Wonder Woman

I took my parents to see "Wonder Woman" at a mall movie theater last Friday afternoon. Apart from the crowded parking lot, guy standing inside the door with his finger up his nose, hairless patrolling security guards (along with an actual cop in a vest with a big gun—yes, at the mall), mindless consumerism, twenty minutes of blaring commercials before the movie (we got there a little early) and the people who sat next to us eating and slurping the whole two and a half hours, nothing bothered me about the “mall experience”. On with the movie review.

"Wonder Woman" was directed by Patty Jenkins, and I’ll do my best to not make a big deal that she’s a woman. Many of the other top production jobs were also held by women and an unreasonably big deal has been made about this (because Hollywood is still a boy’s club, let’s be honest). Gender dynamics jawboning takes away from the film, which is fantastic, gorgeous, and most of all, badass.

I’ll give a brief plot synopsis, but mostly I’m going to talk about the cinematography, costumes, and swordfights, which rivaled the booming soundtrack for sensory overload. Wonder Woman (played by the Israeli actress Gal Gadot) finally gets her story told, with a plot that never buckles under the weight of bad dialogue—the screenwriters did not go there. The opening scene is the Louvre, where Wonder Woman apparently has a sexy desk job and a sensible bun. A package arrives from Bruce Wayne: it’s an old photo of her and a ragtag group of WWI soldiers. Cue the backstory. We go right to the Amazonians' home island (the name of which I forgot to write down), which is so lush and ancient I wanted to teleport there immediately. Child Diana longs to learn sword fighting and martial arts, but her mother, Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielson) says no. Eventually, her super badass auntie Antiope (Robin Wright) starts training Diana at night. By the time the human world crashes into the Amazonian one, Diana’s the fiercest warrior they’ve got.

In this telling of Wonder Woman’s origin, a WWI spy for the British (who’s American for some reason), Steve Trevor, crashes through an otherworldly fog in a WWI Axis plane (I thought fondly of Snoopy as the Red Baron when I saw this craft) into the realm of the Amazons. A bunch of pissed off Nazis crash through the ether in hot pursuit of Trevor. Diana dives into the ocean to pull Steve from his sinking plane—the imagery here was of an angel saving a drowning sailor—as the Nazis charge the Amazonian’s beach, firing machine guns and pistols. But they’re no match for the warriors, who take out every German with flaming arrows, neck snaps, liver twists, etc. Antiope takes a bullet for Diana and dies on the beach, first telling her to take the “god killer” (a sacred weapon) and leave the island to find and destroy Aries, the god of war. Diana sets out for the human world, and the rest of the movie is a lot of WWI battle scenes and freaky German death labs, leading up to a battle royale between angry gods.

Wonder Woman is the only light in the dark world of the Belgian front just before armistice, and she’s blazing. Her costume is more metallic than in other renditions, it’s like a metal second skin, with boots both practical and sexy. Gal Gadot is trained in martial arts and she kicks ass in every single fight scene. Her magic lasso glowed as intensely as a light saber, with that same sense of warping the energy fields around it.

The man tasked with winning Wonder Woman’s respect and declaring his mortal love for her, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), does a credible job of it. I’d only ever seen him in one other role: young Captain Kirk in the new Star Trek movies. He did okay, but playing young Captain Kirk is not up there with Hamlet or Lear—it’s more in line with Kojak, or MacGuyver. Pine’s character changed substantially in Wonder Woman, and he pulled it off.

My second favorite character, after the ferocious title lady, was Antiope, because she’s totally capable, ripped, and lays down her life for Wonder Woman. That’s the only plot twist I divulged—it’s early on, and if you were halfway paying attention you saw it coming five minutes into the movie. [I also loved the Amazonian whose real name is, waith for it...Ooooota Adepo. I saw that name in the credits and had to write it down. What a wonderful line of o’s]. A mixed bag of characters come in and out of the plot (Steve Trevor’s misfit war buddies, a giant headed evil Nazi guy, a plucky British secretary, a Nazi lady mad scientist with a skeleton mask over half her face), but none can touch Wonder Woman’s aura, which fairly emanates off the screen. As with any comic book movie, you have to suspend disbelief at times. A German warehouse full of lethal toxic gas explodes, and in the next scene everybody who survived stands up and stretches, totally unphased by wafting clouds of mustard gas.

I have just a few other things to say about this movie, which is still ringing clearly in my mind four days later. The soundtrack was appropriately grandiose, but the mall speakers were turned to 11; in the final fight between Wonder Woman and Aries, they blasted my ears off my body. My parents and I were so deaf on the ride home we gave up trying to discuss the movie’s production values. Which were high quality. The WWI-era costumes, makeup, hair, and street scenes were all convincing. The Amazonian sets and garments were a pleasing marriage of Greek mythology and steampunk.

The CGI, which makes up a good 80% of the film’s imagery, was at times gorgeous, terrifying, and so vibrant the movie screen pulsed. Matthew Jensen was the photographic director, and he done good. I think a couple of paintings were referenced—“The Battle of Heaven and Hell”, a Renaissance work of art, seemed to be called up in a backstory fight between gods. Towards the end of the movie, there’s a shot of the sun rising over a WWI battlefield and broken soldiers that reminded me very much of a painting of the same scene—can’t call up the name and artist though (Singer-Sargent, maybe? Anybody know?).

Not much else to say except go see this movie if you have the means, you won’t regret it. Of all the comic book movies I’ve seen in the last five years (and that’s like fifty movies), "Wonder Woman" was my favorite. Fantastic work by Patty Jensen, Gal Gadot, the six cast physical trainers, and all four thousand visual artists (a rough estimate from the credits). Five stars y’all.