Wonder Woman review

I guess in the great war between DC and Marvel, I come down pretty hard on the Marvel side... not that I read the comics, we're talking strictly cinematic universes here. I find that I've never had the patience to try and catch up on fifty years of comic history for... well, anything.  That said, I have nothing special against DC properties.  I liked Superman and Wonder Woman in the 70s, and I like them still.  I'm vaguely fond of Batman.

So, while I wasn't exactly waiting on the edge of my seat for the Wonder Woman movie, I certainly meant to go see it, and I finally did.  Since I was late in the game for blockbuster, I doubt I really need a spoiler warning -- everyone who meant to see it probably saw it before me -- but for form's sake, I review with spoilers all of which are unmarked.

It was... pretty good.  I'm not sure about all the hype about how utterly amazing I'm supposed to find it, but yeah.  Good flick.   I liked the people (which isn't always a given for me in recent DC films), and I liked the overaching theme that the way you behave toward people isn't about what they deserve, but about what you believe.

And yes, it's cool to have a female-led major summer blockbuster.  Dear Marvel, aren't you kicking yourself now about not bothering with a Black Widow movie just because you thought female superheroes wouldn't bring in the box office?  Want a plot?  She has to infiltrate Hydra and retrieve a Macguffin, forcing her to don several undercover identities along the way.  Or she is using her common tactic of pretending to be captured when outside events trap her among the enemy, and she has to escape and rescue whoever she was sent for.  Or she discovers that the red room is still active, and goes in to rescue girls who have been so brainwashed that most of them don't even think they need rescuing. Or... you know, pretty much any well-written story would work.  If you can come up with stuff for Tony to do, you can come up with stuff for Nat to do.  It is not an alien concept.

It's true that female-led superhero movies in the past have flopped -- Catwoman, Supergirl, Elektra.  That wasn't because they were female-led.  That was because they were awful movies.  Get a good movie with a female action lead, and people come to it like any other awesome popcorn flick.

Which brings us neatly back to Wonder Woman.

It's much better than it has any right to be, following, as it does, one of the worst superhero movies I've seen, Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice.  I hadn't bothered to watch it before, and only watched it now to find out how they set up WW, and, spoiler, it's as bad as the reviews say.  Just a big, dark gray, muddled mess.  But Gal Gadot's Wonder Woman was the best thing in it, and by some miracle, they gave her over to people who could capitalize on that instead of killing it.

So, elements:

Plot
Diana, princess of the Amazons, spends her childhood on the hidden island of Themyscira, home of the Amazons.  After a bloody battle Zeus hid it from sight with his last breath.  Diana is the only child.  She has been raised to believe that it's the Amazons job to defeat Ares eventually and stop human wars. When WWI pilot Steve Trevor crashes through the barrier, chased by German troops (defeated by the Amazons because they're just that good), she learns about the Great War and decides that Ares is abroad in the world.  Taking the sword she believes to be the god-killer and the magic lasso that compels people to tell the truth (along with her iconic gauntlet bracelets, of course), she follows Steve back out into the world of the 1910s.  They stop first in London, where she gets her first taste of modernity ("It's hideous!"), and then they go to the Belgian front, where she suits up as a superhero and goes through a brilliantly shot bit of trench warfare to save a village. She believes the German commander is Ares and determines to find him and go mano-a-mano, especially after he destroys a village with a poison gas attack -- the very village that she, backed up by Steve and the Howling Commandos -- er, I mean, Steve and his band of misfits -- had saved.  She kills him, but he isn't Ares, and it makes no difference.  The real Ares shows up, and gosh, it turns out that killing him won't really work either, since humans pretty much make war without a lot of help from divine or demonic forces.  She's tempted to simply give up, but Steve makes a huge sacrifice to save a lot of lives, and she understands that Ares' view is too simplistic. Yes, humans do stupid and cruel and violent things, but they also do great and brave things.  So she continues fighting (though, judging by BvS, she gets pretty jaded afterward.)

Again, not bad.  There is a lot of seriously mangled Greek mythology, which bugs my Grecophile self, but I'm guessing they're stuck with it from the comic source material.  Just as a taste, Ares has killed all of  the other gods. Yes, in this verse, the Greek gods had Ragnarok.  Also, more irritatingly, THE AMAZONS WORSHIPPED ARES, mythically speaking. They were daughters of war, not pacifists sworn to fight their own patron god.  And Zeus wasn't exactly a pacifist, and he didn't create humans (that was Prometheus) and Ares... sigh.  Suffice it to say, if you're a fan of classical mythology, just kind of... remember that it's most likely not the movie's fault, and what they came up with makes a kind of internal sense.  Ah, well. Someday, a movie will do justice to Greek mythology, but that movie is not this movie, and that's okay.  They're constrained by a lot of comic canon.

Character
Much improved for DC.  Diana is good protagonist. She goes through a very believable innocence-to-experience arc, and she works even the sillier elements of the WW mythos -- the Lasso of Truth, for instance -- work in context.

Steve Trevor is good as the love interest. Like most superhero love interests, he's strictly support, but he does it well.  He and his band of brothers follow WW through the trenches. He teaches her to dance. She rescues him several times. But he's a believable enough sort of guy, and Chris Pine does well with him.

Ares is... well, let me put it this way.  If you can't figure out exactly who Ares is really pretending to be within one scene, you haven't been watching a lot of hero movies. The telegraphing was breathtakingly clumsy, one of the few plot missteps, unless it was actually almost brilliant: It was so obvious that I thought for at least part of the movie that it might be a red herring, and that they were playing all of the cliches to try and misdirect my attention from someone else.  But... they weren't.  Still, David Thewlis seems to be having a good time with it.

Setting
The first setting is Themyscira, and it's a lovely  Mediterranean island with glowing water and an ancient Greek society. For that part of the movie, they actually used saturated color, almost.  After that, we're in Great War Europe, which is understandably bleak, though not as understandably mostly gray. 

I like the historical setting.  We don't have a lot set in WWI, and it's a striking choice because of it.  I wish there were more period pieces, though most of Diana's frame story is in the present, so we most likely won't get any  more.

Style
Have I mentioned how much I hate the "gritty" look, and how fervently I wish the fad to end? Because I hate the gritty look and fervently wish for the day this fad will leave.

That said, while it's certainly of an aesthetic piece, it is brightened up somewhat, and Themyscira uses almost lifelike color. Maybe they're slowing digging their way out of they gray, but feel they can't do it too suddenly?

Theme
"It's not about what they deserve. It's about what you believe."

The theme is actually relatively complex.  Wonder Woman learns that mankind is troubled and deeply flawed, and she can't save the world with a single grand gesture like killing Ares. And people may not deserve the help she gives.  But it's important to be a good person anyway, important to be a hero, because the more people choose to be heroes, the more likely we are to defeat our flaws.  Therefore, believe in love and goodness and heroism (all names for the same thing in this 'verse), and act accordingly toward your fellow creatures, and in that way, you contribute to saving the world.  It's a pretty healthy message.

I guess there's some complaint that Ares' presence as a real figure undermines this somehow, but I don't think so.  He whispers to people about how to do more efficiently what they want to do anyway, but he doesn't cause them to want to do it.  My own interpretation is that the nature of the humans is what created the god of war in the first place, and they therefore sustain him, rather than vice versa.

That's about it.  I enjoyed the movie.  It has a lot of details that I liked and didn't mention because they're just... details.  But yes -- I may even make an effort to see Justice League in a more timely fashion, since this movie shows that DC can make movies.  (And also because Joss Whedon touched it up, of course.)