Wonder Woman encompasses a tale of self-righteousness, bravery and heroics, leaving enough room for commentary on the ruling elite in a male oriented society. However, the hands of Hollywood pushes the movie in a direction that it didn’t need to go in which left me leaving the cinema deflated from what could have been.
To start at the start, the beginning of this movie was an absolute joy. The scenery of Themyscira was beautiful, the history of the land and gods was shown in a wonderfully stylised way and it was clear the hierarchy of the Amazons.
With the arrival of Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), the Amazons are thrown into disarray at what to do with their new captor, and eventually Diana disavows her mother to help Steve. This wasn’t handled too poorly and gave the opportunity for some laughs after the gag-free opening. I had to suspend disbelief during the scenes where Steve is explaining to the Amazons and the audience about how he wound up in their land. How would they know about anything he was talking about? How come no one found the island before? How did his notebook survive being completely submerged? All questions that were left unanswered.
Joining Diana and Steve on their quest are a bunch of unlikely heroes that do next to nothing the entire time. They were however given a surprising amount of backstory and I was genuinely rooting for them when they were cornered at the end, but they simply didn’t _do_ that much. The only other significant woman during the ‘getting the gang back together’ segment was Etta (Lucy Davis), an office secretary who — even after Diana compares her job to slavery — ends up answering phones and carrying things from A to B. I felt she didn’t add enough to her scenes to be anything other than (not particularly effective) comic relief. I suppose when one your members is literally a goddess there’s not much more you can do. Oh, and for some reason there’s a native American chief wondering around Nazi occupied Belgium. Not sure what that was all about.
The clashing of an all female civilisation with one run primarily by men allowed the writers to make cutting remarks on society, particularly surrounding sexism and war time behaviours. They could have easily skipped much of this social commentary but I’m glad they kept it in. Granted, some of it was a little on-the-nose but on the whole it paid off and hopefully highlighted to young woman the importance of fighting against repressive traditions. Granted, Diana does fall for literally the first man she meets and it’s implied they have sex within 72 hours which probably isn’t the best message to be getting out.
The fight scenes all throughout the movie utilised slow motion in a way that blended ferocity with femininity, showing off hand to hand combat in a way that’s usually hidden behind fancy camera trickery. The epic guitar riff from the trailer makes a triumphant return. I do wish they’d’ve used it more often, instead of falling back to a generic orchestral score.
The villains were fairly weak and in some respects which I’ll expand later, completely unnecessary. The first apparent “big bad” is Ludendorff, a high ranking German general (inspired off the real [Erich Ludendorff](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erich_Ludendorff)) whose grand scheme for the movie is to cause mass genocide and that’s pretty much the depth of this character. To aid him in his diabolically one dimensional scheme is Dr. Maru aka Doctor Poison, an apparently highly skilled chemist in the art of poison making. Nevermind she has her notebook stolen, can’t remember the only thing she’s been working on the entire time and creates the exact opposite of poison, she has a modicum more character and is for some reason vindicated at the end of the movie.
Driving the plotline is Wonder Woman’s belief that Ares, the god of war, is responsible for the evil in the world and becomes determined to find and kill him in order to stop WWI. This is, for 90% of the movie an good enough plot point. The audience is made to think this is both ridiculous and that Ludendorff is Ares.
Woman Woman eventually confronts Ludendorff and even with the help of a super strength tonic that Doctor Poison stumbled upon, Ludendorff is defeated and to our surprise nothing happens. Diana is genuinely confused and disturbed as to why the war is continuing, why men continue to fight when the ‘evil’ has been vanquished. This could have been a poignant commentary into the human psyche; how men, not gods, are responsible for the evil in the world. The movie then goes and throws that out the window with the most incredulous villain reveal I’ve ever seen. In what I can only describe as a ‘reverse Deus Ex Machina’, a character that we’ve barely come to know is revealed as Ares, a character so irrelevant that he doesn’t even have a first name. Sir Patrick (played by David Thewlis in his Professor Lupin getup) who was introduced early in the movie as a high ranking British officer that agrees to help Diana and Steve to vanquish Ludendorff.
At the end of the movie he literally appears out of nowhere and reveals his master plan; that he orchestrated key parts of the war the cause the most destruction. A generic fight scene occurs, Ares is defeated and the German soldiers all look up as if they’ve been freed from a curse.
This whole section of the movie was completely unnecessary. Why did Ares have to exist at all? Diana could have simply been wrong, there was no evil boss, but continues to help men end the war in some other capacity.
Speaking of scenes that had no place being there, I would also like to bring to attention a number of other segments that should have been left on the cutting room floor.
The first of which occurs just after we discover that Ludendorff will disregard for the armistice and continue his plan. The German war leaders are all situated in an underground bunker, Ludendorff throws a gas grenade and a single gas mask into the room and shuts the door. Doctor Poison remarks how the mask won’t help and Ludendorff retorts that they don’t know that. They then, in perfect synchrony, literally [throw their heads back and laugh](http://i.imgur.com/psTHAPr.gifv) like Muttley and Dick Dastardly.
Another odd exchange is when Steve has to sacrifice himself at the end, he gives Diana his watch. This wouldn’t have been _too_ bad, if not for Diana explicitly pointing out how she didn’t like the watch at the beginning. I think the writers were trying to tell a message that I wasn’t picking up on.
Yet another unusual choice was that during the infiltration of a gathering of German high commanders, was to have Steve put on a ridiculous German accent. He was introduced as a spy, but can’t speak German. It would probably be too much to ask for the actors to learn the few lines for this part of the movie in German but have some other excuse for them to be talking English.
Overall, the movie was a blast to watch. It went far beyond what it needed in both style and message. However, it would have fared a lot better if the studio didn’t feel the need to make a generic ending final boss battle. Superhero movies don’t require a megalomaniacal villain hell bent on destroying everything – we saw this done with great effect in Captain America: Civil War. Diana had her desires and if they just so happened to be wrong, the movie would have been better for it.