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.
Unfortunately, some muddled writing kneecaps the message. There's a great moment when the Sword of Athena, the phallus that Diana is told will kill the bad guy, gets smashed to smithereens. This shattering of the phallus of power is an incisive commentary, but Diana's takeaway is that the power was inside her all along--she is the weapon.
"I am the only one who is powerful enough to defeat evil" is a standby of the superhero genre, and an insidious one. The fetish of the destined hero is individualistic might-makes-right wish fulfillment that ignores the social forces that create evil. For a while it seems like Wonder Woman is going to engage with that rotten core of superheroism. Instead, when Wonder Woman kills Ares, she saves the day and stops the war, as Ares is apparently the malicious force behind the brunt of WWI. This is a missed opportunity for self-reflexive commentary. What if the reveal had been that the war created Ares, not vice versa? Or that mankind is the true supervillain, and Ares's death doesn't change man's bloodlust? Ares himself suggests that he is a catalyst rather than a cause, but that commentary is tossed out the window when he dies and the German soldiers give up as if they had been in a hypnotic fugue state the entire time. To further tangle the message, there is a baffling moment in which Wonder Woman spares the life of Dr. Maru (Elena Anaya), otherwise known as Doctor Poison, who was directly responsible for the deaths of countless more soldiers than any of the German footsoldiers Diana has killed previously. Dr. Poison does not demonstrate remorse, guilt, or reformation. Why does Diana spare her? Is it simply because Poison is a woman?
Wonder Woman gets much of the way towards saying something insightful about violence, gender, and political orientations, but as it stands the message is a bit of a false savior, propping up the status quo in a few subtle but crucial ways.
Yet we cannot allow Wonder Woman's great accomplishments to be overshadowed: It is the first legitimately good movie to emerge from the garbage fire that is the DC Cinematic Universe. The fact that it took creative team of women to shape up the idiot hypermasculine DCCU is perhaps the aspect of Wonder Woman that brings me the most glee. Indeed, the very worst scenes come in the form of a tacked-on frame narrative in which Diana is just hanging out and emailing back and forth with Batman. Do they suspect that we are really so sweaty for shared universe connections that we will lap up an e-mail from Batman like thirsty dogs?
Even beyond the meager hurdle of being the best DCCU film, it is one of the best genuine superhero movies to come out in quite a while. It's also the only superhero movie to make me feel anything since 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy.* Diana is immensely watchable. Gal Gadot perfectly embodies her character, like Evans, Downey Jr., or Stewart + McKellen before her. She endears herself to us with her enthusiastic wide-eyed absorption of everything that she has never experienced before. The moment she first meets Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) is accompanied not with hammy exposition, but simply a close-up of Gadot gazing upon him with a mix of awe and amused curiosity.
*Logan excluded.
Gadot is the anchor upon which the movie hangs, sometimes with surety, sometimes precariously, as in the overwrought CGI nonsense that smothers the final conflict. Though Wonder Woman in its weaker moments falls prey to such prevalent superhero genre missteps, there are more frequent and more exciting ways in which it excels. Matthew Jensen's cinematography, for one, feels more gorgeous and deep than that of its superhero peers. The grandiose vibrancy of Themyscira is the perfect set-up for the payoff that is greyed-out wartorn Europe. Even the action feels novel, despite utilizing a handful of well-worn tropes (e.g. speed ramping, over-the-top acrobatics). The Amazonian combat style is far more impactful than the typical "Strong Action Woman Beats up Men with Her Flips" pandering. Their movement is graceful, almost impossibly so, but with a tangible weight and precision behind every gesture.
Although I found the dialogue occasionally dubious**, Jenkins' directing elevates the script's shortcomings. Unfortunately, even she cannot salvage a crew of tertiary characters who seem to tag along with our heroes just to fill out the cast. Each one of them gets one "important" line in the movie, only to spend the rest of their screentime loitering about the frame pointlessly.
**Diana makes it clear that she has read extensively about the world of men, even so far as to be well-schooled in treatises on sexuality, but somehow has no idea what marriage is. The fish out of water conceit is never quiet internally consistent.
I experienced exhilaration during that scene, and a borderline mythic awe. I can't say as I was expecting that from a late stage superhero film out of the most disgraced studio still in the game.
3 / 5 BLOBS
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