Why hello there,
*sensible chuckle, smoking jacket, pipe*
I know a lot about comic books. I recently decided that for the month of July, since I enjoyed doing the Friday reviews themed, I was going to dip my toe into something I have tried very hard not to. Which is taking about comic books on the internet.
These aren’t going to be proper reviews so much as a couple essays about comic book material.
Which I am–as always–so looking forward to being told I’m wrong about.
All media are the result of their writers, their publishing companies, their political climate, their contractual obligations–none so obviously in recent years as those tied to film production companies.
I’m coming down from my mythology month by talking instead about what Denny O’Neil referred to as the American Mythology.
I can’t recall the source of the interview, it was ages ago that I saw it, but Denny O’Neil upon becoming the head editor of all Batman titles referred to himself as the custodian of an American mythology.
So, on the heels of talking about Antigone, it only makes sense I would talk about a different princess.
I’ve threatened to do this for ages when people chuckle nervously after asking me what I thought of WW84 and my eyes apparently turn white and start glowing.
In the past I’ve been deeply apologetic on behalf of the DCCU.
I will have to sing the sweet cries of Doom Patrol or Peacemaker some other night.
WW84 is a movie so deeply disappointing I had to write about it.
The good:
Pedro Pascal’s entire character arc. I would not cut a single scene. It was such an interesting and dynamic way to introduce magic into the unnecessarily gritty DC live action franchises and it’s true to WW writing. It had such potential for wonderment. From the instant his character wished to become the wishing well himself, I was immediately hooked into ‘oh shit, they’re doing DC-weird.’ I expected the character to be a Trump-esque joke and he was legitimately the most endearing, human character.
Kristen Wiig as Barbara/Cheetah was excellent, though I was a little bummed that she wasn’t utilized more in the final act. But the characterization, the scenes that she was in, all felt real. When they were playing villain music over her beating up the mugger, it was big ‘why are you booing, she’s right’ energy. I could have done with less establishment scenes of her being super strong. Like. I got it in one. She has super powers now. Time could have been shaved here. But Kristen Wiig was good and I didn’t mind seeing the cgi cats.
Barbara taking the moral high ground over Diana, repeatedly. Good. It was good. Barbara saying ‘I’m not going to let you hurt this man’ etc, and Diana being like ‘well, we could just kill him’ or Barbara saying ‘You want me to renounce my magic amulet wish, but you won’t do it?’ Good. GOOD.
Steve Trevor falls into multiple categories. Steve Trevor was….good? Chris pine was good. The concept that he was what she accidentally wished for from the stone, and getting to have fun acclimating him to the 80s as a newly rematerialized dude was fun. Way too long. I can only look at Chris Pine being slack jawwed so much. We get it, he’s from the past.
Gal Gadot is literally a better actress if Chris Pine is there. Her line deliveries are more smooth, their chemistry is great.
The meh:
The Amazon’s representing truth/valuing truth over success. This is the more enduring theme of Wonder Woman. It’s why she has the lasso of truth. It’s Lex Luthor saying, ‘Superman seeks to pull out the best in us. Batman seeks to curb the worst. You…seek the truth.’
It was handled clumsily. A lot of the Diana a-plot felt badly edited while the villains b-plot was amazing, and that’s the ultimate summary of where everything in this movie went wrong.
Asteria’s armor. This is a grey zone between the good and the bad, because they clearly cut this entire story line for time and just….she just…..she just fucking had it in her closet. She just..she just fucking…’hey what’s that?’ ‘oh, it’s the armor of the most powerful amazon ever, don’t worry about it’. They didn’t even call it the golden eagle armor. Like
It’s an established thiiiing. I feel like there was an entire goddamn storyline here that just got cut for time because they didn’t want to spend too long on mythology elements, and that’s why this movie fails. Hard. They’re afraid to talk about mythology….in a Wonder Woman movie….If they had played up the importance of Asteria and the armor, the pay off would have been good. Instead, ‘oh, this old thing. M’not gonna wear it now when it’s plot relevant. Gonna wait till later for no discernible reason’. I want the Asteria plot.
The bad:
Why did…uhhhhh…why did we do that very long sequence in Thymiscyra to teach us about the importance of truth and not cheating and like…not mention ASTERIA and her sacrifice? Instead they were like ‘let’s have a long ass sequence, point at a statue of ASTERIA, and not tell you what she did.’ Why…uhhhh….why beat us over the head with a clumsily written theme and leave out the super important sacrifice altogether? When they talked about ASTERIA later it wasn’t like ‘oh yeah, that lady’ because we knew nothing about her, but we do know that Diana ran real fast at 10 years old.
Oh, and hey, while we’re here, WHERE DID SHE GET THE ARMOR? HAS SHE BEEN LOOKING FOR ARTIFACTS? IS THAT WHY SHE BEFRIENDS BARBARA, TO CONTINUE HUNTING? IS THAT WHY SHE’S WORKING AT THE MUSEUM? IT SURE WOULD HAVE BEEN NICE TO KNOW.
The random ‘hey look, we’re in the 80s. Haha, everyone is inconsiderate and bad, cause 80s!’, whoops, mini montage of WW saving people. Yeah. Cut it. Cut it? Cut it the fuck out. Everything about it felt heavy handed, top long, and stupid.
We also followed this mcguffin too closely? Like instead of following a consistent character in the beginning to establish a frame of reference, we talked almost exclusively about the rock.
The first ‘oh no’ I had was Barbara/Diana at dinner. That was so very clearly a date. I chocked up Gal Gadot being awkward to it being a date, though I was to later decide it was because that is how she acts. Maybe that’s how she thinks people talk? How did Kristen Wiig have good chemistry with Gal Gadot but not the reverse? Even when they introduce Steve to Barbara, Steve says he’s Diana’s ‘old friend’ and Barbara immediately, defensively, says ‘well I’m her new friend.’ Where the FUCK was my sapphic arc? Why did it die there? It’s never acknowledged again? And hey! Barbara’s smart! Steve said he’s a pilot and she goes ‘pilot’ and looks aside CAUSE SHE KNOWS HE’S A WISH. Because SHE IS A SMART AND GOOD CHARACTER. Barbara’s entire arc was wanting to be more like Diana and admiring Diana and wanting to be with Diana and it just….stops? Not even a ‘you rejected me?’
That poor man that the ghost of Steve Trevor possesses. Why couldn’t they just rematerialize Steve? Why did they disrupt this man’s life?
FUCK YOUR INVISIBLE JET. I’d like the invisible jet sequence more if you didn’t spent so much time showing us Chris Pine’s tonsils. This movie actually suffers from way too much Chris Pine. Is that a thing? Was that a thing before? Nothing …happened? It was him trying on outfits, then him going to museums, then him stealing a goddamn jet to go to CAIRO so they could be weirdly racist for a long fight sequence that had little payoff both in plot and action.
WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT ENTIRE SCENE IN CAIRO? I looked away for one (1) second and they were all in tanks??? And then there were children playing soccer in the road IN THE MIDDLE OF THE DESERT? So we had to stop the weird tank thing and shoot a bullet from the TANK so she could ride it to catch the children from being run over by tanks?? And then? Like? None of this was good, well choreographed, or necessary. It was all literally so Diana could have somewhere to go in the invisible jet, be weird about middle easterners, and then get vaguely injured so they could say ‘oh noooo having your wish is diminishing your powers’. This whole thing could have been done LITERALLY ANY OTHER WAY. THIS WAS THE POINT AT WHICH I STARTED HATING THIS MOVIE.
Diana has to give up her wish-Steve to get her powers back, good. A good concept. Sacrifice. Would have tied nicely into that ASTERIA PLOTLINE that we didn’t get for some reason. She might have put on the super powerful armor THEN when her powers were diminished, but didn’t, for some reason. Wish-Steve saying ‘you don’t have to say goodbye, I’m already gone’ nice. Nice. Would have been a nice end to act 2. Sad. Except that it was undercut by web slinging the lasso into the sky and finding out that she knows how to fly now, a thing which receives a lot of visual but no verbal mention?
WONDER WOMAN CAN FLY, I DON’T DISPUTE THAT, I’VE READ A LOT OF COMICS, BUT WHY DID SHE NEED TO SOOOO MUCH? IT ADDED NOTHING EXCEPT AS A CALL BACK TO HOW SHE FEELS ABOUT STEVE. SHE COULD HAVE DONE IT ANY OTHER WAY AT ANY OTHER TIME. THE PAY OFF FELL COMPLETELY FLAT. And it lasted 27 YEARS.
Overall, this movie was so many interesting ideas cut together HORRENDOUSLY.
The best parts,
My compassion for Chris pine when he says ‘well shit, Diana’ as she fails to prepare him or the audience for what’s happening.
So why is this dumpster fire something I feel the need to talk about?
The last book that I reviewed was Antigone Rising. In it, Helen Morales does discuss the Amazonian princess in question made a UN ambassador after the success of Wonder Woman (2017). But also, she discusses something which our culture and which Greek and Romans loved to do before us: Killing Amazons. The most popular subject for Ancient Greek pottery, after Heracles, is dead Amazons. Amazons were used as cautionary tales in many respects: here is what we do to women who disobey our gender norms.
Wonder Woman is a reimagined Amazonian princess which flies in the face of violence against women. She avenges the injustices that her sisters have faced for all of Amazonian literature. And what she represents is truth.
What I really want to talk about, what I wish we could see in a Wonder Woman film or franchise, is content like the August 1998 one-shot Wonder Woman: The Once and Future Story.
The plot revolves around two archeologists in Ireland uncovering Grecian tablets and asking Wonder Woman to translate the inscribed story. Her translation follows the forgotten history of the Ephesians and their princess, Artemis, as she leads a revolt against Theseus in retaliation for numerous acts of violence including the abduction, rape and enslavement of her mother. The heart of the story, while describing abuses against women in the ancient world, is that one of the archeologists is being abused by her husband.
Wonder Woman is forced to confront her own privilege; domestic violence is alien and repulsive to her, she has difficulty understanding–while other characters are so inoculated that they are able to dismiss it. Wonder Woman comes in to rescue, obviously, but is ultimately shaken at how systemic the problem is and doesn’t know how to proceed or why she was fortunate enough to be spared.
That is the correct way to write a Wonder Woman story. It does not need to be so heavy or dark as depicting women being slaughtered or staging an uprising, it doesn’t even need to address a strictly feminist issue. But it must be about using Wonder Woman to uncover a truth.
This is where Wonder Woman 2017 succeeded, why it succeeded. The young Diana is convinced that the Godkiller is a physical weapon, she has to discover that it is herself. Diana believes Ares’ deceptions and ultimately uncovers him as the primary villain.
Very importantly–one of the minor villians, Dr. Isabel Maru, is wearing a mask. I can wax poetic about this quite a lot. The female counterpoint among the villains is visually obscured because her appearance doesn’t please the men in power around her. It was flagged as abelist, it’s shitty, and that’s kind of the point. In interviews, discussing Dr. Poison, director Patty Jenkins referred to the injuries to the character’s face as self inflicted. Each element of what Dr. Poison represents, from her sadism to her callous indifference for herself, places her among the Nazi forces as ‘one of the good ones’–the only female in Nazi command. She is ultimately subservient, provided she isn’t interrupted from engaging in the experimentation she cares about. She does not care about the broader consequences of her actions, she celebrates them.
She is meant to be the counterweight to Diana. Diana is ‘one of the good ones’ not because she follows along with what the men tell her but because she is defiant in pursuing truth, not self interest.
I made mention above referencing a panel between in Dark Knights Death Metal (Nov 2020 issue) by Scott Snyder and artist Greg Capullo,
Writing anything less misses the point.
Aliactast 