by OL » Mon Jul 03, 2017 3:09 pm
Saw Wonder Woman a ways back, and even though I was looking forward to it so much, I have to admit it was much, much weaker than I'd been hoping.
It's wasn't terrible, mind you. It's just one of those things where the buzz and reviews seem so ridiculously positive that the actual movie feels really underwhelming when you finally see it. Seriously, with that 90-something percent on Rotten Tomatoes (a bracket that's usually reserved for Pixar movies and whatnot), I thought it was gonna be a sure thing, that I was gonna love it to pieces.
But no. Not so much.
It did have some really good qualities. First things first, it wasn't heavy-handed at all with the various social messages it relays. Sure, there's an overall feminist "thing" to it, but only insomuch as that it features a woman (actually quite a number of them at the start) doing amazing things and setting a good example. However, at no point did it feel like it was shoving anything down my throat. It's the absolute polar opposite of the overbearing shitshow that was the first season of Supergirl, for example, where at every turn it was trying to shove the message in your face that women are just as capable as men (which was hilariously ironic, because Supergirl herself was very obviously less-capable than her male equivalent). Wonder Woman does it without being obnoxious or overly-insistent though; it's just there, in the film's content, and you can either take it to heart or just enjoy it as a dumb action flick. It doesn't feel like it's trying too hard to prove anything, and all by itself that's far more effective than having a bunch of front-and-center yammering about women's rights, capabilities, and worth.
It even does this with the subject of racism in just about the most graceful way possible. One character explains how he didn't originally want to be a soldier; he wanted to be an actor. But, as he explains, he wasn't the right color.
And boom; right there, in a single line of dialogue, the movie has said it all. Racism is bullshit, racism is wrong. A single line of dialogue, and you've expressed the only point you need to make about that issue, while also making me like that particular character just a little more. Polar Opposite to, say, Django Unchained (Tarantino's worst movie by a damn mile) for example, which was basically three hours of "racism is bad, white people are evil, racism is bad, oh, and also white people are evil. And did we say racism is bad? Christoph Waltz is cool, but otherwise white people are evil."
Nothing elegant about the storytelling there in the least.
Also on the good side of things, Gal Gadot is still pretty much perfect in the title role. It's not a particularly demanding role by any acting stretch, but she has the looks, the presence, the voice, and the physicality for it, and honestly, that's all the really important stuff you need for Wonder Woman. No complaints there. Likewise, Chris Pine has exactly the right balance of good actor/comedic timing to keep things light and enjoyable, and the rest of the cast is plenty capable in those departments as well. Really nothing wrong with those aspects.
The issues I have with the movie come more in the department of directing, I think, than anything else.
Patty Jenkins is getting a ton of credit for pretty much being the first female director for a movie of this style and size... but man, the fact that she's never done anything like this fucking shows throughout the entire thing. With a few small exceptions (if you've seen the trailers, you've seen the good stuff) the action is really, really lame.
Like, "early-2000s, riding on the success of The Matrix trilogy" lame.
The fight choreography for the Amazons is overly-flippy and ridiculously silly to look at. It's overly-showy and impractical, and it had me squinting my eyes in disbelief that, in this fucking day and age, some directors still think that this is the kind of thing that passes as cool and exciting. The full-body cg used for some of the action also looks really rubbery and incredibly fake. Shocking that anyone can make cg this bad and actually have it approved for wide-release in this kind of movie anymore... but hey, being that Patty Jenkins has literally no experience with this kind of stuff, I guess I can understand how it happened.
Likewise there's far too much unnecessary slow-motion used. It's the kind of thing where WW might punch one guy, punch another, then as she's going into the next punch it slows waaaaaay down for a couple seconds... then it comes out of slo-mo for the next hit. It's pointless, to an absolute and utter extreme, and adds nothing to the action. People like to shit all over him, but Zack Snyder had the right idea about this stuff in BvS; when Batman bursts into a room and takes down ten to fifteen guys and absolutely no slow-motion is used in the entire scene, it increases the impact of the scene tenfold. The choreography itself hits really fucking hard, and it leaves you with a lot of extra details that you may miss at first, making repeat viewings even better. I mean, think about some of the best action you've seen in movies in the past several years; chances are, almost no slow-motion was used. John Wick, Logan, the BvS Batman brawl, etc. All amazing stuff, all in real-time.
It's an action style that makes everything feels really modern and new, whereas the overuse of slow-mo in WW makes it feel like something that was made around 2002. Dated and silly.
A smaller note, but still relevant, is the editing; was it just me, or did it feel like there were tons of scenes where the last camera shot just goes on for a couple seconds too long? Like, the scene ends with something that's supposed to be funny, something that's supposed to make the audience chuckle... and for some reason, Jenkins saw fit to leave a couple seconds there, as if to leave the audience time to settle back down and stop laughing. It's like when you remove the laugh track from a sitcom, and suddenly you're left with all these awkward pauses. It feels weird.
Last thing, the final shot of Wonder Woman... what the fuck was the point of that? It's yet another one of those things that feels like a silly trope of late-90s/early-2000s action flicks. Yeah, end with a slow-motion shot of the heroine jumping at the camera, all battle-ready and shit! Yeah, that stuff's cool!
Except... what the fuck is she jumping at? She was literally just standing atop a tower overlooking the Thames River. Why is she jumping off of it, looking like she's about the attack the shit out of someone? It's a silly trailer shot, just for the sake of having a trailer shot.
Yet another of those things that just feels like the planning of a director who doesn't understand how to make this stuff legitimately cool, someone without any eye for action. Sure sure, I understand that people felt it was important to have a woman directing the Wonder Woman movie... I get that. But, if they're going to automatically exclude all the usual men who actually know how to do this shit correctly, couldn't they have at least gotten a woman with even an ounce of action experience (off the top of my head, Kathryn Bigelow probably would have been a fine choice)?
I dunno. Like I said, I don't hate the movie, and I think it did some things right, specifically in regards to themes and scripting. But in the end I just don't really think it was made for me; instead, I kind of feel like it was very specifically made with the mindset that a lot of little girls are going to go see it.
Eh, Wonder Woman will be in Justice League regardless, and no doubt that'll be much more up my alley. I was just hoping the solo movie would hit with me a little more, but instead it was more of a light tap.