Director: Patty Jenkins
Writers: Allan Heinberg, Zack Snyder, Jason Fuchs
Cast: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Connie Neilsen, Robin Wright, Danny Huston, David Thewlis, Lucy Davis, Elena Anaya
Runtime: 141 mins.
2017
Ever since 2016 kindly reminded us that seething racism, sexism, and class inequality are still the primary forces behind America, folks have been searching desperately for heroes. It makes sense that those hopes would be hung to Wonder Woman and all that it represents, as it is embarrassingly the first female-helmed superhero movie in the current decade-long era of superhero movies. Superheroes are the pop cinematic genre of our time, so the importance of this moment cannot be understated. This was further amplified by the hiring of Patty Jenkins as director. The frequency of hiring women for movies of this magnitude is just about zero. We see this evidenced in the career of Jenkins herself, who directed a killer first feature in Monster, then was left to molder in televisionland where she's been quietly doing tremendous work for a decade and a half.
I remember coming in contact with two thinkpieces in close succession: One argued that Wonder Woman is bad because Gal Gadot didn't have visible body hair, and the other argued that Wonder Woman is good because Gadot's thigh juggled while she was running. As discourse becomes increasingly compartmentalized on social media, we tend to double down on partisanship. A thing must be either good or evil, acceptable or unacceptable, easily characterized or dismissed in 140 characters. Yet we do a disservice to art when we eradicate nuance in favor of easily digestible political capital. Every work of art is political, yet it exists in the political sphere in myriad and complex ways.
Representation in Wonder Woman is boundary-pushing in a lot of the ways that count. Simply putting a woman at the helm of an action movie means that we get to see Wonder Woman shot and framed iconically, a treatment usually reserved for our Indiana Joneses and Spider-Mans. Too often women in action movies are vacant sex symbols, or characters who can be summed up as beautiful but dangerous. Diana, however, has a distinctive personality and value system--one that the film is structured around.
