Runtime: 2 hours, 21 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Patty Jenkins
Quick Impressions:
My first novel was about Wonder Woman. I wrote it when I was four-and-a-half in a spiral notebook with a Cabbage Patch Kid on the cover. It took up half a page, red ink, all caps.
“OH HELLO. HELLO, WONDER WOMAN! OH NO! YOU ARE NOT WONDER WOMAN! YOU ARE NOT…AHHHHHH….”
My early work is sort of like Shakespeare, scant stage directions. To get the full effect, you have to picture someone sitting behind a desk in a darkened office when a wicked Wonder Woman impostor walks through the door. By the time the speaker realizes he’s not dealing with the real Wonder Woman, it’s too late. She’s already strangling him.
Fortunately for audiences, Patty Jenkins had much better material to work with when she made this film. (But did she have Wonder Woman Underoos like I did? Probably. She’s only eight years older than I am. Back in the day, we all had Wonder Woman Underoos.)
My point is, for me, Wonder Woman is more than just another summer movie. I spent my preschool years reveling in the animated action of Super Friends and watching Lynda Carter stop a bullet cold and make the Axis fold. In first grade, I reread my copy of Wonder Woman: Cheetah on the Prowl until the cover fell apart.
I have been waiting for this movie to come out for decades. I love Wonder Woman. So even though I haven’t been seeing a lot of stuff in the theater lately, I had to see this.
In a few weeks, my son will be two, so this fall seems like a good time to end my long hiatus and restart this movie review blog in earnest. In the meantime, I’ll try to review a summer movie here and there to ease my way back into glamorous world of independent online movie reviewing.
The Good:
Wonder Woman was just exactly what I expected and deflected every bullet that I nervously imagined might shatter its success. To me, any Wonder Woman movie should involve Paradise Island, and a plane crash, and a bunch of Amazons, and rumors of a statue, and an amazing child running along the beach wishing to train in combat but sheltered by her mysteriously overprotective mother Hippolyta. I’m fine with blurring and rearranging of the exact details just as long as the shadow of these essentials hovers over the beginning of the film. I always get uneasy when I hear some new, weird pitch for a Wonder Woman project. (“But this Wonder Woman runs a nail salon in Brooklyn and dreams of managing an Italian restaurant.”) You get the idea that Hollywood types have spent decades vying to come up with the weirdest pitch for a new Wonder Woman.
I’m so relieved that the Wonder Woman that actually made it to the screen was just a normal, straight forward telling of what I consider the real story. I also appreciated that the film was helmed by Monster director Patty Jenkins instead of Zack Snyder. This is purely a personal preference kind of thing, but to me, watching a Zack Snyder movie generates an uncomfortable nails-on-a-chalkboard-like sensation inside my brain. Snyder does good and interesting work, but as a rule, it’s not for me. (I did enjoy 300, but not that much.) I feel like his movies hurt my mind, like my brain is just not wired to readily comprehend material in the way that he’s presenting it to me. His films are usually interesting and often have many excellent elements, but the experience of watching them is a kind of slow torture. Imagine you wanted to cook a particular dish, but the only recipe you could find was presented as a ballet with occasional interjections in a foreign language. For me, that’s a Zack Snyder film. It’s not bad. It’s just so much harder to enjoy than it should be.
But Wonder Woman is free of Snyder’s signature style and is pretty much your standard American popcorn flick. (It’s got plenty of substance and probably more depth than most summer films, but I mean, it’s easy to watch without any story-scrambling, stylistic flourish.) This isn’t the first DC movie I’ve actually liked because recently I watched Suicide Squad at home, and that was the first DC movie I’ve actually liked. But Wonder Woman is by far the DC movie that I’ve liked the most.
What impressed me so strongly about the film, what made it stand apart from virtually every other summer blockbuster featuring a woman that I’ve ever seen is that Wonder Woman herself comes across more as someone you’d like to be than someone you’d like to have.
Gal Gadot is an incredibly attractive woman with intense charisma that comes across in all her TV appearances and interviews. But the film does not particularly play up Wonder Woman’s sex appeal. She is definitely beautiful. She certainly turns heads. Every other character finds her striking, fascinating, compelling, and they should. She’s a demi-god. She’s more than human. But the camera’s gaze never seems lurid. We’re not really encouraged to bask in her sexiness and desirability. I’ve seen fast food photographed to look sexier. (Seriously. It’s scary how frequently we’re urged to lust after sizzling all-beef patties.)
There are plenty of other substantial female comic book characters out there. Take Black Widow from the Marvel Universe. She’s not just a sex object. She’s a deep character with a rich backstory who is a highly trained and skilled spy. She’s incredibly intelligent with complex motivations, and she’s an invaluable member of the team. But she’s also a sex object. It’s the way the camera reveals her to us.
This isn’t a criticism of Scarlet Johansson’s performance as Black Widow. She plays the character really well, and there’s nothing wrong with exuding sexuality. (In fact, because she is a spy, using her sexuality to entrance and entrap people is a legitimate part of her character. Her name is the Black Widow, after all.)
It’s just that in Wonder Woman, Diana truly seems different from the female hero we’re usually given. A little girl might want to be like Black Widow when she grows up, but she could go ahead and be Wonder Woman right now. You don’t have to dress in sexy clothes to be Wonder Woman. That’s not the point of Wonder Woman. In fact, Diana spends significant parts of the movie bundled up in a bulky fur coat or hidden by a voluminous cloak. (This may be partially because Gadot was pregnant during re-shoots, but regardless of the reason, the effect is the same.) Now her actual armor (the Wonder Woman costume) is a bit skimpy, but it’s also made of metal. When she wears it, she’s preparing to go into battle. When one character mentions being “aroused” by her, he says in the same breath that he’s “frightened.” (That’s probably an appropriate response when one beholds the Amazonian daughter of Zeus.) If Diana hears this comment, she doesn’t respond. She’s busy.
As young women, we’re frequently encouraged (through cues that can be quite subtle) to want to be someone special so people will want to look at us. Watching this movie, a little girl might get the desire to be Wonder Woman not because she wants to be seen as Wonder Woman, but because she wants to experience being Wonder Woman. That’s a big difference.
Gadot’s Diana is a lot like Joan of Arc but without all the gruesome fiery martyrdom that might be off-putting to would-be emulators. (As a Catholic, I have great respect for St. Joan, but you must admit, it’s more fun not to get burned at the stake. Honestly, Gadot’s whole interpretation of the character is quite evocative of Joan of Arc. Allan Heinberg’s screenplay seems to be having a conversation with various legends of St. Joan, and I’d love to write more about that, but any such analysis would be riddled with spoilers.)
Diana serves a different god than Joan of Arc, of course, and some of her values are much more in harmony with contemporary secular morals and feminist thinking. (She’s like a literate Joan of Arc who’s not so hung up on virginity. She draws her power from within, and when she sets about doing god’s work, she’s the god.) There’s a lot in this movie for feminists to love. (Feminist is a really loaded word, though, one that obscures as much as it reveals about a person’s beliefs since not everyone using the label means the same thing by it.) Jenkins gives us a strong protagonist, but this film is bound to be seen as “too feminist” by some and “problematic in its attempts to convey a feminist message” by others.
My husband commented, “I wonder if that scene in the hotel was disappointing to some people. I can imagine that some feminists might be disappointed by that.”
Maybe. But I don’t think we should be. In Hollywood movies, women always seem to find fulfillment by falling in love with a man. But Diana’s relationship with Steve does not help her to understand herself. It helps her to understand Steve. What happens between them does not fundamentally change her. It changes their relationship and her understanding of him.
More problematic for me than the “love story” was the way the movie seems to hint that there are certain more feminine virtues possessed by humanity that give it its good side. Maybe it takes a woman to understand these things, kind of the old idea that a man (being a man) can’t anticipate a woman’s insights, so while no other man can defeat him, a woman can. Trust me, there are enough of these ideas woven through the film to make anybody launch into a furious debate with anyone else. It’s almost like the movie at times tries too hard to be feminist and ends up inadvertently weakening its own case. Some people who think feminism is a bad word will be upset by what the movie asserts, while others who despise feminism will praise the movie for championing the traditional virtues of women. Two feminists will look at the same aspects of the movie and reach similarly opposite conclusions. Everyone will get in a fight. In the end, this is probably a strength of the film. It will create discussion.
Sometimes I wonder if Diana’s way of behaving like a woman will end up changing the way society views the contributions of women during World War I. I know this sounds silly, but hear me out. As I watched, I kept marveling, I can’t believe that it’s been one-hundred years since World War I. My maternal grandparents were born in 1918, so I feel (probably errantly) like that time period is part of my personal reality.
I thought idly, My children will now always associate World War I with Wonder Woman, a way I never could have thought of it. (I always think of Hemingway.)
Then I had another thought. In the far distant future, will people think that we actually believed Wonder Woman was fighting alongside us in World War I? Will even our own society eventually believe such a thing? Will movies like Wonder Woman one day become our Iliad? (If so, and we end up remembering only highly fictionalized versions of history, we definitely need Wonder Woman to counterbalance the Hemingway!)
Best Scene:
I absolutely loved the scene in the boat when Diana reveals that although she is not familiar with Steve Trevor’s culture, she is not as naïve as she might appear and is certainly not ignorant. I liked it especially because usually when a woman has not been around “men” or “the big city” she’s portrayed in popular fiction as a wide-eyed naïf who will easily fall prey to the sly sophisticates and needs “a good guy” to protect her.
That’s just not the case here. Now it is true that Diana does not understand men and does not understand the cultural rules governing Steve. But after the slightest amount of pushback, Steve is forced to reveal that he does not understand the arbitrary rules of his culture either.
I’d like to say much more here, but I want to avoid spoilers. I honestly think people could have a heated argument about many aspects of this scene for hours, but to explain this assertion, I would have to get too specific.
It’s pretty awesome, though, when Diana casually confirms one somewhat obvious implication about life on Themyscira. Of course, I suppose Queen Victoria would watch the scene and conclude that the Amazons eschewed physical pleasure altogether in favor of more transcendent pursuits.
Best Scene Visually:
The most visually stunning thing in this movie is Diana dressed up like a typical lady of the day. I love Diana’s interplay with Etta Candy (Lucy Davis who really makes the most of her scenes and leaves a huge impression despite a relatively small part). I love Etta’s reactions to Diana’s reactions to every successive rejected outfit. What’s best, though, is that Diana ends up in an outfit that evokes the civilian dress of Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman. Somewhat ironically, this effort by Steve to dress her down makes her look more conspicuously “sexy” than at any other time in the movie. I suppose because she’s dressing modestly to win the approval of the scrutinizing male gaze.
But now, if you talk less about a scene and more about a stunning visual, the symbolism with Steve’s watch wins out. That early moment when he is bathing is rather hilarious (in a movie that goes for knowing chuckles rather than big laughs).
But I love the sort of symbolic transference that happens there. Steve and Diana talk about how that “little thing,” (the watch) controls his whole life. And while that’s worth a chuckle, there’s a deeper truth there. That watch and whatever other little thing that could be running his life—both are symbols of his mortality. Diana and Steve’s conversation here foreshadows a critical moment later on when we must remember the significance of these linked symbols yet again.
The dynamic at play between Diana and Steve here is different than in some movie pairings. It’s not that Steve is a man and Diana is a woman. It’s that Steve is a man and Diana is a god (or at least a demi-god). That watch and that other thing are pretty much the same. They are what make him different from her. And as she gains greater understanding of him, she comes to value what he offers her and to decide what her relationship to humans will be. I could write an entire book on this. It resonated quite strongly with me.
Also easy-on-the-eyes were all of the early scenes set on Themyscira (Paradise Island). The white cliffs rising above the blue sea must be somewhere in Greece. I’d love to visit. It’s gorgeous.
Best Action Sequence:
Under most circumstances, being able to deflect bullets with your bracelets is kind of a cheesy power, but not when you’re in the trenches during WWI facing relentless machine gun fire. (I remember an early episode of Lynda Carter’s Wonder Woman—maybe the pilot—has her exploited as a carnival-type street performer doing the old deflecting bullets trick.) There’s nothing cheesy about this scene. She’s resplendent in battle.
This was not only an excellent scene but one that made me realize how apt a setting World War I is for showcasing Wonder Woman’s particular powers.
Also, as cool as the bracelets are, the truly amazing aspect of this scene is her courageousness and lack of fear. She doesn’t care that she will be in danger. Her goal is to do what’s right. Her willingness to run out there motivates the others as much as (and probably more than) her amazing bullet deflection. Her compassion and her courage make her a hero.
Incidentally, both my husband and my daughter (who is now eight) enthusiastically named this scene as their favorite part in the movie.
The Performances:
I’ve already praised Gal Gadot (the perfect Wonder Woman), and Lucy Davis (whose very presence reassures us that women can be exciting and integral characters even if they aren’t ten-thousand foot tall super heroes who look like they’ve been chiseled from stone by Zeus). Chris Pine is perfectly cast as Steve Trevor and makes the character quite likable. I also particularly loved Robin Wright as Antiope and Said Taghmaoui, Ewen Bremmer, and Eugene Brave Rock as the charismatic bunch of misfits rounding out Steve’s crew.
The Negatives:
I like Chris Pine. (He’s probably like my fourth or fifth favorite Chris.) But I never believed for one second that he was a guy from 1917. He seemed more like a guy from right now. It’s the same way his Kirk comes across—just your average charismatic guy, an everyman from anywhere. (I mean, Kirk’s from Iowa in the future, and he’s always journeying to the far reaches of space, but he seems like somebody you might bump into hanging around your dorm.) Pine plays Steve Trevor exactly the same way. This is not a flaw in his performance. Clearly this was a choice of the director and the screenwriter. Maybe it’s a positive. Sometimes movies set in the past rely too heavily on excessive slang and pop culture references to beat us over the head with reminders that we’re not in the present. For some reason, though, this distracted me through the entire movie, which is why I mention it here.
Also, I enjoyed all the unusual camera angles, but I don’t understand the purpose of them other than to look cool. Okay, I lied. I didn’t enjoy them. I would have enjoyed them, but I found those distracting, too. I kept thinking, “What is the purpose of viewing all of this upside down from the ceiling?” Maybe there is a significance that I will grasp on a second viewing. Maybe I should just relax and enjoy the view.
Maybe the biggest weakness of the film is that while Wonder Woman’s action scenes were impressive, they came quite late in the extremely long movie. Now I love character development and frequently find action scenes hard to follow, so I loved the way the film progressed. But in my experience, most summer blockbusters feature a lot more carefully staged action scenes, which begin happening much, much earlier in the movie. Except for the scene in the trenches, I didn’t find the fight choreography particularly impressive either. For me this was not a big deal. But it might bother someone else a lot.
The only other small quibble I have is that Danny Huston and especially Elena Anaya were extremely underused. I understand why, and what they did with them was effective. But I still hope we see more of Dr. Poison in some future DC project. That character had a lot of potential.
Overall:
I loved Wonder Woman. I hope Patty Jenkins decides to direct a Wonder Woman sequel. It may have taken forty years, but Hollywood finally found the perfect person to play Wonder Woman on the big screen. Gal Gadot had better be in every DC movie from here on out. Since I love her so much, I’m allowing myself to be excited about the Justice League even though I know I’m going to find Zack Snyder’s presentation style disorienting. To see Wonder Woman again, it will all be worth it.