Review of Wonder Woman (2017) by Susan G — 07 Jun 2017

Wonderful first forty minutes or so, up to then it's a great movie, but then Wonder Woman loses much of her charm and for a while some of her impressive fighting ability and needs no less than 4 men to watch her back.

The scenes on the Amazon island and Wonder Woman's first taste of the outside world are exciting, funny and at times charming, but gradually Steve Trevor is made more heroic than her and she is portrayed as a naive confused and disallusioned child at one point. Come on! She's younger than the other Amazons but she would still be ancient by human reckoning.

I found the romance unbelievably fast paced, especially in light of the caution instilled in Diana from an early age, she was very quick to trust Steve Trevor.

Also, was I the only one to notice that rather like in the old days, when according to rumour, Alan Ladd refused to have leading ladies taller than him and when some actresses insisted on being the youngest and prettiest woman on screen, there were no notable male roles played by men as attractive as Mr Pine and even the more prominent Amazons were either considerably less classically beautiful than Miss Gadot or much older? The none Amazon females were either drab and care worn, scarred and sadistic, middle aged and stooping, or plump comic relief.

To add to the strange decision to avoid any other young beautiful people in prominent roles, the supporting characters once, the Amazon paradise is left behind consisted of a sharp shooter who had an aversion to shooting, a linguist ex actor who was just more comic relief and a native American who used smoke signals to send messages to his allies when German troops were only a few hundred yards away from his position.

The best fight scenes are in the trailers, the fight against Ares is a bloated, over blown light show and was disappointing. Notably even the God Ares is skinny, plain and middle aged rather than muscular, handsome and ...well Godlike.