One nerd girl's honest opinon of Wonder Woman
I laughed, I cried, and I got REALLY sick of watching Gal Gadot watch the men around her talk.
There’s a lot that’s been written about Wonder Woman already from various feminist perspectives —many praising, some condemning the film. I’ve got my own basket of mixed feelings about the movie, but overall I was a little annoyed that nobody seemed to catch what to me boiled down to one glaring and obvious error:
They hired the wrong writers. Specifically: they DIDN’T hire women.
To be clear: I didn’t watch this movie “as a feminist”. Although it’s true that I usually align with feminist values, that’s not my primary lens when it comes to the comic universes. My perspective is one of a lover of comics and films, and of all things nerdy, who also happens to be a progressive woman who is sometimes annoyed by not seeing herself represented well or at all in the media she consumes.
Story quality comes first. Always. And that’s my main problem with this film. The story is a swing and a miss.
I should also disclaim that I’m a hardline Marvel fan, and have little use for most DC stories. In non-geek speak, that means that DC, the comic book franchise that produces Wonder Woman, is the Yankees, and Marvel (producer of the Avengers, etc.) is the Mets. I appreciate DC’s grittier ambience, but its characters are two-dimensional, its stories haphazard, and its philosophy is about as deep as a mud puddle.
I mean, just look at how DC’s last run of films has universally flopped.
But Wonder Woman’s reception promises that this movie is different, not only breaking the glass ceiling, but also DC’s losing streak. I agree that it does both — but ultimately, I don’t think the film succeeds in being a good movie, nor genuinely progressive on some key levels.
What worked (the directing and acting)
First, though, I think it’s important to celebrate the wins — and there are a lot of them here, starting with the basics: Wonder Woman’s costume. Comics are by nature a place for fantasy, and Wonder Woman’s costume design is iconic, so we expect plenty of skin, but what really delighted me was the realistic contour of the suit. Her costume’s boobs do that slight concave swoop thing that actual boobs do, and instead of gravity-defying cleavage, she’s got a sweet middle piece in the center of her chest armor which allows the woman to ACTUALLY have a decent range of motion without pulling a Janet Jackson. Likewise for all the other Amazonian costumes — they’re authentically badass.
Gal Gadot is pitch perfect as Diana/Wonder Woman, plain and simple. The cast of Amazonian warriors on Themyscira was pure femme power porn. And is it just me, or was Robin Wright born to play matriarchal badasses?
The second part of the film, which shifts to male-dominated 1918 Europe, fails to carry the energy of the first act on Themyscira, which feels too short. More of Diana’s character development on Themyscira would have better fleshed out her character — and scratched my itch for more time with Antiope. But I digress.
Patty Jenkins’ role as director is, I think, perhaps one of the strongest aspects of the film. It’s clear, as an audience, that we’re in the hands of a woman filming other women, and it feels right. The lens isn’t glued to Gadot’s or anyone else’s ass or tits, but instead portrays her as powerful; the fight scenes are elegant, inventive, and effective. It was refreshing to be able to relax into a lens that looks more like my own. And it made me realize how rarely that happens in movies like these.
And as a comic lover, that female-centric perspective is important not because Feminism, but because the alternative is distracting. It’s very hard to read or watch a comic featuring illustrations of women with balloon-shaped tits and toothpick waists, because it’s so distractingly and overtly sexualized. It takes me out of the story.
Wonder Woman is a film about a woman, seen through a woman’s eyes, and that’s a huge new step.
There were definitely a few moments in the film, during those familiar action sequences where the superhero struts their skills, when I suddenly realized, with a sense of awe, that the object of the screen’s worship was a woman. It felt new. It felt different. And as a woman who loves her superheroes, it felt really fucking good.
But. That’s directorship — the lens — and it’s only part of the film. What about the writers — the story?
All three of the film’s writers are white men. I think it’s no coincidence that this is where the film fails — pretty spectacularly in a few points.
What doesn’t work (the story)
The story kicks off beautifully, but as soon as Diana and her new friend Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) leave the Amazons’ island of Themyscira, the story’s energy deflates, and it never really comes back. The new troupe of characters are a cardboard cutout of rag-tag soldier archetypes, a copy-paste of Steve Roger’s WWII pals from Captain America: The First Avenger. Unsurprisingly, they’re all men.
But before they can get close to the rag-tag crew and the front lines, Diana has to do a fashion show (which was admittedly fun), then stand around and listen to a lot of men talk, and tell her what to do and what not to do. Pine’s character Steve Trevor (who my husband quickly dubbed Knockoff Steve Rogers), takes up the profession of bossing Diana around, hauling her around by the elbow, and telling her to get behind him.
Knockoff Steve Rogers bossing Diana around kept jolting me out of the story. Diana seems to just passively ignore him, with only two exceptions. She at last confronts him, and tells him to stop telling her what to do, but it comes two dozen comments too late. It’s wildly out of character for her to tolerate it. Diana is princess of the Amazons; there’s absolutely no way she’s going to tolerate being treated like human luggage — most certainly not by a man. As a viewer, I’m annoyed on her behalf to the point of distraction; Diana would have broken his nose by this point.
Same tropes, different day
Wonder Woman and Themyscira are sublime, but everything else is just…off. Yes, of course WWI was a male-dominated time and society, but this is Wonder Woman — a fantasy superhero movie, where anything is possible. So why is this part of the movie so weighted by patriarchal stereotypes? Why does Princess Diana spend SO MUCH time standing around, watching the men around her talk? It’s out of sync with Wonder Woman’s vibe.
And, one of the most glaring holes in the plot IMO: why is Wonder Woman surrounded by a rag-tag team of men, selected for her by someone else? Why not bring any of Diana’s many inevitably loyal warrior friends from the island along for the ride to the front lines? Were Peggy Carter and her Agents not available to be copied? Or the Carol Corps? Or Josephine Baker? Clara Barton and her Red Cross Army of volunteers? It’s not like there’s no precedent or source material, either fiction or nonfiction, for human women participating in major wars.
Having a woman in the role of the villain, the sinister Dr. Maru, was another spot of refreshment — but it doesn’t discount how overbearing the “man’s world” of 1918 Europe is on the movie’s plot. And, let’s just be honest: her character was both overshadowed and overpowered by Ludenorff, the German general in the film who clearly poses the real threat.
For Wonder Woman, the second half of the movie felt way too much like Captain America: The First Avenger. And even Star Trek, in some instances. There was a LOT of Chris Pine. Way more Chris Pine than you’d expect in a movie that’s not about Chris Pine. Don’t get me wrong: he’s great, and I love him in Star Trek and just about everything else he does, but I was under the impression that Wonder Woman was about Wonder Woman, not James Tiberius Kirk as Knockoff Steve Rogers.
And, of course, there’s the cheeseball ending which makes no sense at all. Love is the answer in the end, of course, which the writers try to punctuate with a weirdly out of place romantic encounter with Knockoff Steve Rogers, whose death inspires Diana to protect humankind. We’re left with no explanation as to how Diana’s involvement in Batman v. Superman ties into the timeline, or what her relationship with Wayne Enterprises is now. It’s nonsensical, but hey — it’s DC.
The cheese and some of the nonsensicality I’m content to write off as DC being generally shitty at storytelling, but there’s some pretty glaring errors with the film’s story, most of which DC could have easily fixed with one simple, no-brainer move: hire female writers.
A woman wouldn’t write an all-male cast of sidekicks for Diana, nor would she create a supporting character who nearly eclipses the title character. And she wouldn’t write a badass superhero who’s so fucking demure.
It’s frustrating, because this isn’t the first time we’ve seen an awesome nerd film with an amazing female cast get brought down by crappy writing. The new Ghostbusters was written and directed by Paul Feig, who also did Bridesmaids. The cast and chemistry were phenomenal, down to Chris Hemsworth glass-basement-shattering performance as the very dumb, very pretty secretary, but the banter and story lost their steam halfway through.
In a golden era of female comedians and writers, it is beyond me why a producer would reboot an all-female cast of Ghostbusters, then hire a man to write and direct the film.
Likewise with Wonder Woman: in this case, producers went to the effort of putting a talented woman behind the camera, which worked, and which I think should be applauded. But they stopped there, and left the source material to be written by a room full of men.
As a writer, I’m a bit offended by this. The story — the source material — is the most critical part of a film, of any creative endeavor. It’s the meat, the substance; everything else is filling and garnish. If movie producers are genuinely interested in producing movies centered around woman, then why wouldn’t they put the story in the hands of women?
Much like electing our first black president didn’t solve racism, just because this film is the first to center around a female superhero doesn’t mean it singlehandedly solves feminism. In fact, in some aspects, it sheds light on a lot of lingering sexism in Hollywood. But in a way, that’s ok, because singlehandedly solving feminism isn’t what Wonder Woman is supposed to do. It’s supposed to be a great movie — and, as sci-fi is mandated to do, to kick us a step further down the path of progress. I’m not sold on the former, but I believe it achieves the latter.
There’s a lot I love about Wonder Woman. It’s really well made, and simply the fact of its existence is a step forward, and a win for our youngest generations, including my own daughter. But as a story, it doesn’t hold up. And ironically, the reason it doesn’t hold up is because of sexist hiring practices.
Thankfully, it looks like Marvel, true to form, won’t be so sloppy with its stories. Its the first solo female superhero film in Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, Captain Marvel, is slated for spring 2019, directed by Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck and written by Nicole Perlman. With a little luck, Brie Larson’s Carol Danvers will land the punch Gal Gadot’s Princess Diana never got the chance to throw.
