Wonder Woman

This was a movie full of nitpicks. Fast-travel boats, origin stories framed as flashbacks but full of lines of dialogue the character having the flashback did not hear, a fight with arrows flying but for some reason nobody aiming at one main character despite having no reason not to kill him…

Though those details add up, I could forgive it if the rest of the movie was good, but it suffers from unlikeable characters, an uninteresting main story and despite the backdrop of WWI, stakes that just don't seem that compelling. It would probably have been better to have a modern-day story that actually got us to like Diana and then this origin story as a sequel.

Diana herself is half robot, half child, and it's bizarre how the narrative makes her too pure to be able to pass by those in need but at the same time never stop to ask the Germans' stories before slaughtering them. Never pausing to question destroying the heritage of local people.

As WWI scholar enough to be bewildered as to why Siegfried Sassoon was on what appeared to be a wall to memorialise dead soldiers (Owen makes more sense), I totally expect to see the period made cartoonish for action movies, but it would be nice to have a bit more nuance than directly stating it was good guys against bad guys. Or at least having Diana question that when it was presented to her.

The humour was stilted, Gal Godot wasn’t very interesting or powerful, the main antagonist acted in ways that make no sense to further his goal, and Chris Pine didn’t manage to bring the likeability to Steve Trevor that he did to James T. Kirk.

There’s a lot of controversy about how adequate this incarnation of Wonder Woman is as a feminist icon, whether she exists only for the titillation of the male gaze or whether she’s an empowered icon of strength. Well, I’m not in a position to tell women what to think about this powerful woman, and it’s not for me to conclude whether she’s an image of strength or a tool of patriarchy. But the jokes about her getting undressed inappropriately or the main characters going straight to talking about sex definitely seemed both artificial way to get the character to own her sexuality and at the same time excite teenaged boys, but the worst part is that neither ring true as character moments.

I’m surprised this plodding film got the positive reception it did. DC are definitely lagging far behind Marvel with their cinematic universe these days. It’s interesting that internationally, Thor: Ragnarok has slightly outdone Wonder Woman (with Guardians of the Galaxy and Spider-Man: Homecoming both more successful still). But in America alone, Wonder Woman has outdone them all, second only to Beauty and the Beast in box office takings. This seems to me wholly fuelled by the American obsession with identity politics right now, which the rest of the world is wrapped up in. And certainly, I find nothing wrong with progressiveness. But when there’s such a disconnect from the rest of the world, the danger becomes writing more for political goals than for the need to tell a good story. Perhaps that’s a factor in why I just couldn’t get into this one.