More eye-patches appear on the silver screen

Something caught our eye when we saw the ads for the new movie “Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.”

It was Angelina Jolie, who plays the rough-and-ready Capt. Franky Cook in the special effects-laden sci-fi adventure.

She’s wearing an eye-patch.

Could this be a trend? Daryl Hannah sported one in the “Kill Bill” films of the last two years, and starlets were seen sporting the classic pirate look at the Disneyland premiere of “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” early last summer.

In moviedom, “if you have an eye-patch, it means you’re a tested warrior,” says Al Nigrin, curator of Rutgers University’s New Jersey International Film Festival. “You have the battle scars, and you’ve made it to the next battle.”

(Did Jolie’s vial of Billy Bob Thornton’s blood on her necklace count as a warrior battle scar? Never mind.)

In the olden days, only crusty bad guys wore eye-patches. See Captain Hook in “Peter Pan” or Anthony Quinn in 1942’s “The Black Swan.”

In more recent years, donning an eye-patch did not immediately mean the wearer was a ne’er-do-well. Kurt Russell’s Snake character in “Escape from New York,” despite the name and the eye-patch, was a good guy. Or at least he was as good as they get in the futuristic land of lawlessness portrayed in the film by director John Carpenter.

“It could mean that you’re half bad and half good,” Nigrin says. “The bad guy isn’t all that bad.”

But what about the gals?

In the 1975 sexploitation flick “Switchblade Sisters,” a switchblade sister in the film, Patch, wears one. Quentin Tarantino had Hannah’s character wear an eye-patch seemingly as an homage.

Now, Jolie’s wearing one. It’s kind of a sign of a new, battle-tested feminism emerging in movies, Nigrin says.

An unintended result of this is that people who actually have to wear eye-patches now have some glamorous role models.

“I think it’s great,” says Wendy Devoy, founder of the California-based Eye Patch Heaven (eyepatchheaven.com), which manufactures decorative eye patches.

“When I started to wear one in middle school, the black patch freaked people out,” Devoy says. “It won’t be as devastating after people see actresses wearing them on TV and the movies. They won’t make as much of a deal out of it.”