, Nagini would have captured Harry.

5 Imperator Furiosa – Mad Max: Fury Road

Very few films are yet to depict a woman who knows their way behind the wheel, but 2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road breaks with this tendency in Hollywood. In a film that transitions from one epic car chase to the next, in the penultimate chase Furiosa is behind the wheel while Mad Max and other characters fight off the War Boys. With one hand on the wheel, Furiosa reaches out and catches Max as he is thrown from their vehicle and is plunging headfirst to his demise.

4 Princess Leia – Star Wars: Return of the Jedi

Not necessarily a clean save since Jabba the Hut captures and enslaves her in the process, but when Leia unfreezes Han Solo at the beginning of the film, she saved not only him, but the franchise from losing one of its best characters.

Harrison Ford’s popularity was skyrocketing from his role as Han, so it was uncertain whether he would be available or afforded for the final installment of the original trilogy. But love endures, and they were able to write Han into the script based on his romance with the princess warrior.

3 Sarah Connor – Terminator 2: Judgement Day

After the events of the first film, Sarah Connor is a hardened guerilla fighter whose hatred for the machines makes her volatile and unpredictable. Witnessing the Model 101 rescue her and her son John from the T-1000, her attitude towards the machines as machinations of pure evil changes. Nonetheless, she knows what has to be done when the Model 101 insists he also be destroyed to prevent him from being hacked and turn against Sarah and John. Against the pleas of her son, she effectively saves them both when she submerges the Terminator into molten lava.

2 Selene – Underworld

The late ’90s and early 2000s was the golden age of vampire action movies. Among one of its best protagonists was vampire huntress Selene, who saves her beloved, a mortal turned Lycan named Michael, on numerous occasions throughout the first installment in the Underworld franchise. In the film’s final sequence, Selene saves Michael three times. First, she frees him from captivity in the Lycan lair, then after he is mortally wounded she infects him with a vampire bite, turning him into a Lycan-Vampire hybrid. Despite his new powers, Michael is about to be defeated by the treacherous vampire elder Viktor until Selene saves him one last time, decapitating Viktor with his silver sword.

1 Trinity – The Matrix

Dressed head to toe in tight black leather, Trinity points a 9mm to the head of an agent about to blow Neo away. Before pulling the trigger she cold-bloodedly implores the agent: “Dodge this.” When Doozer told Neo that going back into the Matrix to save Morpheus was suicide, he wasn’t wrong. Without Trinity in this moment Neo would never have been reborn as The One.

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