Superhero stories can be a tough tale to tell effectively because of the lack of a common thread of humanity. After all, the superhero possesses powers not attainable by the common person; and defeating your everyday thug can only take you so far before the audience becomes bored and wanders off, meaning the story-teller must come up with more extravagant antagonists, and the slender rope the story-crafter is trying to dance upon is becomes thinner and thinner.
There are a couple of approaches to this problem. For example, the superhero may also be burdened with some physical disability, which emboldens the common crook. Marvel’s Daredevil is blind, but in a clever twist, he attributes his superpowers to that blindness, his remaining senses sharpening to cover for his nearly useless eyes. Still, the basic disability remains.
Another approach is that taken by the subject of today’s review, Wonder Woman (2017). This is an interesting melding of the Goddess Diana, from old Greek Mythology, with the years of World War I, aka the War to End All Wars. Marvel Studios has chosen to start her off by putting her up against another God, Ares, the God of War (and where will they go from here?). The key is they’ve chosen to humanize a Goddess by recognizing that the traditional divine beings hardly ever change and grow, as this is often taken by devotees as denials of their God’s divine and all-knowing status, and this static condition is death for a story.
So we get to see Diana grow from a child to a woman. And then we get to see her not only be fallible, but to see her change and mature emotionally and mentally in response to the consequences of her actions. This transforms her from an unknowable divine being to someone very much akin to us.
And this, in turn, permits us to share in her story, to understand her mistakes, and, with her, to learn from those mistakes. As my Arts Editor points out, this is the traditional voyage of discovery, complete with mistakes made, consequences sustained, and lessons made apparent.
This artistic decision is one of the strongest components of this movie, but the story itself is well drawn, balancing horror with humor, laughter with anticipation, a plot twist here, a plot twist there. While the title character herself is a good looking lady, she is not a statue depending on her looks, but a good actor in her own right; more gratifyingly, she’s not completely surrounded by more good lookers, but some folks who just look normal – even Chris Pine, who has played Captain Kirk in several block-busters from the Star Trek franchise, is not a pretty face in this movie. In fact, he improved his standing in my estimation, showing more acting chops here than in any of his Trek movies (I skipped the last one, but not because of Pine).
The special effects met the current bar for success, although sometimes it seemed there might be too many. Still, it’s a movie that wants to cover a lot of ground, so that may have been justified. Characters are well drawn, even the Amazons who ran the risk of being too similar. And, being a product of Disney’s Marvel, it has a certain technical sophistication that you just come to expect.
So, go. Have fun. Recommended, if you enjoy superhero movies. It’s a half-step above most of the superhero films in my experience.
