#for a movie about food.... there's barely food shots wut

[argumate]

Wonder Woman

This movie was great fun! It hit all the right notes for a superhero movie, and although it was not particularly original it was very well executed and I liked it.

 - The movie is bookended with references to Bruce Wayne, who thankfully doesn’t show up in person, so let’s just ignore those scenes. Actually I’d like to see her meet Steve Rogers, but I guess that would require corporate merger shenanigans at the highest level.

 - (Actually the movie does share plenty of tropes with Captain America: a hero taken out of time, a band of brothers in the war, a villain with apocalyptic plans, a love that is not to be, an aeroplane, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves).

 - Hot diggity, Amazon island! (I keep wanting to say they’re from the Amazon, but that isn’t right at all). It’s got unrealistic waterfalls and everything, that’s how you know it’s blessed by the gods. Oh and a forcefield bubble to keep out the rest of the world, that’s cool too.

 - This has to be the most satisfying representation of the female warrior race ever devised in the past three thousand years, and the movie could have just been two hours of Robin Wright kicking Gal Gadot’s ass while Connie Nielsen smoulders in the background and the audience would have been well satisfied.

 - No Futurama jokes were made in this review. Not even petite ones.

 - Princess Diana (wut? I only just noticed the main character is Princess Di, although in fairness they always refer to her the other way around) I mean Diana, Princess of the Amazons, has the standard chosen-by-destiny origin story and a mother who can’t bear to lose her to fate, and gives her heavily redacted stories of the past. (She boned Zeus! That’s nothing to be ashamed of, everyone has boned Zeus).

 - What could possibly trouble this peaceful island of crazy warrior ladies besides the arrival of... a man. In the form of Chris Pine, whom I must admit I was a little wary of since I haven’t seen him in any movies before so to me he’s a bit of an unknown quantity. But he’s great! In this film at least. Funny guy, charismatic, good love interest, solid support without overshadowing, I think his character works really well.

 - All that dick innuendo while he’s in the bath tho.

 - The man brings news of the Great War, and the Amazons’ sacred duty is to restore the peace... kinda. It’s a bit vague actually; the artfully rendered backstory montage of god fights certainly suggested that, but then what have they been doing for millennia on their island while wars rage across the world outside? Anyway, the bubble has been broken, a bunch of Germans got what was coming to them, Robin Wright took a bullet for Diana and will grimace no more, and Diana is just itching to go kill a god.

 - I mean seriously she is thirsty for god slaughter; when she was six years old her mother showed her the magical god-slaying sword and she literally drooled at it, this woman doesn’t even need a reason she’ll slaughter a god just for sport.

 - Sorrowful partings as Diana sails away from the only world she’s ever known, and spy boy tries to mack on her when they’re barely out of sight of shore. Lucky for him that magical force bubble shields his amorous intentions from her mother, who can and will throw a spear that far if she has to.

 - Wonder Woman, of course, is demisexual.

 - The London scenes where they try on outfits and fight spies in alleys and rustle up a posse of misfits are a lot of fun indeed, then things turn serious as they approach the Western Front. Sometimes the Great War really does feel like the abstract concept of war reified and instantiated in the world, soldiers and generals and politicians alike helplessly forced to dance to its tune without any way to stop, the logic of game theory gone mad. It’s certainly tempting to imagine that there must be an off switch somewhere, and if you could just stab the right guy everything would grind to a halt. Of course, you could say it was shooting the right guy that kicked things off in the first place.

 - Diana charges into no-mans land without even tossing her hair back first and saying “but I am no man”, but you know we were all thinking it.

 - Quick shout out to the cinema audience who laughed and gasped and cried at all the right moments, although I thought I could hear someone behind me repeating the lines slightly before they happened, perhaps closed captions? Either way it was a nice atmosphere, top stuff.

 - That charge scene though, it was something. I’ve heard it described as every woman’s experience facing a machine gun hail of microaggressions, and frankly the less said about that the better. But you can’t help thinking about the men and boys who trudged through that mud without magical shields or bracelets or plot invulnerability to bullets and were cut down in their thousands and left to rot where they fell. It was notable that when she finally reached the German trench she smashed not the soldiers, but the machine gun.

 - I think the movie handled Diana’s gradual power boost very well. She starts off capable of defeating people in hand to hand combat, and slowly levels up to the point where she is casually smashing through walls and swinging tanks through the air with one hand. Amusingly she’s so focused on her quest that she doesn’t think through the implications of her having god-like powers, and everyone around her just accepts it because honestly what else can you do? “Excuse me miss, I can’t help noticing that you just smashed face first through a brick wall and yet your lipstick is still impeccable-”

 - Perhaps her powers scale up based on having Something to Protect, and a lot of tension comes from her realising that she can’t be everywhere and can’t save everyone.

 - Wonder Woman gets busy with Chris Pine; I hope she’s gentle with her new-found strength. (She didn’t try the beer though, which bugs me a little; in fact we never see any of the Amazons eat, I think. Do they grow food on their island? I assume the climate and soil is magically good, so farming should be easy work, and they can spend the time between harvests punching each other).

 - He sketches out a future of life together and work and kids and growing old together (he don’t know she’s immortal, which saves some awkwardness). Sure would be a shame if he selflessly sacrificed himself for a noble cause, especially after he’s already signed a contract to feature in multiple movies.

 - Oh yeah, there is a ludicrously villainous German general (an actual asshole from the Real World, and future Nazi!) and a tortured femme Phantom of the Opera who delights in poison gas who sort of has a thing for him. I reckon a good relationship is one that makes both participants healthier, and what they have going on is the exact opposite of that. I don’t think they quite get enough attention, but since War is the real adversary perhaps that’s intentional.

 - There is obvious awkwardness with making the Germans the main bad guys in this story while the British push for peace, even though the film does make some token efforts at calling for a pox on both their houses. Along with Ludendorff, the real villain could be... Winston Churchill, who as Minister for Munitions at this time was in fact stockpiling a vast armoury of gas and bombs and tanks to be deployed in the offensive he was planning in 1919 that would destroy the German army and win a decisive victory for Britain. Churchill was despondent when they signed the Armistice instead and crushed his dreams of annihilation; he didn’t get his victory until 27 years later, when he finally pissed in the Rhine.

 - I’m grateful that the misfit sidekicks didn’t heroically sacrifice themselves in this movie, they needed to catch a break.

 - Ludendorff might bitch about the Dolchstoßlegende but he didn’t seem to enjoy being stabbed in the front, what a hypocrite.

 - The final showdown arrives in a blaze of rage and glory... and Remus Lupin is the god of war! Now that’s a nice twist, I appreciate a softly spoken man in a bowler hat who wishes to end the pestilence that is humanity. Turns out his powers are not what they once were (although he seems tough enough!) so he has just been chilling on Earth whispering rude thoughts in people’s ears and waiting for Diana to show up so he can make her a Darth Vaderesque offer.

 - You could say that he’s been waiting for Gadot.

 - And it’s over, god is dead and a new day dawns. The soldiers taking off their gas masks is a nice touch; it’s a shame they didn’t get to show something like the 1914 christmas football match. Ultimately the ending echoed Age of Ultron: a being of ultimate power and contempt for humanity is zapped by another being of ultimate power who believes in the redemptive power of love. So it goes.

- Terry Pratchett would say that killing the god doesn’t stop the war, but stopping the war would kill the god, divinity flowing from belief and not the other way around. If no human believed in war, what would Ares even do? Fighting for peace is always a tricky concept, but the structure of a superhero movie based on god-like physical abilities inherently demands it. This one did its best to thread that needle and didn’t mess it up too badly.

 - It’s a shame we didn’t get a reunion scene back home on the island, given that she not only achieved the destiny of her people but survived the attempt. Maybe she can’t find her way back and she’s stuck living with the humans now. The shot of her with a laptop at the end raises the disturbing scenario of Amazons tearing up social media all day instead of throwing down.

 - It’s not clear how Wonder Woman occupied her time during the Second World War and all the other craziness that filled up the 20th century, but no doubt we’ll find out. 

#wonder woman #spoilers