Both Wonder Woman and Captain America were created in the days just prior to the United States’ entry into World War II. Both had costumes that evoked the red-white-and-blue of the American flag, and both spent their earliest days in comic book form fighting the Axis powers.
While Wonder Woman wasn’t specifically created to punch Nazis the way Cap was, the character continued to be associated with her WWII-era origins, in part due to the 1977 TV series initially taking place then. So when it came time to do a movie for her as part of DC’s Extended Universe, the powers-that-be decided to shift her back to the first World War to avoid comparisons to Captain America: The First Avenger.
William Moulton Marston, under the pseudonym Charles Moulton, created Wonder Woman in 1941 with Harry G. Peter. Marston famously lived a polyamorous lifestyle, sharing his life with both his wife Elizabeth Marston and their partner Olive Byrne. Both of the women in Marston’s life were inspirations for the character, who was created as a feminist icon before that phrase was really a thing, inspired by Marston’s own work as a psychologist, as well as the writings of many women’s rights advocates of the time, notably Margaret Sanger.
Wonder Woman has remained DC’s most prominent female superhero, often discussed in the same breath as Batman and Superman as DC’s “holy trinity.” Like most of DC’s characters, she was rebooted in 1986 following Crisis on Infinite Earths, with George Pérez, aided by Greg Potter and Len Wein, tying her more closely to her Greek mythological roots, and she was rebooted again in 2011 as the daughter of Zeus and Hippolyta, making her an actual demigod instead of a being created from clay and infused with life by the gods. The character has received other revamps over the years, ranging from her separating herself from Paradise Island and losing her powers, becoming a martial artist, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, to fellow Amazon Artemis taking over as Wonder Woman for a time in the 1990s.
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Dozens of attempts over the years have been made to bring Wonder Woman to the screen in live-action, with only one truly successful: the 1977 TV series starring Lynda Carter. Prior attempts by William Dozier (which never got past its awful promo) and John D.F. Black (a mediocre pilot movie starring Cathy Lee Crosby) both failed, and subsequent attempts ranged from another failed pilot starring Adrianne Palicki in 2011 to multiple attempts to do a live-action movie with such names as Todd Alcott, Jon Cohen, Paul Feig, Leonard Goldberg, Matthew Jennison, Becky Johnston, Laeta Kalogridis, Philip Levens, Ivan Reitman, Brent Strickland, and Joss Whedon all attached to write and/or direct. Among the actor names attached over the course of the two decades leading up to the DCEU’s debut in 2013 were Sandra Bullock, Mariah Carey, Angelina Jolie, Lucy Lawless, and Catherine Zeta-Jones.
Warner Bros. eventually decided that a female director would make the most sense, initially hiring Michelle McLaren, who eventually quit over creative differences, replaced by Patty Jenkins.
Gal Gadot was already set in the role of Diana after being cast by Zack Snyder in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. That movie also set up her World War I roots with a picture of her with several people from 1918. The people in the picture—Chris Pine as Steve Trevor, Said Tagamaoui as Sameer, Ewen Bremner as Charlie, and Eugene Brave Rock as Chief Napi—all appear for real for the first time in this film. The cast also includes Lucy Davis as Etta Candy, David Thewlis as Sir Patrick Morgan (later revealed to be the Greek god of war, Ares), Danny Huston (last seen in this rewatch as the younger William Stryker in X-Men Origins: Wolverine) as General Ludendorff, and Elena Anaya as Isabel Maru (a.k.a. “Doctor Poison”). Playing Diana’s fellow Amazons are Connie Nielsen as Hippolyta (Diana’s mother), Robin Wright as Antiope, Lisa Loven Kongsli as Menalippe, Mayling Ng as Orana, Florence Kasumba as Acantha, Madeleine Vall Beijner as Egeria, Hayley Jane Warnes as Aella, and Ann Wolfe as Artemis.
Gadot, Nielsen, Wright, and Thewlis, will all next appear in Justice League. A sequel to this film, currently titled Wonder Woman 1984, was green-lit almost immediately after this one’s release, as it achieved a perfect storm of making a lot of money and having good word of mouth (the DCEU had only managed the first part up until this). WW84 is scheduled for a 2020 release, with Jenkins returning to direct, and Gadot obviously starring. Nielsen, Pine, and Wright are currently listed as starring in the film, along with Kristen Wiig as longtime WW adversary Cheetah. A third film is also planned, which Jenkins has said will take place in the present day.
“I can save today; you can save the world”
Wonder Woman
Written by Zack Snyder & Allan Heniberg and Jason Fuchs
Directed by Patty Jenkins
Produced by Charles Roven and Deborah Snyder & Zack Snyder and Richard Suckle
Original release date: June 2, 2017
We open in modern Paris. A Wayne Enterprises courier delivers a package to Diana Prince in her office: the original of the 1918 picture of Diana with four men in France that we saw a digital scan of in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice. This prompts Diana to have an extended flashback…
On the island of Themyscira, hidden from the rest of the world, the Amazons live in peace and harmony—but also constantly training in combat. There’s only one child on the island, Diana, whom we learn was molded from clay by Hippolyta and given life by Zeus. It was one of Zeus’s final acts when Ares killed him, and the Amazons were given Themyscira to await Ares’s return and defend the world against him.
Diana wishes to learn how to fight, but Hippolyta refuses. However, Hippolyta’s sister Antiope trains Diana in secret, because the truth (which Hippolyta keeps from Diana) is that she was created to be a warrior who can defeat Ares.
Eventually Hippolyta gives in and instructs Antiope to train Diana harder than any of the other Amazons until she is their greatest warrior.
She grows up to be a mighty warrior indeed, and in 1918, she spars with her sisters, at one point crossing her arms in defense against Antiope—an action that sends her aunt sprawling. (It’s similar to something she did against Doomsday in Dawn of Justice.) Frightened at this heretofore unknown ability and horrified that she’s hurt her beloved aunt, she runs away to a cliff, looking out at the ocean.
While she’s watching, a plane comes through the force field that keeps the island shielded from the outside world (and also seems to keep the island in perpetual sunlight, as it’s dark and foggy outside the field), which is followed by boats. The pilot of the plane is trapped in his now-sinking vessel, and Diana dives underwater to rescue him. The people in the boat—whom the audience recognizes as German soldiers serving the Kaiser, though the guy Diana rescued is also wearing that uniform—start shooting at them.
Hippolyta, Antiope, and the Amazons attack the invaders, and the battle is joined. Diana is appalled by the presence of rifles, especially after seeing what they do to a human body.
However, the Amazons are triumphant, aided by the pilot, though not without cost—among the dead is Antiope. The pilot is taken prisoner, and bound with the lasso of Hestia, which compels him to give his name, Captain Steve Trevor, and his purpose, which is a spy. (He’s very reluctant to admit that, for obvious reasons, as the worst thing a spy can do is admit to being a spy, but eventually the lasso compels him.)
He explains his mission. The Germans are on their last legs, but General Ludendorff and a scientist he has employed named Isabel Maru (nicknamed “Dr. Poison”) are working on an ultimate weapon. Trevor was tasked by British Intelligence with going to Germany undercover as a German soldier and reporting on Maru’s work. Seeing an opportunity, he steals Maru’s notebook, then steals a plane, using it to do serious damage to Ludendorff’s headquarters.
His plane is then shot down over the ocean, where Diana rescued him. The Amazons in general and Diana in particular ask what war he’s talking about, and Trevor is gobsmacked. “The war,” he says, not knowing how anyone could not know about it, eventually adding, “the war to end all wars.” His enumerating the death count of the war, which has gone on for several years now, devastates Diana, and while Trevor is recovering from his wounds, Diana offers to take him home if he’ll take her with him. Diana sneaks into the armory (involving jumping over a big chasm and climbing up the wall using strength she only just now realizes she has) and takes the lasso, the sword (which her mother told her can kill a god), and a shield.
She and Trevor sneak out to a boat, but Hippolyta and several Amazons meet her there. Hippolyta tries to convince her to stay (“If you choose to leave, you may never return”) but Diana is determined (“Who will I be if I stay?”). Hippolyta gives her Antiope’s headband to wear.
They sail out to sea, with plenty of conversation that is about as awkward as you would expect from a 1918 man and a woman who has lived her life as among a bunch of scholarly warrior women (she proves herself well read as well as badass), and Trevor thumphers a lot.
They catch a ride with a boat that tugs them into London. (“It’s hideous!” is Diana’s first impression, to which Trevor says, “Yeah, it’s not for everybody.”) Trevor introduces Diana to his secretary, Etta Candy, who takes Diana clothes shopping so she’ll blend in better than she will in Amazon fighting togs.
Afterward, they’re ambushed by German agents who want the notebook, but Diana takes care of them in fairly short order, aided slightly by Trevor himself. (He initially tells her to stand back until she deflects a bullet with her gauntlets, at which point he withdraws that suggestion.)
Trevor goes to meet with his superiors—the War Council led by Sir Patrick Morgan—who are discussing the waning days of the war, and who are appalled when a woman walks into the room. They’re also more than a little surprised when Diana translates Maru’s coded notebook, revealing that Maru has developed a gas that will be unleashed on the Western front before an armistice can be signed.
The council refuses to do anything, and orders Trevor to stand down. Diana is livid, both at the council and at Trevor for acquiescing, until he wraps the lasso around his own wrist to make it clear that he was lying to the council and he intends to go anyhow.
Diana is convinced that Ares is responsible for this war, and based on what Trevor has told her and what she’s read in Maru’s journal, she believes that Ludendorff is really Ares in disguise.
Trevor and Diana gather some ne’er-do-well comrades of Trevor’s, including Sameer, a con artist who works as a freelance spy; Charlie, a sharpshooter and drunk; and Chief Napi, a Blackfoot who chooses no sides in the war, but can get supplies and material for anyone who can pay for it. While they’re impressed by Diana—who takes out a brute who wants to beat up Charlie—they’re less impressed by the fact that Trevor can’t pay them. But then Sir Patrick shows up and gives Trevor funds to pay them all, sanctioning their mission as long as it remains covert, with Candy coordinating with him from London.
They head to France, and work their way through there to the Belgian front. Diana gets to see the carnage, the broken and wounded and dead bodies, and is appalled. She’s even more appalled when she talks to Napi and learns that it is Trevor’s people—the Americans—who all but wiped out his own people.
When they arrive at the front, she learns that, on the other side of “no man’s land” (Trevor says that “no man” can cross it, and it’s to the scriptwriter’s credit that she doesn’t respond with an obvious rejoinder about how she’s no man), there’s a village called Veld that the Germans have enslaved.
Against Trevor’s wishes, and to everyone’s shock, Diana goes over the top and walks across no man’s land, drawing the Germans’ fire, which enables Trevor and his gang, as well as the British and French and American troops to charge across and take the German trench. Even as the soldiers secure the trench, Diana, Trevor, Charlie, Sameer, and Napi—but, y’know, mostly Diana—liberate Veld. (At one point, Trevor and the gang re-create a move he saw Antiope pull off on Themyscira involving Diana using a shield as a jumping-off point to take a mighty leap.)
The town is liberated, and the people celebrate. A photographer poses everyone for a picture. (Thus bringing everything full circle.) Diana and Trevor wind up sleeping together. They contact Candy, who informs them that there’s a gala for the German hoi polloi being held at a nearby castle, from which Ludendorff will launch his latest weapon from Maru. For their part, Ludendorff and Maru have already tested that weapon on a gathering of German top brass.
Trevor and Sameer infiltrate the party as a German soldier and his driver, but Diana on her own does likewise, stealing a dress from an aristocratic German woman. Trevor stops her from killing Ludendorff in the middle of the party, which would get them all killed. Ludendorff then launches Maru’s gas toward Veld, killing everyone.
Diana blames Trevor for staying her hand, and she abandons him. Napi tracks Ludendorff to an airfield where Maru has a lab. Diana goes there, and confronts Ludendorff, to whom Maru has given a gas that gives him super-strength. This means he’s able to put up a fight against Diana for more than six-and-a-half seconds, but she still is able to kill him—
—at which point, to her abject shock, the war doesn’t end. Trevor tries to explain that the war isn’t because of a god’s manipulation, but she doesn’t want to hear it.
And then Sir Patrick turns up, and reveals that he’s Ares. He didn’t start the war, he’s merely pushed at tensions and brutality that were already present. He wants humanity to wipe itself out so the Earth can be a paradise again like it was in the heyday of Mount Olympus. She tries to kill him with the sword, which Ares destroys. Ares reveals to Diana that she’s the god-killer, not the sword.
Trevor and the gang destroy Maru’s lab. Trevor says his goodbyes and I-love-yous to Diana and then hijacks the plane that will attack London with Maru’s new gas. Once it’s high in the sky, Trevor blows it up, sacrificing his life.
Ares offers Maru’s life to Diana by way of tempting her over to the dark side, but she refuses, preferring love over war. She spares Maru and then absorbs Ares’s direct attack upon her and throws his power right back into his face.
London is saved, the war ends, and Diana, Sameer, Charlie, and Napi have a muted celebration, given that Trevor is gone.
In the present, Diana e-mails Bruce Wayne a thank-you for the picture, and she reaffirms her commitment to fighting for justice.
“I cannot stand by while innocent lives are lost!”
It’s easy, and a bit facile, to say that this is the best movie in the DC Extended Universe, as it’s damning with the faintest of praise. The best of its competition is mindless goofiness.
It’s just as easy, and just as facile, to call this the best female-led movie in this rewatch so far, given that the only serious competition it had upon its release is another movie adapting the same character: The New Original Wonder Woman four decades prior to this, and that was a pilot for a TV show. The feature film landscape of live-action superhero comic book adaptations has not been kind to women.
In truth, women have had far more success in this subgenre as leads on the small screen, most recently seen in Supergirl, Agent Carter, and Jessica Jones.
With this movie, we finally get a good live-action female-led superhero comic-book movie and a good DCEU movie, and it’s about fucking time. In particular, for the first time in this particular cinematic cycle, we have a movie that remembers that the world has color in it. While Zack Snyder’s fetish for browns, blacks, and grays in his cinematographical choices are easy to blame, it should be pointed out that Suicide Squad was almost entirely in grayscale as well, with most of the action taking place at night, in the rain, or in a city that was covered in a literal cloud of evil. Here, at last, we have colors, and it’s amazing! From the tropical sunlight on Themyscira to the red-white-and-blue of Diana’s outfit—which we don’t really get a good look at until that crowning moment of awesome when she goes over the top—it’s a bright, beautiful movie.
Gal Gadot continues her superlative work. After being one of the few bright spots of Dawn of Justice, here she gives us a Wonder Woman who is strong, passionate, compassionate, a bit naïve (though the movie is about her getting past that), brilliant, and happy. She is a person who takes absolute joy in life, and is fervent in all her passions, whether it’s something as minor as seeing a baby or as unexpected as being able to break stone and metal with her bare hands or as major as walking across “no-man’s land” to save a town.
It’s a testament to how strong the Themyscira segments are that I had forgotten what a tiny percentage of the movie’s screentime they actually have. Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright only have a fraction of the film’s running time, but they absolutely make the most of it. Nielsen’s Hippolyta is obviously torn between protecting the island’s only child with her duties as queen, and Antiope is a most worthy mentor to a great hero, a powerful and wise warrior played with overwhelming gravitas by Wright.
Chris Pine is also superlative as Diana’s sidekick. I like the reworking of him as a spy rather than simply an Army pilot, as his covert work makes him well suited to deal with the many curveballs that crashing in Themyscira throws at him. Pine has a particular ability to completely inhabit whatever role he’s playing, whether it’s Steve Trevor, Captain Jim Kirk, Jack Ryan, a drunken reporter, or a neo-Nazi speed freak.
I particularly like that Trevor and Chief Napi are the only people from America in this movie, and that the United States is mostly irrelevant to the story. It takes place in the Atlantic Ocean and Europe, the characters that aren’t from the mystical island that traces its roots to ancient Greece are mostly European, and both Trevor and Napi are working for British Intelligence specifically. It emphasizes Diana’s importance to the entire world, not just the U.S., to which she has always been unconvincingly tethered.
The script does a very nice job of balancing early-20th-century sexism with Themyscira’s more enlightened philosophy, and does so without overly caricaturing that sexism, but not pretending it doesn’t exist, either. Sameer’s attraction to Diana could be a leering stereotype and it’s to the credit of the scripting, the directing, and Said Tagamaoui’s acting that he instead simply comes across as tiresomely quaint. The support for the good guys is generally excellent, from Tagamaoui’s charm to Ewen Bremner’s drunken loopiness as Charlie to Eugene Brave Rock’s dignified turn as Napi to Lucy Davis’s hilarious and nicely layered portrayal of Etta Candy.
Sadly, the acting kudos can’t really extend to the bad guys. David Thewlis is perfect as the British aristocrat, but when called upon to be the god of war, buried in CGI garbage, he’s considerably less effective. It’s hard enough for anyone to play Ares without comparing them to the late Kevin Smith’s superlative work in that role in Xena and Hercules twenty years ago, and Thewlis just can’t convey the required menace once he’s dressed in CGI armor and shooting ray beams from his fingertips. And Danny Huston is just as boring here as he was in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and at least there he had the excuse of being in that movie; he has no such out here, he’s just dull as hell. I’d much rather have seen more of Elena Anaya’s Dr. Maru, as she showed much more potential. The scene where Trevor, posing as a German general, tries to recruit Maru was brilliantly played by Pine and Anaya both, and the sight of her without her ceramic mask, revealing the scars from her own gas experiments, all hinted at a much more interesting conflict than the one with Huston’s bland Ludendorff.
The story borrows a little too much from other sources. For all that the comics character’s origin was yanked back two decades to avoid being too similar to that of Captain America, the story takes a lot of beats from The First Avenger, from the Howling Commandos equivalents in Trevor’s gang of ne’er-do-wells, to the bad guy murdering several high-ranking German officials with an unconvincing lack of consequences, to the male lead destroying a plane and sacrificing himself to keep that plane from causing wanton destruction to the good guys.
However, the most frustrating theft is that of George Pérez’s initial story arc in his 1987 reboot of Wonder Woman, because it blows the ending. Pérez emphasized the diplomatic aspects of Diana coming to “man’s world,” having her be an envoy from Themyscira, not just a warrior there to fight. The script to this movie pays lip service to that, with Diana saying that love can save the world, but the actual actions of the movie belie that, as Diana saves the day, not with love, but with her ability to throw Ares’s ray beams back at him full force. Snore.
And what’s maddening is that the ending of that Pérez arc was a masterstroke. Wonder Woman doesn’t stop Ares—who has manipulated the U.S. and the Soviet Union into barreling toward nuclear war—by overpowering him, but instead by wrapping him in the lasso of truth and showing him what a nuclear war would actually mean.
This movie can’t do that exact story, as the devastation of World War I was not quite the same as a nuclear war would be, but it’s still pretty horrible, and having Diana win by showing Ares the truth, that wiping out humanity will just make him a god of nothing, would have been very effective, and spared us Yet Another CGI-Drenched Climax to a superhero film.
Having said that, the movie is still fantastic. Gadot beautifully plays a hero who starts from a place of compassion. When her parent cautions her against using her powers in the world, Diana gives the life-affirming, heroic response that Clark Kent should’ve given to his sociopath father in Man of Steel. The moment where she says, “Who will I be if I stay?” was one where I cheered (quietly) in the theatre, and did so again (more loudly in my living room) when rewatching it for this entry.
That is how you write a superhero. And she still has a journey to go on, as she’s so incredibly convinced that stopping Ares will stop the war. She can’t believe that people would be this horrible to each other, and it’s a bucket of ice water in the face when she realizes that Ares was just fanning a flame that was already there.
Wonder Woman is a bright jewel in a tarnished crown, and luckily works just fine on its own without the cruft of the rest of the DCEU, instead telling a story of the tragedies of war, and how one brave person can stem the tide against the darkness.
Next week, Bruce Wayne gets the band together for Justice League.
Keith R.A. DeCandido, whose birthday was yesterday, has compiled collections of quotes by and about both Batman and Wonder Woman for the Insight Editions Tiny Book series. The Batman book is entitled Batman: Quotes from Gotham City, and will be out in July—the WW book hasn’t been scheduled or titled yet. Also coming in July is Keith’s Alien novel Isolation, based in part on the 2014 videogame of the same name, as well as stories in the anthologies Thrilling Adventure Yarns and Brave New Girls: Adventures of Gals & Gizmos, the latter of which benefits the Society of Women Engineers.
“Diana is appalled by the presence of rifles, especially after seeing what they do to a human body.”
Was she? I thought she was appalled to see her fellow Amazons actually dying. Because, lets be real, an arrow, spear, and sword do the same, if not worse, to the human body. A rifle is better from range than a sword, and modern ones are faster from range than arrows. But, I’m pretty sure both kill or maim pretty effectively. Her shock seemed solely based on seeing actual death.
That said, I agree with your review on pretty much all the other points. I loved this movie, loved the character. There were a few flubs, but the movie was just so grand and the pace was so good the bumps got smoothed over almost immediately. Top 5 of all the newer superhero movies for me.
William Moulton Marston, under the pseudonym Charles Moulton, created Wonder Woman in 1941 with Harry G. Peter. Marston famously lived a polyamorous lifestyle, sharing his life with both his wife Elizabeth Marston and their partner Olive Byrne.
While it technically falls outside the remit of this series, I just want to take a moment to plug the film Professor Marston and the Wonder Women, which came out a few months after Wonder Woman and did a very good job telling the Marston/Byrne family story.
I really love this movie, and I love the way Gal Gadot is able to portray the character as both so powerful, but also so childlike/naive in some ways. And I’m always a sucker for a movie about confronting the idea that darkness is potentially in all of us – that evil doesn’t just come from some outside force, but from the choices we make.
On the other hand, the idea that Diana cares not about ‘what they deserve’, but love instead (and the potential all humans have) makes her one of the few female characters I can think of that gets to be a Christ analog (and I think that’s really cool), even though she doesn’t really sacrifice herself. And, on that note, happy Good Friday ;)
Well, I of course would disagree strongly about this being the only good DCEU movie, but it is definitely a very good movie.
I knew you’d take a shot at Snyder’s use of color, but Jenkins uses it exactly the same way he does: to invoke mood and create worlds. Themiscyra is bright, vibrant and alive. It’s a remnant from the Age of Heroes, a piece of paradise. By contrast, the world outside is mostly cold and wet, ravaged by war and dying. Compare this to the Disney MCU, which makes every time and place in the universe the same overly-lit, wet concrete “colorful” that somehow manages to be drab. Or Mary Shelley’s Justice League, which has the color saturation turned up to ridiculous levels and nighttime scenes lightened to look like day. But more on that next time.
Also interesting that Diana gets a free pass for killing a whole bunch of German soldiers and a god. I don’t recall the “superheroes don’t kill” crowd getting angry here. The only time I recall her killing a human being in the comics was Maxwell Lord prior to Infinite Crisis.
I liked Thewliss as Ares. Not a brutish Klingon type, but rather the quiet bureaucrat who keeps the engines of war moving. His look is inspired by a painting of Mars, but the name of the work escapes me at the moment. Not sure the Lasso would really work because Ares wanted the human race to destroy itself. Like Zod in MOS, he wants to wipe the slate clean and start again.
But yes, a good movie.
@1 – One interesting thing about a rifle is the comparative size of the thing that actually hits the target. Arrows and spears have some range (not as much as a rifle), but they are big compared to a bullet. The way they convey momentum is different, and the force with which they directly impact internal organs is generally higher.
My blog review:
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2017/06/13/thoughts-on-wonder-woman-2017-spoilers/
To quote the lead paragraph, “it’s a terrific movie, and the first DC Extended Universe movie that not only isn’t fatally flawed, but is genuinely excellent and has a coherent, well-defined heroic journey at its heart. Gal Gadot is fantastic in the role, not only a sublimely beautiful, poised, and powerful physical presence but a strong lead actress who handles all the emotional range the film requires of her, which is a lot more than any of the previous three DCEU films have demanded of their leads.”
Although I think it was a mistake to make the Amazons a creation of Zeus rather than Aphrodite as Marston intended (that reduces them to tools in a battle between male deities rather than having their own independent agenda), and I agree with Keith that Diana’s diplomatic, peacemaking side tends to be given short shrift these days in favor of her warrior side.
My review also covers the parallels between Man of Steel and Wonder Woman and why plot elements that failed in the former succeed in the latter.
And yes, Gal Gadot is amazing in the role. The moment I realized she was the perfect Wonder Woman wasn’t in one of her movie appearances, but in a video of a Comic-Con panel where a male fan in a Q&A talked about being mocked for his Wonder Woman fandom, and she offered a very supportive and compassionate statement about how he should feel free to embrace who he was and so on, and she was just so kind and wise and uplifting that it was like I was watching the actual Wonder Woman instead of just an actress hired to play her.
Almuric: I, at least, have never said that all superheroes shouldn’t kill, because nuance is a thing that exists. Wonder Woman was raised in a warrior society patterned after ancient Greece and in this particular movie is fighting in a world war. Captain America also fought a world war. Thor was a warrior god worshipped by a violent people. Wolverine is a self-described savage, created and trained to kill.
Superman (and Batman and Spider-Man, etc.) is a different case entirely.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
@2/scifantasy: I have to disagree with you about Professor Marston and the Wonder Woman. It didn’t do a good job portraying the true story at all; it just uncritically perpetuated all the modern myths that have grown up around said story and contained multiple factual errors and gross failures of research. Here’s my blog review of that film, going into more detail about its problems:
https://christopherlbennett.wordpress.com/2018/03/16/professor-marston-and-the-blundered-biopic-spoilers/
Excerpt:
@4/Almuric: I do bring up the lethal-force issue in my blog review. I’m not happy about it, but there are reasons why it’s more excusable here than in films about Superman and Batman (e.g. that this is a war story, that Diana was trained as a warrior, and that her decisions of whom to spare and whom to kill are hers rather than just blind obedience to what the villain tells her to do).
@7. My comment wasn’t aimed at you specifically. But I find there’s an astonishing number of double-standards surrounding this particular issue in fandom.
One thing that occurred to after seeing this: None of the Trinity in the DCEU are virgins. Lois and Clark in the tub, Bruce with some anonymous woman, Diana and Trevor. They’ve all done the deed.
a gala for the German hoi polloi
I had the impression it was more for the upper ranks, well-connected, etc. Do I misremember?
I liked this one okay when I first walked out of the theater (barring misgivings about the Ares twist – I was literally praying they wouldn’t go that route just to convince us the underwhelming Sir Patrick was actually important to the story), but in retrospect, I’ve kind of soured on it. To put it simply: Gadot gives us a pretty good portrayal of Wonder Woman, but the actual story they built around her kinda tanks. Keith already pointed out why the big climactic battle doesn’t work – and seriously, why would you change it, to the point of rewriting Ares’ motives, when Perez/Potter/Wein already gave you the perfect blueprint back in 1987 – but I’d go a step further.
I’m genuinely surprised so many people hold this in contrast to the likes of Man of Steel, because there’s a lot of the same wannabe-Watchmen themes shining through: superheroes are irrelevant at best, an active detriment to the world at worst, and all the little people just have to deal with it. I suppose this just goes to show why it’s generally a bad idea to make your superhero movie a period piece, especially when they’re also supposed to survive to modern day – to one extent or another, you’re basically admitting they failed to make any difference in the long run.
(Y’know, now that I think about it, the frozen-in-the-Arctic thing Stan Lee retconned into Cap’s backstory truly was a stroke of genius. Makes all the timescale issues go poof, just like that.)
But to be fair, this is a problem that the Wonder Woman comic has been struggling with since forever. In theory, the Greek Pantheon being real should be a huge deal. Huge chunks of Western civilization are built on Greco-Roman traditions, and the Greek Gods (unlike, say, the Norse) were infamous for meddling in the lives of mortals whenever they felt like it. Hell, they were directly responsible for most if not all aspects of nature and civilization (see: Demeter throwing the whole world’s food supply to hell when Persephone got abducted).
Which, of course, leads to the inevitable question: in a world where Gods exist, why do mortals still matter? The Greeks were content with all those tragedies where the protagonist was screwed no matter what because the wrong God got cheesed off, but us Americans like having narratives where protagonists actually have a say in their own destinies. Over 80-ish years, the Wonder Woman comic tried to address this a lot of different ways – Marston turned them into kings and queens of other planets who only occasionally took an interest in Earth, Perez had them as this over-the-hill social club struggling to regain their glory days, a lot of other productions (like the Lynda Carter show) just plain ignored them, etc.
The movie, in my opinion, takes the most aggressive option of all: killing all of them except black-sheep Ares in the friggin’ backstory, then establishing that even Ares barely has any impact on modern humanity. How does that reflect on the woman who steps up to defeat him (much less the society that produced her)? Like, I’m not a “villains are the ONLY measure of a hero’s worth” hardliner, but when your protagonist was tailor-made to take down a specific villain, well… you should probably put some effort into that villain, y’know?
Chris Pine does a lot to support Gadot’s uneven acting, and takes a lot of credit for not hogging the spotlight too; and it is true that it was the best DCEU movie released up until that point, although if you lower the bar low enough then anything can be a success, but it is a mediocre movie at best. It isn’t really a movie, it is two episodes of a mini series smooshed together. The narrative does not do a strong enough job of linking the Paradise Island parts and the WW1 Europe parts together. You could broadcast those two halves on two different weekends and not lose anything.
And there is the same problem that so many works of fiction have right now, separating creator from art, in the form of Gadot’s political views on Palestine and the suffering going on there. That is a big ask to get over.
The best DCCU movie so far, and that is about all you can say.
@krad,
In your recap of what actors/actresses reappear, does it count that Themyscira is where Zari from the Legends of Tomorrow dropped off Helen of Troy, thereby kinda sorta establishing a link between DCEU and Arrowverse?
Speaking of a returning actress, I’ve been a fan of Robin Wright’s since The Princess Bride. So it amuses me Antiope is one of the few that could defeat the Dread Pirate Roberts and Clair Underwood would certainly run circles around Vizzini in a Battle of Wits.
Wee babby Diana at the beginning of the film was adorable. Beyond that, I found it enjoyable, with some great performances, but not necessarily super memorable except in being the first DCEU film I found actually watchable.
@11/rubberlotus: “I’m genuinely surprised so many people hold this in contrast to the likes of Man of Steel, because there’s a lot of the same wannabe-Watchmen themes shining through: superheroes are irrelevant at best, an active detriment to the world at worst, and all the little people just have to deal with it.”
I don’t get that sense from Wonder Woman at all. On the contrary, as I said in my blog review, “Wonder Woman’s battles are clearly, centrally about saving people. We see the people she’s helping, and we see her connect to them. So there’s a better sense of who and what she’s fighting for, and a greater emphasis on that human element rather than just nonstop CGI destruction.” Wonder Woman is clearly a positive force in the film — maybe not in the pat, simplistic way she expects of being able to end the whole war with a single killing stroke, but in the more fundamental way of being there to help individuals in need where and when she can. The film connects her on a human scale to the people she’s fighting for, in contrast to Zack Snyder, who depicts Superman’s heroism purely as dragging or lifting gigantic objects and punching monsters, as macho feats of strength rather than acts of kindness toward individual people. You talk about making a difference as if it had to be to the whole world. But the world is made up of individuals. Saving them makes a difference too.
The sight of the full-bodied, muscular Amazons engaged in mighty combat was simply thrilling! The producers should get a lot of credit for casting stunt-women and athletes as the Amazons, instead of the supermodeloid waifs they are in the next movie. These look like women warriors who can throw a spear or draw a bow.
I like this movie well enough, but I’ve wondered how much of the praise this movie gets is just because it’s impossible to avoid comparing it to the DCEU’s previous regrettable entries. (Ever concerned about my own biases, I was gratified that my wife felt similarly about the film — good, not great.)
Thanks for mentioning the lackluster climax. I too felt it was hypocritical to see Diana talk about how love is a more powerful force than hate, and yet that manifests as the exact same type of attack that Ares himself was doing. I thought it would have been much more affecting if she refused to engage in battle, and that lack of engagement would drain Ares’s power. (Really, I was hoping it would do what happened in the “Hawk and Dove” episode of Justice League Unlimited.) And again, I like to think that’s not a sexist thing on my part — I wish that more male heroes were also shown saving the day through their wits or compassion rather than by punching the goodest.
But one thing I for sure like about this movie is the way it embraces the idea that a hero can inspire others to do amazing things themselves. As corny as that can sometimes come off (see some of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films), it just works for me!
–Andy
The big thing that bothered me is that they killed off Ludendorff because they could, but in our timeline he actually not only survives but is also a fairly important figure in the history of WWII. I sometimes wonder if this was a goof left over from someone wanting to set this in WWII and not changed when the time period was set back.
Ares the character in the movie was unconvincing to me as the Greek God Of Violent And Stupid War; though my feelings on Ares are summed up by Neal Stephenson’s filibuster on the subject of Ares v Athena in Cryptonomicon. (OTOH, the association of Ares with Germany fits that lens as well)
@18 Ludendorff was pretty instrumental in the rise of Adolf and his merry band of eminently punchable in the interwar period too. Wait, does this mean WW2 never happened in the DCCU timeline?
For being the best in the DCEU, I think this has some solid competition from Shazam. Still, It’s great WB finally made the first great Female-led superhero movie.
@19: TV Tropes had a pretty long thread about this back in the day. The short version is: probably not, since Lex Luthor briefly mentioned East Germany back in BvS, which was a direct fallout of WWII.
In other words, all those civilians Diana saved in this movie are probably gonna get chomped up by another meatgrinder in 20 years’ time.
Another thing I liked was how they handled the equality theme. It actually was about equality, rather than simplistic “man=bad, woman=good”. Diana sees the worst of men, but by the end comes to the same conclusion Bruce does in BvS: “Men are still good”. Her partnership with Steve Trevor helps save the world. They both learn and grow.
This is a recurring theme in the early DCEU. Lara is the one who launches Kal-El into space and she literally has the last word on Krypton. Ma Kent is supportive of her son and tells Zod to go to hell. When he’s depressed about how the news is depicting him, Clark calls her for comfort. When Clark is remembering/dreaming his father, he says that his nightmares stopped when he met Martha. Lois Lane is never fooled by glasses and a stoop, she’s Clark’s partner from Day One in creating “Superman” as his public persona. She’s his world. You don’t need superpowers to be a strong female character in the DCEU.
Compare that with how a “male feminist” handled the same characters in the JL reshoots.
IT was good but not great.
Gadot gets grief from some quarters for her acting, but I never saw the problem. She comes off as very warm and natural. Gadot is very lucky to have worked with two very talented directors in her DC films.
Though you could start a drinking game based on how many times she says: “Kill Ares”. Or maybe not. Could be bad for the liver. ;-)
This might be an unusual POV, but– Look, as a Pagan, blasphemy isn’t something I really think about a lot. But the combination of Zeus being able to be killed by Ares, Ares wanting to do it, and the character of Ares at the end of the movie? That, to me, felt blasphemous. In a way that even the MCU “Norse” pantheon doesn’t trigger for me, not even, say, Hela. I can’t really say why; perhaps it’s because these Gods are presented as really being Gods and not like aliens or something. It makes the movie very uncomfortable for me despite its many virtues.
This is a picky point, but that is not what “no man’s land” means. For one thing, the Allies had advanced halfway through Belgium by the end of the war, so it obviously was not that impassable. Even when the front was fairly static, the two sides could raid each other pretty often. “No man’s land” mean that no one controls it.
Behind the Allies front line, they can impose law and order, and everyone who is not on the Germans side is fairly safe. Behind the Germans front line, they can impose law and order, and everyone who is not on the Allies side is fairly safe. Between the lines, anyone will be shot on sight by one side, if they are not shot on sight by the other.
@26. “Between the lines, anyone will be shot on sight by one side, if they are not shot on sight by the other.”
In other words . . . no man can cross it.
Great review; this is probably my favourite superhero film. (I have adored Wonder Woman since I was a wee Jaime. Full disclosure – I once owned Wonder Woman underoos!)
However, I have to say that I wish this post had engaged with Wonder Woman’s Queer identity, which is currently canonical in the comics. In the scene on the boat with Steve Trevor, she says (I’m paraphrasing) that men are necessary for reproduction but not for erotic pleasure. As a Queer woman myself, that was incredibly afffirming.
I saw this film in the theatre (I don’t actually land up watching many films in the theatre any more, as they come out on streaming services so quickly) and I remember thinking that I waited over 20 years for this movie. I agree that some of the plot is clunky and derivative, but it was SO INCREDIBLE to see Wonder Woman and her fellow Amazons on the big screen for the first time ever.*
*Yes, I know Wonder Woman appeared in “The Lego Movie,” but I really don’t consider that appearance on the same level as this film.
Something I don’t see mentioned much, is how Chief Napi was so inspiring to the Native audience, including me. Especially with the bilingual bonus thrown in. It’s what made me fall in love with the movie, especially the rather resigned “His people” remark.
Also, Etta was awesome, the one regret that I have is that given the time period, we likely won’t get much more of her(Though if DC ever decided to do a Etta and crew detective movie/series set during the Roaring twenties, I’m there.)
From Doomsday to Ares to Steppenwolf, the CGI in DC movies is simply terrible. I’ve seen better in some video games. The animation studios working with Marvel are on another level entirely and seem much more invested in producing something amazing. Consider the de-aging stuff, which apparently involved some real hands-on artistry. Contrast that with Superman’s uncanny missing mustache. A supposed world-class studio like Warner should be able to hire better quality artists.
@28. jaimew: it only makes sense that the women of Para… umm, Themyscira would form relationships among themselves. It seems a bit too pat when WW sleeps with Trevor though, having only book knowledge to guide her. Perhaps it could have been played a bit more awkward for comedic purposes.
@30. Had no problem with Doomsday myself. Incubus looked bad, but that was because they had reworked the CGI to replace Steppenwolf at the last moment. And Steppenwolf was reworked at the last moment (accounts vary how much). WW was lucky in that they didn’t cut out a half hour of plot or try to reshoot it at the last moment.
As to Marvel, Groot and Rocket look great, but some of the fight scenes in Black Panther look like Mortal Kombat and then there’s Bruce Banner’s cut-and-paste head on top of the Hulkbuster suit . . .
@31. Almuric: It wasn’t really Doomsday. The comics design with the spikes/bone spurs looked dangerous. Instead we got a generic troll who could’ve shown up in any bad video game.
This is the first of the modern DC movies that I really enjoyed. Gal Gadot was great, and so was Chris Pine. There were so many great lines and great moments throughout, and some nifty little comic touches that kept things from getting too heavy. My only criticism is that they didn’t stick the landing, with the big, bloated CGI battle being too much like every other big, bloated CGI battle you see in too many movies. My favorite battle scene was when Wonder Woman goes over the top into No Man’s Land, and goes into full-bore superhero mode.
I did not see this movie until it showed up on The Movie Network here in Canada, so that meant I’d read and heard all the praise for it. That meant I was prepared for a rollicking good ride.
But…
We all need to willingly suspend disbelief to enjoy these kinds of movies. I can make myself believe that a man can fly, and so on. But when something falls into our areas of expertise, we get more critical. Keith ripped apart the Marvel/Netflix Iron Fist because they got the martial arts wrong. My fields of expertise include German naval history and the First World War. I found too many places where I couldn’t get past some howlers.
We’re told the secret lab is “somewhere in the Ottoman Empire”. Fine. Trevor steals a plane to escape. It’s an E3, obsolete for about two years, with a limited range. Fine; perhaps he’s heading for one of the Greek islands, since Greece had joined the Allies by late 1918. The Germans chase a man in an airplane by using a warship. Let’s ignore the speed difference. Let’s ignore the fact that the Germans didn’t have any surface warships in the Aegean or Eastern Mediterranean, especially since the Allies had control of the waters.
We are also told that the war is nearing its end, that the armistice negotiations are about to begin. This means that Trevor needs to get his information to the Allies ASAP. Does he head for the nearest Allied base to send a message? Does he get Diana or the steamer they hitch a ride on to land at Marseilles, hop a train to Paris then another to the Channel, then a steamer across the Channel and a train to London? No; they take what should have been a slow boat to London.
I have a few issues with “Ludendorff”. By October 1918 the real Ludendorff had been ousted from his position in Supreme Command, so this Ludendorff would not have access to senior military and political leadership. I would also be skeptical of how quickly Ludendorff, Dr. Maru, and their cargo of poison gas have made it from the secret base to Belgium, especially since Bulgaria had aleady signed an armistice, but – magic! as has been explained before.
As for the movie itself, most of it is bog-standard outsider comes into situation and tries to save the day. I spotted the real Ares right away. I also have a lot of issues with Trevor’s death – what purpose does it serve for him to die? Quite frankly, for all its overblown pretentiousness and hammer-over-the-head religious imagery, I enjoyed BvS more.
@34/David H. Olivier: I think Steve’s death was meant to explain why Diana had cut herself off from the world for the subsequent century, as established in BvS. Although IIRC, this film’s frame story kind of contradicted that by implying that she’d continued to fight for justice after all. Or did it? I’m not entirely clear on that.
David: well, that wasn’t the only thing I ripped apart in Iron Fist, but your point is well taken……
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
Anybody else get goosebumps when WW busts out of her restraints against Ares?
I saw this movie only once, so forgive me if I’m forgetting some details, but why did Steve have to take the bomber up in the air? Wasn’t it loaded with poisonous gas? So wouldn’t destroying it in the air disperse the gas over a larger area? It was never made clear to me why he couldn’t just land the plane and disarm the gas on the runway.
Anyway, that was the only moment I got hung up on. Otherwise a fun movie.
@38/Spike: The film made a point of the new mustard gas being hydrogen-based, so that it was therefore highly flammable; Steve blew up the plane in midair in order to burn up the gas while it was far away from people. (Although that doesn’t work chemically, since there’s already hydrogen in mustard gas, to an extent.)
@39. Okay, thanks.
@37. Austin: reminds me how many of the early WW stories involved bondage and kink. She was always getting caught and bound. Sometimes spanked. The bracelets symbolized submission, which was worked into the mythos. Olive wore wide arm bracelets in real life. And the lasso, another binding prop, stood in for Marston’s other famous creation, the polygraph.
In terms of the Diana/Steve relationship as an image of egalitarian hetero relationship, I was especially moved by a moment that KRAD mentions: “At one point, Trevor and the gang re-create a move he saw Antiope pull off on Themyscira involving Diana using a shield as a jumping-off point to take a mighty leap.” It is Steve who makes this happen, and we know what lies behind it: he PAID ATTENTION to how the Amazons fought, and therefore knows that Diana can use the metal surface to jump up to the sniper’s nest in the tower. He knows she’s the only one who can get the sniper, and is ready and willing to help her do it. He figures out how to get the metal in place and gives Diana the cue she will recognize: “Shield!” He does this her way, the Amazonian way, both physically and verbally.
His willingness to play the supportive role to the female hero (which does not emasculate him, as the movie presents it) and his having paid attention to the way the women fight are both very significant ways in which he proves his feminist cred. I love the fact that the script does not spell out the fact that he remembers Antiope’s move; the viewer just picks that up.
The moment when they are waylaid in the London alley and he realizes that he needn’t protect Diana is an early sign that he has an impressive learning curve on the gender/power issues. But it was this later moment when he sees how to help Diana defeat the sniper that that was shiver-inducing for me.
About the only complaint I have with the movie was the ending. I too was expecting the Perez version. Even though I was surprised that they didn’t use it, that doesn’t mean I was pleasantly surprised. For a movie that was making a break from the Snyder-vese of greys and blacks, it would have been nice to break from the boss fight at the end as well. Sure, you can have the battle at the end but the way that it’s ended would have been so much better and fitting for the character.
I have a quibble with the swamping of Aphrodite for Zeus but that was a change made by DC in the comics and was probably mandated. Boo to them.
While I really enjoyed Gal Gadot’s character (and the fact that they had the other Amazons adopt her accent), the character that really surprised me was Steve Trevor. After seeing Chris Pine in the two Trek reboot movies, it was nice to see him play someone who could actually be charming instead of a drunken frat boy. It drives home my complaint that while the case of the Trek reboots were great, what they were given to work with just didn’t work for me. Kudos to Chris Pine.
@32. Doomsday grew his bony protrusions during the course of the battle. Like in the comics, his body is constantly changing and adapting to threats. By the end of the fight, he was much closer to his comics look than he was at the beginning.
Something that just occurred to me: Both Ares and Diana are Godkillers, in different ways.
@41/Sunspear: Yeah, I got a collection of Golden Age Wonder Woman comics from the library recently, and the bondage and submission kink was so pervasive and blatant that I’m amazed it got past the censors. And one aspect rather disturbed me, which was that there was a lot of slavery in it — a lot of stories about women enslaving other women who were okay with being enslaved as long as it wasn’t by men. It’s one thing to engage in “slave” play in consensual sex games, but portraying something that’s actual slavery within the story as if it were no worse than sexy roleplay is deeply insensitive and disturbing in retrospect.
“And the lasso, another binding prop, stood in for Marston’s other famous creation, the polygraph.”
That’s a complete myth, one of the many falsehoods perpetuated by the Professor Marston biopic. First, Marston did not invent the polygraph. He merely invented the systolic blood pressure test that was later integrated into the polygraph by its actual inventor John Augustus Larson in 1921. Marston would go on to popularize the (essentially false) idea that the polygraph was useful as a “lie detector,” but that’s about the extent of his connection to it.
Second, the golden lasso didn’t become identified specifically with compelling the truth until the Lynda Carter TV series in the ’70s, and the idea wasn’t codified in the comics until the George Perez reboot in 1987. Under Marston, the lasso was more generally about compelling obedience, part of the overall BDSM themes of the comic. It forced people to obey the holder’s commands, whether about telling the truth or anything else. It could even be used to command someone to lie, in contrast to the modern portrayal where it makes lying impossible. (There was even a deeply disturbing Silver Age story by Robert Kanigher where Steve stole the lasso and used it to try to force Wonder Woman to marry him.)
@41 – So you’re saying that moment was symbolic in addition to being badass?
While I did enjoy this (it’s the only one of the current DC films I went to the cinema to see) I do think it’s incredibly overrated. The ending is such a boring let down that I feel it detracts quite strongly from the rest of the film. To have the point that the war is not going to end just by defeating Ares is completely sabotaged when she kills Ares and ends the war. Whose idea was that nonsense?? Weirdly I did have a similar issue in Captain America where we go straight to the victory celebrations which kind of makes it seem like Steve Rogers won the war when he was fighting a separate power.
I don’t think the similarities with Captain America do Wonder Woman any favours as CA is a far more satisfying film.
@47/scimarad: Uh, what? Killing Ares didn’t end the war. As Keith’s summary explained, the armistice to end the war was already looming, and Ares and Ludendorff were trying to prevent its end by using the poison gas to sabotage the armistice talks. So destroying the gas and preventing the terrorist attack was what allowed the end of the war to proceed as it was going to anyway.
scimarad: Christopher is correct, Diana and the gang’s actions allowed the war to actually end the way it was going to anyhow. The movie starts during the waning days of the Great War. Ludendorf and Maru’s plan is to put off Germany’s seemingly inevitable loss.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
The best of the DCEU in my humble opinion, although I haven’t seen Aquaman or Shazam yet. Gal Gadot really made the role her own and I can easily imagine her as being an Amazonian from a shrouded island somewhere in the Atlantic (helps when you cast someone who isn’t widely known to the movie-going audience). I’m looking forward to the sequel and Kristin Wiig. Kristin’s got some dramatic chops.
And on a related positive note regarding the sequel, Brett Ratner was dropped from having any involvement in the film when allegations were leveled against him when the #metoo movement began. He also outed Ellen Page on the set of X-Men: The Last Stand:
https://m.facebook.com/EllenPage/posts/10155212835577449
@CLB: So the lasso was narrowed down to more specific uses. Still a bondage device in general.
Was it one of kind though, or did the other Amazons use similar ropes in their play as a form of kinbaku? Diana statement about men only required for procreation leaves a lot of room.
The Bracelets of Submission encoded that Amazons lost their strength if a man bound their wrists. but not if a woman did it:
“My strength is gone… it is Aphrodite’s Law! When an Amazon permits a man to chain her Bracelets of Submission together, she becomes weak as other women in a man-ruled world!”
WW’s bracelets
The interest in lie detecting is ironic considering how much Marston’s household had to lie to family, neighbors, and employers about the status of the second woman in the house. Marston was somewhat enlightened by the standards of his day as a promoter of female independence. He tried to develop a psychology of submission that if done lovingly was a check on the ego. Don’t know if any of it holds up today, not that it was widespread then either. Any offshoot of Freud may be timebound and obsolete.
@51/Sunspear: Yes, that’s my point — that Marston’s intent in creating the lasso was just about bondage and domination and had nothing to do with the polygraph, because the lasso didn’t become associated specifically with truth-telling until well after Marston died. And he didn’t invent the polygraph, so the statement “the lasso… stood in for Marston’s other famous creation, the polygraph” is wrong on two levels. The bondage bit is the only part of that sentence that was correct.
“Was it one of kind though, or did the other Amazons use similar ropes in their play as a form of kinbaku?”
The movie was silent on that point, but the Marston comics made it abundantly clear that the Amazons enjoyed all kinds of restraint and punishment games.
“He tried to develop a psychology of submission that if done lovingly was a check on the ego. Don’t know if any of it holds up today…”
I think he had some valid ideas — that women should be equal, that there were better paths than violence — and it’s true that consensual bondage and submission play can be good at teaching respect for others, since the dominant partner has to be very sensitive and attuned to the submissive partner’s wishes and responses (so it’s really the submissive’s desires and choices that guide it, contrary to surface appearances). But it was also very much filtered through Marston’s own fetishes and was very sexualizing toward women in its way, as well as uncritically perpetuating certain 1940s assumptions about women such as their vanity and preoccupation with clothes, hair, and makeup.
@27 Forgive me – I should have been more explicit. Anyone present in no-mans land risked being shot AT if seen. They were not at all sure to be hit. So as I did explicitly say, it could be crossed.
@48, @49
If that was Ludendorffs goal, he should have been gassing British armies in France, not civilians in London, if the new gas was as effective as implied. If the gas was not that effective, Germany would be crushed without a cease-fire. Of course, that may just mean that Ares had rendered Ludendorff less than rational.
The No Man’s Land scene got me thinking about the legend of the Angel of Mons:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angels_of_Mons
I wish the film had spent a moment to show more of the reactions the soldiers had to what she did. After all, superhumans weren’t exactly everyday in 1918. Did they think it was a miracle? You might think it’s a minor point, but I think it’s good in superhero movies to have these moments where ordinary humans react to the extraordinary. If it becomes too commonplace, it becomes less wondrous (pun totally intended).
@46. Austin: Binding an Amazon? Yes.
@52 Y’know, that gets me thinking… in its own way, Marston’s Wonder Woman was kind of about truth, except it was a truth that ran on porn logic: deep down, everyone is secretly eager to fuck like rabbits/submit to the raven-haired goddess’s will (unless they’re literal Nazis). The lasso doesn’t so much compel obedience as it “frees” one’s inner submissive.
There’s no better illustration of this than the following sequence, from the very first issue of her very first ongoing:
Marston drapes a thin veneer of “Rah rah support the troops” over it all, but tell me – could you imagine a scene anywhere close to this happening under any Wonder Woman writer besides him?
“Trevor thumphers a lot”
I’ve seen you use that word before, and I can make a rough guess as to its meaning based on context, but I’d really like to know where you got it from. I can’t find it in any online dictionary.
“Thumpher” is a word I and my family have used for ages to describes someone stammering and struggling to deal with a situation. I first used it to describe a former boss of mine. No idea where we got it.
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
I’ve heard it before from another source. It sounds vaguely Heinleinian to me, so maybe it was current in the Campbellian Age? (By which I mean the time period in general, not just the Campbellian World Of Science Fiction Authors).
@48 @49
I think the reason it feels like that to me is that after she kills Ares I vaguely recall you got those shots of the soldiers looking like they’d just woken up or something. That combined with the sunrise seemed to say “Hey, violence DID solve everything after all!!”
That said, I take your point that she stopped the war continuing as opposed to just ending it.
I had a lot of the same reactions to the film. It’s the only DCEU film I’ve enjoyed, though I’ve not seen “Aquaman” or “Shazam!”. I loved a lot of this movie. I loved that the movie embraced the use of color without the need to be garish like “Suicide Squad” (or drained of life like “Man of Steel” and “BvS”). Diana is literally a godsend. She’s complex and grounded in a way that previous characters have not been. She’s understandably naive but she’s not stupid. Her intelligence and compassion are never mocked or presented in a negative light. The comedy in the film seems completely natural without being insulting. And the No Man’s Land sequence brought me to tears.
My quibbles were relatively minor, compared to the other films, but like you I was unhappy with the ending. Personally, the movie plateaued for me when Diana killed Erich Ludendorff and the war didn’t end. And while Ares is a very personal and reasonable nemesis for Diana given their fictional history over the years, that battle never reached the same emotional level for me as that moment of realization for Diana. If the movie had ended there I would have been impressed. The Ares battle, felt like a perceived requirement of the genre which somewhat undercut what I felt would have been a far braver choice. And while the following battle wasn’t completely empty and there were layers of nuance that somewhat justified it, the majority of it felt like a needless extension of a much better film.
The other thing that pulled me out of the movie a bit was it’s continued parallels with “Captain America: The First Avenger”, which I’m glad you mentioned, because a lot of reviews seemed to miss or ignore that. I found it extremely jarring throughout, but I was so happy that I didn’t hate the movie as I had “BvS” & “Suicide Squad” that I was torn of it this was a good or a bad thing. “Cap” is my favorite Marvel character and I’ve seen that film more times than any other Marvel / hero film, so that might be why the similarities were so obvious to me. And “Wonder Woman” is not a carbon copy of that film – everyone involved in this film should be proud – “Wonder Woman” is a great film and a tremendous accomplishment on multiple levels. However, the similarities between these two great films were so dead on that it nearly felt like a remake at times, albeit with some twists that were quite satisfying.
Both films are set in the past but grounded by bookends set in the present day. Both feature patriotically dressed lead superheroes. Both historical sections are set in wartime: World War I in “Wonder Woman”; World War II in “Captain America: The First Avenger”. Both leads are presented as morally superior to the majority of the other characters in the films. Both leads fight with the Americans against the Germans. Both supporting teams of soldiers are made up of minorities. “Captain America” is named Steve Rogers. Diana’s love interest, the male lead of the film is named Steve Trevor. During the climax of the films both of the Steves sacrifice themselves by destroying German aircraft they have boarded to prevent the deaths of thousands of innocent lives due to weapons found within the crafts which can’t be safely disposed of; both female leads are the last to speak to them and both are played as tragic romances. Both wars end with a celebration on the day of victory in which the female leads look at black and white photographs of their presumed dead Steves. “Captain America: The First Avenger” ends with Steve in the present mourning the fact that he didn’t get his date with Peggy Carter before joining “The Avengers” in the following film. “Wonder Woman” ends in the present in which she’s received a photograph of Steve Trevor causing her to reminisce the preceding flashbacks…before she joins the “Justice League” in the following film.
So that was a lot. But again, both films have elements all their own and both films are great comic book movies that can and should be enjoyed on their own merits.
@62/JASON: ““Captain America” is named Steve Rogers. Diana’s love interest, the male lead of the film is named Steve Trevor.”
Yeah, and they’re both played by guys named Chris. And their mothers are both named Martha! No, that’s someone else.
Jason: You can’t really fault this movie for having a male Steve in it when that character — and the one in Captain America: The First Avenger — is a well-established comics character. Both of them were created in 1940, for pity’s sake….
—Keith R.A. DeCandido
It is not as if Steve is an uncommon name either. I mean, if they had two guys called Roybury (I used to know a kid called Roybury Conroy Deltonburgh when I was at school, and he didn’t have the most ridiculed name in class too; that honour went to Richard Head, some parents…) in it then that parallel might mean something. Steve though, one of the more common English language names.
At least neither Steve’s first and last names were alliterate…
Steve Rogers, a man barely alive … Oh, wait …
@66/Austin: I’d say “Steve Trevor” is somewhat alliterative.
@68 – How so?
@69/Austin: STEVe TrEVor. Three letters in common. Alliteration isn’t limited to initials. Literary alliteration allows more than a little latitude.
“Trevor goes to meet with his superiors—the War Council led by Sir Patrick Morgan—who are discussing the waning days of the war, and who are appalled when a woman walks into the room.”
I did see it once pointed out that the war council probably had a reason to be appalled. Not so much that a woman was at the meeting but rather that a stranger without security clearance and speaking with a foreign accent walked in….
Also, surely they should have had some cameos in here. Lucy Lawless as an Amazon, Kevin Sorbo as an army PT instructor, Kevin Smith as a gala guest etc…
@72/line: Sadly, Kevin Smith (the one from Hercules/Xena) died in 2002.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: This is far and away the best superhero movie since Richard Donner’s 1978 Superman. Nothing else comes close. And like with the Donner movie, WW’s primary flaw it its ending. In Superman, the idea that flying fast enough around the Earth would cause it to reverse its rotation and go backwards in time is silly. For one thing, the arrow of time has naught to do with the planet’s rotation. For another, OY, all the stuff on shelves would have been knocked off and broken. People would be killed by flying debris. The writers could just as easily have had Superman fly fast enough to go back in time all by himself alone and save her with no loss of emotional impact. Characters on The Flash do that so often it’s like taking a lunch break. “Caitlin, I’m having lunch at a Horn and Hardart Automat in 1956, wanna come with?” Here, as you state with perfect accuracy, WW’s ending is marred by the cliché CGI battle with Ares. Kevin Smith, as you point out, owns the role, but David Thewlis has been one of my favorite actors since his early work with Mike Leigh. He’s great until the climax, but when the fight starts you can’t see him any more than you could see James Spader as Ultron. A waste of a great actor. I live for the day when some superhero film has the guts to NOT end on a huge climax set piece. Even Howard the Duck didn’t manage to escape the cliché.
@74. I don’t think the Earth spinning backward has to be taken literally. It could be seen as a visual storytelling device, like when some movies show a clock spinning backward or forward to illustrate time travel or a jump in time. But I suppose it’s open to interpretation.
@74/BillReynolds: It’s far worse than that. I remember an old Isaac Asimov science column (“Worlds in Confusion,” The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Oct. 1969, reprinted in The Stars in Their Courses, Doubleday 1971) talking about (among other things) the physics of Joshua stopping the Sun in the sky in the Bible. That would require stopping the Earth’s rotation, and as Asimov put it, “Not only would Joshua’s soldiers all have fallen down and rolled for a thousand miles, but the energy of rotation would have been converted into heat and have melted the Earth’s crust.”
I agree with Spike on this one – it’s probably just a metaphorical illustration of time rolling back. I recall Gravity Falls doing much the same thing in its time-travel episode, and it was pretty cool if only for the reversed soundtrack.
@77 et al.: No matter how you interpret the Earth-reversal shot, as literal or metaphorical, it’s still a bad idea to give Superman the power to undo his mistakes by reversing time. How can there ever be any stakes after that? It’s too easy a copout; nothing will ever be a real danger for him ever again.
Also, it has some disturbing implications. In the original timeline, he was too late to save Lois because he was busy saving thousands of other people, including Jimmy Olsen. So if he rewound time and went to save Lois instead, does that mean that this time around, he just left all those other people to die? And how did Jimmy survive this time?
It was just a dumb ending, because they had this incredibly huge, literally world-changing thing happen and utterly failed to think through its internal logic or examine its larger consequences.
@74, I agree with @75. It isn’t rotating backwards, that is just a piece of visual shorthand to give the viewers a clue as to what happened. Maybe it could have been better visualised with 21stC effects and CGI, but it was a good attempt for the time period.
@79/random22: And like I just said, whether you take it as literal or figurative is the least of its problems. Either way, it’s still a bad storytelling choice in far more fundamental ways.
As problematic as the time reversal was, plot-wise, it still gave us the best superhero scream in all of film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qbrqhaBmno
@80. That wasn’t the specific issue Bill was raising though.
@82/Spike: I know, but we already covered that issue adequately in earlier comments. I’m suggesting that it’s not worth dwelling on it further than we already have, since it’s not the only or primary problem with the scene.
@73. Sorry to hear that. Definitely had the charismatic villain thing working for him.
STEVE: We can’t save everyone in this war. This is not what we came here to do.
DIANA: No, but it is what I’m going to do.
When I first saw Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman in Batman v Superman, I was cautiously optimistic. She was a noticeable bright spot in an otherwise dismal film. WB/DC had already spent way too much time on Batman and Superman films over the years. Could they buck the trend?
Needless to say, there was a lot riding on this film. And the end result was way beyond anything I could have hoped for! Wonder Woman is DC’s brightest, most uplifting film since the 1978 Superman! And somehow it manages that feat while telling a story that takes place in the middle of WWI.
I certainly enjoyed the first act, the introduction to Themyscira, the Amazonians and even Steve Trevor. But to me, the film only really came together during No Man’s Land. That sequence encapsulates everything that makes this film special.
A hero has to be willing to endure and sacrifice everything for those in need. It’s the most essential aspect of being heroic. Diana literally walks across a minefield of death and destruction, taking every single bullet in stride, holding up her shield with fierce determination. You can see her struggling, but never backing down. Not to mention Diana stands in stark contrast to the field around her, a bright colorful spot in a dark colorless wasteland. One could even draw parallels from that scene to the ongoing struggles for women to not be treated as second-class citizens. They’re willing to stand up and take the heat on a daily basis in order to survive and make the world a better place.
It all works beautifully, thanks in no small part to the contributions of director Patty Jenkins, writer Allan Heinberg, star Gal Gadot, and especially the outstanding score by Rupert Gregson-Williams. Easily the most iconic and recognizable score written for a DC film since Elfman’s 1989 Batman score. I even have to give Snyder due credit for casting Gadot in the first place in the 2016 film and also helping to jumpstart Wonder Woman as a film project alongside Heinberg and Michelle MacLaren before Jenkins came onboard.
There’s not a false note to be had in this film. Everything comes together, the characters, the story. Their motivations are genuine. The jokes never undercut the drama. The cast is rock solid, from Robin Wright’s Antiope to Pine’s Trevor.
If there’s a less-than-favorable element to this film, it’s mostly down to the villains. Well-cast, but overall on the simplistic side, with feeble motivations. They could have easily cut a lot of Ludendorff and spent more time developing Ares (Thewlis nails the role), going beyond the mythical and getting more personal.
I haven’t even talked about Steve Trevor. Pine can be charismatic, funny and heroic, all in one, as seen in the Trek films. And he plays off Gadot beautifully. A person who struggles to understand who is she and where she comes from, but who never thinks less of her due to gender or any other preconceptions.
Needless to say, Gadot carries the film with grace and passion. Her love, her optimism are tested as she faces the death, destruction and horrors of the war. But she never wavers either. Whether she tries to hug a baby or risk her life riding into a cloud of poison gas, we’re constantly reminded of just how selfless Diana can truly be. Out of all DC films, I can’t recall ever leaving a movie theater with such a wide grin on my face. Wonder Woman was the one film truly capable of doing that. I’m anxious to see what’s next for the character. Jenkins and Gadot have earned every bit of goodwill from this viewer (who wasn’t even a fan in the first place).
I think a lot of the comments have nailed my basic problems with the film. It’s a good film, it’s entertaining and, while I was watching it, I was thoroughly absorbed into it. But. Five minutes after I left the cinema, I started to spot all the issues. By the time I got home (it was a 50 minute walk!) I had a 1500 blog post written in my head.
I think my biggest issue was just how similar the beats of the story were (once it gets to Belgium) compared to The First Avenger. The only real differences between the basic stories of the two films are setting (and really the differences between WWI and WWII are not huge at surface level [vastly different conflicts underneath, but at the levels the two films operate at not so much]) and the fact that the hero of WW is female. (And while I don’t hold the fact that we have a Steve Trevor here to go along with Steve Rogers against the film [I’m aware of my comics history!], it really doesn’t help matters!)
My second biggest was with the bad guys. Having Ares be the stuffed shirt in London was boring (even before you get to the climactic fight which…not a crowning moment of awesome). Featuring Ludendorff was (as someone else has already mentioned) problematic. Dr Poison was a cypher.
I’m not sure that there’s really all that much that could have been done about the first problem, to be fair, absent a complete and utter rewrite. Maybe dispensed with the cut-price Howling Comandos? That might have helped a bit and wouldn’t have harmed the story much. (Ironically, I actually think Sameer et al are better characters than the Howling Commandos from The First Avenger because all three shake out as three distinct people while the commandos [Bucky apart] are not so much.)
The second, well. The idea that occurred to me as I was walking home was that Dr Poison would have made a far more interesting Ares. Leave the stuffed shirt in London as an obstructive bureaucrat and leave Ludendorff out of it altogether (go the Captain America route and invent a German officer) and give Dr Poison some actual character development, motivation and make the climactic fight way more interesting than what we ended up with.
This film started out great, with a nice aesthetic, a nice portrayal of the character, nice action…. but then it was derailed by the very stereotypical racial/ethnic characters, and the incredibly cheap-ass final battle.
It looked like something ripped off from a Dragon Ball episode, which would be fine… for a Dragon Ball episode. And of course, subverting the cliche final boss fight would have been a more fitting ending.
That said, I did enjoy it a nit, and I was glad that it did well with the public, and we will be getting more WW films.
@12 – random22: Yes, Gadot’s views on Palestine are troubling.
@18 – Ian: My son, a WWI buff, was incensed at Ludendorff’s death.
I don’t get the hype for Wonder Woman at all. To me the whole movie feels entirely derivative. The plot kept moving along with the feeling that I knew what was around the corner all along. The ending was telegraphed a mile away and there was not a single surprising moment in the film. If I had seen this movie in 1985 I would have loved it but now it feels like I’ve seen it all before, and better.
On the plus side, Gal Gadot is great. And despite it’s faults it’s still the best DCEU movie so far (though I confess I haven’t seen any of the DC movies released after this one). Though it must be said that MoS, BvsS and SS set the bar extremely low.
I also find the WW musical theme cringeworthy. Seriously, when I first heard it in BvsS I burst out laughing. It’s just so ridiculously on the nose as a heroic musical theme.
Different strokes for different folks obviously.
@88/titaanzink: I think that’s why people liked it — because it was the first DCEU movie that actually felt like a classic superhero/adventure movie rather than a self-consciously dark and cynical deconstruction thereof. Evoking the ’80s isn’t so bad, since that was a high point for action-adventure movies. (The WW sequel is actually set in the ’80s.)