Wonder Woman

 
Saw Wonder Woman today, if the image there didn't clue you in. It may not surprise you to know that I enjoyed it a fair amount. It's not just a good action movie, it's a good movie period, and is a surprisingly nuanced treatment of WWI as well.

Wonder Woman as a character is not one that ever made a huge impact on my life, I mean she was cool and all, but nothing that mattered terribly to me. This is likely in large part due to my gender of course, the point is though that I didn't go into the movie expecting a particular iteration of the character, or anticipating either extreme of satisfaction or disappointment. Well, actually since Zack Snyder has a writing credit on the film I didn't really have high hopes, the dude who made 300 and Sucker Punch is not guy who springs to mind when writing a well rounded female character of any variety, let alone a cultural icon.

Fortunately those fears were not realized. Snyder's influence appeared limited to some of the action scenes and director Patty Jenkins clearly made a ton of effort to shoot the character in ways that weren't exclusively for the male gaze. Mind you, Gal Gadot is a stunningly attractive woman so I am sure there was plenty of drool in the audience(from all genders probably), but the camera and costuming wasn't really emphasizing that aspect.

Like I said though it's a solid story well told, they did a great job of showing a newcomer to industrial society without portraying her as too dumb to breath(my wife's words there) and while it was clear our hero was out of her depth at times she was never treated as helpless or without agency.

I can't speak to the emotional impact a lot of women report having when seeing a big budget super hero movie with a female lead for obvious reasons, so I am not even going to try, but I will say that even though DC studio's movies tend to be worse than their counterparts, they are at least taking more risks than Marvel does, or rather they are showing that some things that are considered risks totally aren't. Wonder Woman deserves all the money and it's own franchise, I will happily go and see Princess Diana of Themiscyra kick ass on screen for the next ten years or more.

Speaking of kicking ass, where many claim the movie falls down is in the final portion, when it graduates from a war film with Amazons to the full blown super powered beatdown. I have no idea why people don't like this, you went to a movie starring a character who in comics has literally punched gods to death, she hangs out with Superman for fucks sake, you really think they aren't going to do a big ass battle at the end? I mean, if they didn't have one then the complaint would be that it wasn't there anyway. I enjoyed it myself, although the special effects team did let the side down a little bit, but this character is supposed to be on par with Superman as far as powers go, a major complaint that I have about super-hero movies is they don't often really show just how powerful some of these characters are, so show me fifteen or twenty minutes of punching gods through walls and chucking tanks around and I am perfectly happy.

On a more meta note, the big fight scene almost had to happen just to establish the character to the audience as someone who should be respected by the likes of Superman and Batman, even in the fictional world a woman still has to prove she is at least as good as her peers, and the director knows the best way to do this is have a big damn fight scene with lots of explosions that she can walk out of unharmed, and so on.

I can see the complaints now if there wasn't stuff like that in the movie "Why should I care about Wonder Woman(a girl) she obviously isn't as strong as Superman, or as smart and cool as Batman, shy is she taking screen time away from the heroes doing the real work(the boys)?"
Perhaps attempting to head this off is futile, but I think it's worth a shot, the movie is great by itself don't get me wrong, but I think in a lot of ways it is an audition to male portion of the viewing audience for her spot in the Justice League.

It is a shame that she has to audition like that, the character has such a history that she shouldn't have to prove anything, but what else is new? If it helps I totally think she passed, and it appears the box office numbers agree with me.