Bob, I'm going to address you directly again. I agree with a lot of what you have to say, but I think it might help a bit if you actually read more female-oriented literature. Stuff written by women for women, it might help a bit when your evaluating certain aspects of this kind of movie. I've been in positions a few times in my life where I've wound up reading to occupy my mind and not really had much of a choice of what to read (whatever is at hand) so I have a fairly good grasp of some of this.
You keep mentioning sexist retro-morality when you talk about things like "Twilight" or how female "Casters" don't get a choice in their alligience. But I'd point out that the genders do have some differances in terms of what appeals to them and how they think, there are entire books like "Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" and similar things which go into this. The details aren't important for the most part, but has it ever occured to you that lack of control is part of the appeal, and that a lot of women might agree with some of this morality instinctively? It's something to consider when looking at books written by women, for women, which become popular enough to have things like a movie franchise made about them. As a guy some things that you find anathema or apalling, might not be seen that way by the other side of the gender equasion, rationalism as opposed to relationalism and such.
To put things into a perspective that will probably piss you and some other people off before you really think about it, sometime consider the differance between someone being "ravished" and "raped". To you, there really is no differance, your talking about forced, not entirely willing sexual contact. To a girl though there is a HUGE degree of differance, and that comes out in romance novels and such, where the male lead, who might be represented by a guy like Fabio on the cover, basically rapes the female lead, but she ultimatly wants to be dominated that way by this studmuffin so it's okay. Something which I think leads to a lot of the problems in real life where guys who read this tend to think "this is what women want" when really it comes down to what they think of someone beforehand, and in general... don't go there. The point being though that women find the ideal of giving up control that way sppealing enough under the right circumstances for it to fuel the sales of hundreds upon hundreds of books doing exactly the same basic thing, exactly the same basic way.
While it's not sexual, being caught up in something important, but beyond her control, is part of the sppeal of something like "caster" or other novels where the female protaganist spends a lot of the time more or less out of sorts or out of control, even if they wind up playing a crucial role towards the end of the story.
Ask yourself seriously, if this is actually sexist, or if it's a big part of why something like this gets enough attention to get a movie, and this basic theme gets recycled by women for women through lots of books. Not really getting this kind of thing is in part why a lot of guys are dismissive of "chic lit", and probably also why a lot of women aren't all that attracted to the stuff guys read (though it does happen, along with guys reading the stuff aimed at girls) because they just don't "get" a lot of the conventions, like the protaganist always being in as much control as possible, the same way guys don't see the appeal in it being any other way.
You might think this in of itself sounds sexist, and I suppose from a certain perspective it might be, but that's why I'm suggesting you might want to broaden your reading horizons a bit more, it might help in understanding the appeal of certain things your not really the target audience for.
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Otherwise I'll say that I agree especially with the point about good and evil in the media. In most cases to create a sense of jeopardy, good needs to have some excuse to be sitting on it's hands, while evil does pretty much whatever it wants. If the "demons" are rampaging it's more dramatic for a group of heroes to face them against incredible odds than to have the "angels" show up and pretty much wave everyone else to the sideline. It DOES tend to get old, but at the same time in storylines where things are supposed to be relatively secret, and normal seeming to everyone else in the majority of the world, you can't have this kind of thing otherwise good and evil would be going at it 24/7 in the middle of Times Square and none of it would be secret and the world would be very differant from our own.... you know pretty much exactly like comic books where exactly that happens, and good guys and bad guys literally do punch it out in the middle of cities all day while regular folks look on from the sidelines.
In recent memory the most obnoxious example of this recently has probably been "Supernatural" though, for years now they have had the plot revolving around what amounts to a Biblical apocolypse and it's aftermath. With Angels, Demons, and later Leviathans all basically being their own special breed of douchebags while humans get covertly mass murdered as irrelevent on all sides. For this to happen of course the first thing they had to do was sideline God on the weak justification of "he's not getting involved", which raises the whole "WTF why" question, any answer to which will make no sense other than "because we wouldn't have a show otherwise... and aren't all these duelling angels, demons, and monsters so much fuuuun, why should we ruin the endlss carnage by actually having the guy who is supposed to prevent this doing his job for a change".
In short, it's something that has been an issue in fiction (except maybe comics) for as long as it's existed, sacrifices to common sense for dramatic tension. It even happens with multi-year long series running on Primetime TV (frequently, in one form or another) why would movies be immune? That said calling a movie out for a lack of logical sense is a good thing, in hopes of getting better writing, but there is no need to harp on the good guys not doing their thing this much, when you could pretty much just leave it with a briefer mention and say that it follows the same old crappy trope of good basically not giving a crap.
