Wonder Woman (Warner Bros., 2017)
Gal Gadot is in this movie. There are other actors in this movie. And there are even some things that happen in this movie. But mostly, Gal Gadot is in this movie.
It’s difficult to review Wonder Woman without comparisons to Marvel Movies. Warner Brothers really wants to make a DC Cinematic Universe to rival Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. This is an understandable perspective. Just taking a quick stroll down Wikipedia suggests that 3 of the top 10 highest grossing films (and 8 of the top 25) are MCU movies. This is impressive, particularly when you consider that (before these movies), nobody had ever heard of most of these characters. Spiderman, sure, Hulk, OK, Iron Man, kind of, but Ant-Man? There’s two of those fucking movies.
DC’s heroes do not suck, and are not obscure. Batman and Superman are like the two superheroes that matter, and they’re both DC properties. I wouldn’t say Wonder Woman is particularly obscure. Not more obscure than say, Black Panther, which made $1.3 billion fucking dollars.
(RIP Chadwick Boseman. I don’t know who will take his loss harder; the fans or the executives and accountants over at Disney. Too soon, I know, I know. I’m sorry. I’m right though. But sorry.)
Anyway, my point is, Gal Gadot is Wonder Woman. So here’s a superhero movie, and that superhero is Gal Gadot, and for the price of admission you get to gaze upon Gal Gadot for over two hours.
I would almost feel bad about this, but even the characters in the film acknowledge this. Off the top of my head, I think there are no fewer than three references to Gal Gadot being beautiful. At one point she puts on glasses to try to tone down her beauty, and Steve Trevor’s secretary laughs and says, oh right, like that makes a fucking difference. Who do you think she is fooling people with glasses as a disguise, Superman?
The problem is that this movie is only about Gal Gadot. Well, calling it a “problem” sounds like a bad thing. It’s not cinematic excellence, but it’s Gal Gadot, so there’s that.
The movie opens with Gal Gadot (surprise) sitting in some office or something, and she gets a briefcase from Wayne Enterprises with an old timey picture of Gal Gadot and some other people. We then flashback to THOUSANDS OF YEARS AGO…
And the exposition feels like it’s told in real time. There’s a lot about young Wonder Woman wanting to train, and not being allowed to, and then her mom pulls a 180 and says “train her extra hard.” There’s lots of exposition about Greek gods and the tribe of Amazons Wonder Woman is part of being purpose built to find and destroy the god of war, Aries.
Anyway, eventually the modern world stumbles across Wonder Woman’s paradise island when Steve Rogers Trevor (Chris Pine, resuming his role from Star Trek, Star Trek Into Darkness, and Star Trek Beyond as far as I can tell) flies his plane through its protective cloak of invisibility.
Follow that up with a beach battle set piece, then conversation about how The Great War must be the result of Aries. Gal Gadot tells Steve Trevor “take me to the front lines so I can kill Aries” and, Steve Trevor, who has a penis, obviously agrees to do whatever she wants despite it obviously sounding insane, because… Gal Gadot.
There’s stuff that happens. Something about chemical weapons, everybody wants to declare peace because the war sucks anyway, and Danny Huston smokes meth or something. I dunno. It’s kind of a mess of ideas. The point is, Gal Gadot is here to save the day.
Spoiler alert: Turns out that German General going around wiping out his own leadership (is that really going to help the war?) isn’t the immediately obvious Aries. Yup, it just seems like Wonder Woman failed to grasp the intricacies of geopolitics leading up to World War I. (To be fair, I’m kind of fuzzy on them myself.) We learn an important lesson about how the evil in the world isn’t as black and white as most superhero movies depict it, and that defeating the bad guy doesn’t automatically end the suffering of war.
Aww, kind of a heartwarming lesson. Cool for a superhero movie to do that.
But then, surprise! Aries is in the game! In a surprise twist that seems pretty obvious in my opinion, Wonder Woman fights him. Guess who wins. Yup.
So I guess the nuance of the lesson is somewhat done in by the fact that Aries really was nudging the conflict along to make it worse. And exactly why? Unclear, something to do with wanting to show daddy Zeus people aren’t perfect.
I mean, it seems like we made that point clear thousands of years ago, and your dad is dead anyway, but whatever. Gotta have something to make the movie go. Go Gadot. Gal Gadot.
For some reason, next, Steve Rogers leaves his love behind, gets in an airplane to take a dangerous weapon away from destroying London, making the ultimate sacrifice to do so.
I’m sorry, did I say Steve Rogers? I meant Steve Trevor. Maybe I too am guilty of copying and pasting from the screenplay of Captain America: The First Avenger.
Seriously, it’s a total ripoff.
But here’s the thing. None of that matters because Gal Gadot learns a lesson about love and the good and bad in mankind. Things aren’t so simple after all.
If it sounds like I’m not clear on a lot of what happened in the movie, I think one scene entirely sums up why. In it, Gal Gadot arrives at the front line, and being totally incapable of listening to anyone’s (any man’s, to be edgy) advice or even stopping and thinking strategically, she bolts into no-man’s land where literally an entire fucking army starts shooting at her and firing grenades and shit.
I guess her training was all combat and no strategy, which seems like a little bit of a blind spot in their curricula. Like, she’s supposed to be a great warrior but quickly finds herself hiding behind her shield as round after round of machine gun fire hits her. Dammit Gal Gadot, c’mon!
Oh but anyway, the very first shots of this action sequence involve Gal Gadot climbing up out of the trenches. As she does so, the camera switches to slow motion. Bombs explode in the background as the wind gently blows her hair. She looks into the camera, and takes one confident step after another, exuding beauty and confidence.
It looked like a parody of a perfume or fashion commercial. She climbs up looking perfect, lit perfectly, staged perfectly. It’s too much. I can’t do anything other than look at Gal Gadot.
There were unanswered questions. Who sent the photo? How is Wayne Enterprises involved? Why doesn’t Chris Pine have a British accent? Seriously, why doesn’t he have a British accent?! I thought they would address that as a plot point. They don’t. He’s just a British dude without a British accent in the British military. Why did they do that? I guess Chris Pine’s fake British accent sucks.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Gal Gadot. Gal Gadot. Gal Gadot. Gal Gadot? Gal Gadot Gal Gadot Gal Gadot.
VERDICT
Worth watching. OBVIOUSLY. What are you, stupid?