Tank Girl (1995)

Tank Girl arrives in 1995 with a tank, a comic-book pedigree, and a chip on its shoulder the size of the outback. Rachel Talalay directs with a scruffy, anarchic energy, and the film is genuinely strident in its feminism, though it never pauses to announce the fact. Lori Petty's heroine ignores the training computer that instructs her to shave, wear makeup, don a wig, and present herself seductively for men at the Liquid Silver club. She keeps the body hair, keeps the wig off, and reconstructs the prescribed clothing into something that suits her. Along the way she emasculates Malcolm McDowell's Kesslee with a stream of witty retorts while being tortured, which is a durable image. The film mocks female stereotypes by simply refusing them, which is a rarer strategy than it sounds.

The political architecture here is corporate villainy of the purest stripe. Water & Power monopolizes the remaining supply after a comet breaks the rain cycle, enslaves the populace, and functions as a de facto government. The entire plot is a rebellion against a water cartel, so the anti-capitalist sentiment is structural, baked into the premise instead of lectured over it. The environmental collapse is backdrop, not sermon. Casting is notably diverse for the era, with Ice-T, Reg E. Cathey, and James Hong in substantial roles, though race itself goes unremarked. The Tank Girl and Jet Girl dynamic carries a queer undercurrent that scholars have noted without the film ever making it explicit.

What keeps the whole enterprise from turning preachy is its punk temperament. This is a cult romp that would rather set something on fire than explain itself. No neurodivergent themes, no historical revisionism, no ecological message beyond the desert. It flopped, then found its people. That is the correct arc for a film this obstinate.