Éowyn's Daughter

Wonder Woman

starring: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Danny Huston, Elena Anaya, Connie Nielsen, Robin Wright, Robin Wright's biceps, some foreigners

directed by: Patty Jenkins


The wrong thing to do would be to start out a review of the first female-led major release of the modern superhero era in film by making a bunch of comments in reference to a bunch of other films centered around dudes, but Batman v. Superman was butt. Batman was all murdery and Superman was a mopey mope and Lois Lane was running around putting together clues to solve a mystery that could not have been solved in real life because a) the details made zero sense* and b) it was so boring, anyone investigating it would have spontaneously forgotten all about it, like that guy from Memento, the movie by Christopher Nolan, who later made movies about Batman that were not butt. Sure, Suicide Squad had a couple of ladies in it, but come on, that was a Will Smith movie, and also it was butt. And Green Lantern was several years ago, sure, and that featured both a pre-Deadpool Ryan Reynolds and none of pre-Deadpool Ryan Reynolds' butt. He made us wait for Deadpool to see that. And that movie went on to massive critical and financial success. Probably not a coincidence, Ry.

What I'm getting at here is that the try-hards at DC have been slamming their hands in their own car doors over and over again to try to trick the American public into giving them some of that sick synthetic opioid that is tentpole franchise box office success, never slowing down to bother noticing the happy-go-lucky Marvel guys in their houses made of cash bricks are content as fuck with a long, slow high from safe, accessible legal weed. Marvel has been playing the long game since 2008, riding an herbaceous cloud of blissful adulation while DC has been junkie-fiending for a sharp, front-loaded endorphin spike. No surprise that the approach has largely left them looking jaundiced, scabby and covered in their own sick.

There's plenty of criticism to go around and lot of it would land specifically on Zack Snyder, a latex fetishist frame painter who is hung up on the idea that a movie is made of a series of still images. But I'm not going to talk any more about Zack Snyder because Zack Snyder has a dick. We've spent enough time talking about the dick-havers already in this review, and in all other things in western civilization since the invention of written script.

Wonder Woman starts off, very pointedly** in an island full of woman not called Lesbos, you fucking juveniles. It's the other Greek one with only ladies on it. We run through baby Gal Gadot and glum teenager Gal Gadot and finally bronze adult Gal Gadot, learning from people who have (cleverly) been taught to match in her native Israeli accent, which is just vaguely foreign enough to we isolated xenophobes in America to count as Grecian.

Some dude shows up, hangs out long enough to pollute this peaceful society by introducing (and I'm not kidding) both lying and dick jokes before, predictably, bringing a bunch of other bros trailing behind him who immediately start shooting and yelling and trying to do all war and that like.

The lady society is operated with an undertone of the stern, where we get the very deeply laid impression that this is a group of people with zero time for the banal fripperies of standard-grade bullshit. This is not a slumber party culture. Nobody is braiding anybody's hair.

Well, OK, some of them had long braids and probably maybe had some help putting all that together, but only in a practical and no-nonsense way that in no way inevitably leads to tickle fights and kissing practice. Caged Heat was a long time ago, everyone.

What follows is a combination of a fish-out-of-water story not atypical of superhero origin movies, which smartly includes a direct homage to the exact same ideas in the original Christopher Reeve Superman film, and a commando war film set in the First World War.

A small band of multiethnic ne'er-do-wells and misfits drag our hero Diana along on their narrowly focused mission, propelled by a stark, borderline fatalist utilitarianism (if such a thing can exist) that she manages to stop dead in its tracks--not the mission, like the whole plot of the entire movie--in a single, metatextual moment of both satisfying narrative surprise and the heavily expected blockbuster action set-piece. The entire "no man's land" sequence is such a deft and wondrous piece of filmmaking it literally brought tears to my eyes. Patty Jenkins pulls together the dangling, seemingly incongruous threads of comic book fan service, feminist empowerment and pure entertainment (for the movie-going neutrals) and braids them into a friendship bracelet she then presents directly to my shriveled male soul.

The safe thing to say here for any reviewer moving on to the rest of the film is "uneven" or "pacing issues" so I can be seen to be objective because my vaguely critical thoughts will even out the gushing praise I'm piling, thickly and wetly, all over floor here. But I'm not going to do that. Gal Gadot was great. Chris Pine and his dick were great. The screenwriters, the cast, the casting directors, the director of photography, the editors, the stunt people, the choreographers and, most of all, Patty Jenkins pulled something together here that I saw twice in two days--the first out of normal excitement, the second as an imperative--and loved even more the second time.

It ended with what I thought at first was a clunky message about how love can save the world. I cringed a bit, but then I thought: all the male superhero movies are about either revenge or revenge's college-educated twin brother justice, one or both inspired by the hero's dead parent(s). Those are the only themes. The only ones. Sometimes you get a plot about redemption maybe, but they end up being revenge or justice in the end (re: Thor). These are dude ideas, dude themes, they prop up and coddle a frail and defensive masculinity that permeates every level of popular culture. We're all swimming in thick, peaty dude soup. A message of compassion of love? Why the fuck not? How many Batman movies in a row will I have to watch before that comes up one time?

Finally a win for DC. I'll try to remember it when the rushed and unearned Justice League sucks.

All the stars.

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*The public would blame Superman for loss of life because of the presence of bullets made of alien metal, I think? I guess because of how Superman always uses his Kryptonian revolver in situations like that? I'm still not sure.

**There are spears, arrows, swords, all pointy