Review of Thelma and Louise, directed by Ridley Scott

If you’re new here and stumbled on this blog through the mythical and magical powers of the Internet, or because of whatever the search engines decided was going to show up today when you Google something, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I made this blog in addition to my author/writer portfolio because I wanted to remember all of the books, shows, and movies I was coming across throughout the years.

I read and watch a lot, and I used to work as a professional film critic on the side when I was in graduate school. While I loved going to film festivals and ploughing through 500 pages of readings a week, on top of my regular fiction and nonfiction TBR list, I wasn’t remembering everything at the end of the day.

So I started writing little reviews and posts to keep an archive. It’s also pretty fun to return to a book or movie after a few years, then come to this website to see what I thought about it originally. One could call this a mind map, especially as you can literally track changes in the way we think throughout a set period of time through this kind of work.

As I suddenly became unemployed in January 2025, while waiting for my visa to come through, I decided to spend some time off and see what I could do with this blog. It was extremely unexpected and I am so grateful to have had the money to be able to do this, as most people cannot afford to take off work for this long.

Today’s blog post is dedicated towards an ongoing series I’m doing. In these posts, I’ve been revisiting old movies and television shows I’ve watched in the past and seeing how exactly my opinions have changed (if they’ve changed at all). It’s been a fun time, especially since I’ve been filling my unemployment time with this and applying to jobs.

Thelma & Louise is a movie I watched almost five years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic. Coincidentally, this is about when I started my blog, but then I hadn’t expanded into movie and television show reviews. I was just using this as a digital diary back then. It was available on streaming at the time of typing this review, so I decided to revisit the film.

Let’s get into the review! I know introductions can get long, and I don’t want to ramble too much.

Two female friends go on a road trip, but end up killing a man and are on the run.

Thelma and Louise are the two main characters in this movie, and they’re good friends who want an escape from their regular lives. They decide to go on a weekend vacation and flee Arkansas for a bit, as they’re tired of what they have to deal with on a day to day. Thelma is a housewife with a controlling husband, while Louise is a diner waitress and is constantly waiting for her musician boyfriend to come back from tour.

They embark on their road trip, but when they stop at a bar, Thelma dances with a flirty stranger. When he takes her out of the bar and into the parking lot, he tries to rape Thelma, but Louise comes out and stops him. She says she’ll shoot him if he continues, and while they walk away, he says he should’ve have kept going. Louise then actually shoots him, and they flee in their car to the motel they’re staying at.

Thelma wants to go to the cops and confess, but Louise thinks that there is no evidence of attempted rape because Thelma was last seen in public happily dancing with the guy. They would be put in jail for murder, and thus they decide that they need to go to Mexico. Louise refuses to drive through Texas though to get there, which means they have to go the long way.

They start driving again. They meet a young man named J.D. along the way, and Louise contacts the musician for money. He shows up and gives her life savings in person, while Thelma sleeps with J.D. and learns he’s a criminal. He steals all of Louise’s money the next morning, and Thelma takes action and robs a convenience store.

The FBI is onto them at this point, and they identify the car and their location. The fishing cabin owner also reported them because they never showed up to their vacation, and the police capture J.D., who realizes what they did. The Arkansas investigator, Hal, gets on the phone with Louise and says he knows what happened in Texas, but she refuses to budge and give in.

With the girls, Thelma says that she no longer wants to go back to her normal life, but she’s happy to negotiate with the cops to let Louise go back to Jimmy. However, Louise refuses to leave Thelma behind, but she gets angry when Thelma tries to bring up what happened in Texas (it’s implied to be a potential rape).

When they’re stopped in New Mexico for speeding, the girls hold the cop hostage and lock him in the trunk of his car. They keep going forward, and when a truck driver acts gross towards them, making certain gestures, they shoot the fuel tanker and it explodes, leaving him alone in the desert with nowhere to go.

But the cops eventually catch up to the girls at the Grand Canyon, and it’s game over. The girls refuse to stop for the police and surrender, then drive off of the cliff and into the canyon. They definitely died from that, but they did escape from the lives they wanted to run away from.

Overall Thoughts

It’s always refreshing to see a movie pass the Bechdel test, and Thelma and Louise does just that. I’ve been on a kick watching movies about female friendship, and when I first watched this in college, I appreciated this depiction but did not come to understand completely what it meant to me.

This is such a classic movie, and it subverts the expectations of this kind of plot and genre. We get two women lashing out against injustices, and the men in this movie are largely gross and sleazy, which kind of justifies their behavior. They were defending themselves originally, butt hen they descend further into violence when men continue acting this way.

I say go watch this film if you haven’t already—it’s definitely worth watching at least once in your lifetime, especially if you’re into film. Don’t just read a movie—watch it and experience what it has to offer on the big screen.

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