K-SCORE: 13
Director: Patty Jenkins
Writer: Allan Heinberg, Jason Fuchs, Zack Snyder
Starring: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Robin Wright, Danny Huston, David Thewlis, Connie Nielsen, Elena Anaya
“If you’re going to ask me not to sleep through this shit, I’m going to have to ask you not to sleep through the process of writing and directing it.”
Spoiler Level: Major
My family had to wait for me for a few minutes before we watched Wonder Woman because I took my dog out and she spent an unusually long time looking for the perfect place to poop on the lawn. Turns out, I could have filmed that search. I’m not saying it would have been a better movie than Wonder Woman, but it would have been as good and it at least would have been shorter.
This film is unacceptable trash. It’s following the superhero formula by the letter of the law while offering nothing insightful, entertaining, or original. The quality bar on the genre has become so low that the fact that this isn’t even the worst film in the category I’ve seen this year is nothing short of disgraceful. It’s long and for no reason since 90% of scenes needed to be cut, as they advance plot and characters in no way whatsoever. At one point Chris Pine’s character Steve and Wonder Woman are on a fifteen foot raggedy sailboat on which they sleep their way across the ocean to London, something made all the more unbelievable by the fact that Steve said the scene before he didn’t really know how to sail. Instead of catching up on, I don’t know, a million cultural and historical differences between them and their people, they discuss the size of Steve’s dick using innuendo and lie next to each other like teenagers at their first sleepover. I’m pretty sure the scene lasts a merciless eleven hundred minutes, most of which is filled only with uncomfortable silence. Yet that cringe fest is matched easily by the scene where they play dress up in a department store, the scene where they dance outside in a Belgian village, the scene where Wonder Woman’s mother reads her an expositional picture book, the scene where the sniper who never snipes anyone gets beaten up in a bar, the scene where the Native American chieftain talks about not fighting for a side, the scene where they’re followed into an alley and a guy eats a cyanide capsule, the scene at the German gala, the scene where the evil German snorts some meth, or the scene where Steve takes a bath and they, well, discuss the size of his dick.
There are only three action scenes, each with twenty times too much slow motion, and they play out like 300 only with PG-13 impacts in a blasphemously softened WWI landscape. Wonder Woman’s powers, strengths, and vulnerabilities are horrendously ill-defined making you question whether it’d be possible for her to just sprint to the MacGuffin plane, blow it up, kill the lanky, aging, mustachioed, British Ares, God of War, and call it a day. None of the soldiers ever bring up the strangeness of a woman wearing bullet-deflecting bracers who can jump fifty feet in the air and break bell towers with her forehead entering the war at the eleventh hour. I guess because they watched Captain America before they strolled out into No Man’s Land. It’s also never discussed that Wonder Woman doesn’t age. Likewise we don’t learn the details of the mythical nature of Amazon island or the women that inhabit it, since, after she leaves, she never returns. At a certain point, it’s not even a problem of what the film asks you to accept as it bounces around the scale of realistic and magical - it’s a problem of definition. The film doesn’t know what it’s characters can and can’t do, where they can go and can’t go, their strengths and vulnerabilities. It doesn’t know until one day, on a whim, they decide to film some crap that may or more likely will not fit in with what they filmed yesterday.
“Germans and Brits are communicating... with Amazons using modern American English”
If you’re going to ask me not to sleep through this shit, I’m going to have to ask you not to sleep through the process of writing and directing it. Seriously. Wake the fuck up. Your film has a script that doesn’t make sense with actors that clearly couldn’t make heads or tails of any story elements because it must have changed so much, who don’t have any chemistry because everything is shot in a random order. It’s tonally confused, mashing awkwardly WWI, Greek gods, and modern Paris. The accent work by the actors is among the laziest I’ve ever witnessed and outdone only by the fact that these turn of the century era Germans and Brits are communicating flawlessly on a conceptual level and linguistic level with Amazons using modern American English. The movie is never funny, which isn’t helping some unfortunate female stereotypes in a film I imagine idiots wanted to see as empowering. At least they can point to the fact that this was written by three men. The best thing I can say about this film is that it doesn’t feature any annoying teaser trailers post credits. Second best thing - the bit with the revolving door? I don’t know - maybe one of the discussions of Steve’s dick. There are a few to choose from.
The only thing that fills me with wonder is that Wonder Woman received positive reviews. DC paid review websites off and/or critics wanted to praise the superhero film that has a female lead for political reasons. Real people didn’t like this film. If you liked it, write me an email telling me what I missed, telling me what’s good about it. If I can’t shred your analysis with a crumbly god-killing sword of hard evidence, I’ll post your email alongside my review with an apology. Until then, DC Comics owes me one.