Review of Wonder Woman (2017) by Not_A_Bear — 25 Jul 2017

I would like to start off by saying that aspects of this movie really impressed me. The actions scenes were packed full of spectacle as you would expect from a Zack Snyder movie, the choreography and visual design of the scenes were very impressive and really commanded the tone of how powerful wonder woman became through all of her training as an Amazonian, and I think the "modernization" of wonder woman really hit the spot as to what my expectations were of the costume designs and fighting style.

However, in the periods between fighting scenes the movie exhibits a complete lack of direction. The origin story is dry and incomplete and it felt rushed. It seems like they were trying to pack a nice origin story to round off the character and introduce us to wonder woman but by doing that they achieved nothing more than mashing two incomplete stories together and frustrating the genuineness of the relationship between Steve and Diana.

Also, the island origin story is just awkward and non-eventful. Diana leaving the island (her home) has to mean more to her than simply fulfilling some mythological prophecy. For example, a movie like Moana does this well by having the character go through the struggle of leaving home and making that internal struggle carry throughout the movie. Nothing about leaving home is easy but Diana should have let us know how important it was for her to do so. Instead it felt like a teenager wanting to go out for a date night and mom finally saying it was ok.

Some people are praising Gadot's performance but I don't think I can agree mostly because of how poorly written the character was. In fact, mostly all of the character's were poorly written (especially the so called side-kicks). I mean who's decision was it to have the Indian character use smoke signals as his biggest contribution to the movie. They might as well just have had no side-kicks at all with how useless they were at driving the plot and creating foils for Diana.

In general, I think the movie did not live up to the hype. It was a fluffed up, poorly written, characterless movie with absolutely no bite. The script is horrendous and I cannot believe that they were able to get this shot at all given how bad it was. I mean to have a movie about a bad ass character like wonder woman where her best motivation is "love for a man" is a complete slap to all feminists out there looking for a break from seeing men kick ass. And needless to say her love motivation did not fit in at all with the mythology behind the whole movie. It's almost like every scene was written by a completely different person experience a case of writer's block so they grabbed whatever common trope in hero movies was most readily available. The whole point of Zeus and Ares fighting is that they disagree on fundamental things about people. I think they did a lackluster job of displaying this through Diana's character.

Like the more recent comic book Hollywood movies, story telling is a second class citizen and I think Wonder Woman is the clear exemplar of how movies can be so good in one sense but leave us completely deflated and hungry for the themes and characters that shine in mediums other than the silver screen.