Wonder Woman (5/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 140 minutes.

OK for children.

For some reason somebody at one time thought that women needed a superhero of their own, so they started creating some, like Superwoman and Batgirl. But the one that apparently caught everyone’s fancy was Wonder Woman. The result is this misguided attempt at entertainment.

One thing that works about the Batman movies is that they are set in a mythical city, Gotham, with mythical events and mythical villains. The same is true of Superman where Clark Kent works at a mythical newspaper, The Daily Planet, in a mythical city, Metropolis, and deals with mythical events and mythical people.

But not Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot)! This movie is set in World War I and shows Wonder Woman winning the war single-handedly. If one is looking at a fantasy dealing with fictitious characters in fictitious spaces with fictitious events, it’s pretty easy to go along and enjoy the fantasy. But when a ludicrously fictitious character like Wonder Woman is put into a real event with real people that everybody knows about, it destroys the ability to the swallow the story.

Although Chris Pine is along for the ride as the man whose advice she ignores and to insert some sort of romantic hints, the WWI scenes minimize the horror and desolation of life in the trenches that the movie tries to duplicate, but doesn’t because the point is that Wonder Woman is indestructible. Today’s people can’t begin to imagine how terrible it was in those trenches where it is estimated that France lost 1.3 million killed, Great Britain 908,000, and the U.S. 126,000, but we were only in the war for a year. That doesn’t count the many more who were wounded. But, hey, it was nothing that Wonder Woman couldn’t conquer!

It is well enough made that it actually does hold your attention and provides some entertainment value if this is your cup of tea. It’s not mine.

Directed by Patty Jenkins with a script by Alan Heinberg from a story by Zach Snyder, Alan Heinberg, and Jason Fuchs, it’s hard to believe that with so many people involved in putting the story together they would come up with such a preposterous idea. They even show one real person as being killed during Wonder Woman’s conclusive fight when, in fact, the man lived until 1937.

I saw this with a woman who rated it 9/10, so I guess that there’s some sexism involved (duh!). This is a movie directed by a woman from a story and screenplay created by men but made solely to appeal to women who view a female superhero as their right. Apparently their unique ability to bear children, the future of intelligent life on this planet, isn’t enough for them to set them above men, which is pretty sad if you think about it since that’s the most important thing in the world.

If it were up to me there would be no superhero movies regardless of their sex. These films are intellectual and entertainment diarrhea, filled with absurd incidents and fights, and this one is no different. There is absolutely no tension or dramatic uncertainty. As far as I’m concerned this is a total waste of 2 ½ hours.