by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last Thursday I went to the Point Loma Target store to buy a
couple of video discs — a Blu-Ray and 4K HDR combo pack of the 2017 film Wonder
Woman and a Blu-Ray and DVD pack of Spider
Man: Homecoming. I’d intended to screen
both of them during the weekend when Charles and I both had days off, but in
the end we only watched Wonder Woman,
directed by Patty Jenkins (who for some reason hadn’t made a feature film since
2003, when she released Monster,
a sort-of biopic of real-life Lesbian prostitute serial killer Aileen Wuornos —
it was a good movie for what it was and it won an Academy Award for Charlize
Theron as Wuornos, but I thought Jenkins, who wrote her own script, softened
the story and in particular erred by changing Wuornos’s girlfriend from the
hard-edged biker-dyke she was for real to a teenage “questioning” Lesbianette;
it was a good movie but one of those frustrating fact-based films that would
have actually been a better movie if it had stuck closer to the facts). Anyway,
Jenkins ended up supporting herself with TV work until she got the nod for Wonder
Woman — and according to the “Trivia”
posters on imdb.com, though the people who originated the Wonder
Woman project were all men (as was Dr.
William Marston, a psychologist who created the Wonder Woman character in 1942
as a morale-booster for all the women who were either enlisting in the women’s
branches of the armed forces or working at home in defense plants), they seem
to have decided early on that they wanted a woman director and approached just
about any woman with at least some rep, including Kathryn Bigelow (The
Hurt Locker) and Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight), before settling on Jenkins to direct the script by
Zack Snyder (one of Warner Bros.’ go-to guys for turning DC comic books into
films), Alan Heinberg and Jason Fuchs. Jenkins cast Israeli actress Gal Godot
as Wonder Woman, a.k.a. Diana Prince, a.k.a. Princess Diana of Paradise Island,
since the origin story of Wonder Woman was that she was the last surviving
member of the ruling family of the Amazons, women warriors in Greek mythology
who fought either alongside or against men and were as strong and effective in
battle as the males. (Just how the Amazons reproduced themselves in a society
with no men allowed is something of a mystery, though some of the ancient myths
claim that the Amazons copulated with centaurs, the incredibly horny half-men,
half-goats of Greek mythology.) In this version the Amazons seem not to have to
worry about reproduction since they appear to be at least partially immortal —
they can be killed in battle but don’t seem subject to the natural aging
process: they stay alive and youthful-looking forever unless an enemy gets a
sword, a spear, an arrow or — when they encounter modern civilization — a gun
close enough to do them harm, and sometimes do them in, just like normal human
beings. (This explains why in the epilogue, set in modern times about 100 years
after the main body of the film — more on that later — Gal Godot as Wonder
Woman looks every bit as young, hot and sexy as she does in the earlier
scenes.)
Apparently the writers’ original plan was to have Wonder
Woman take place during World War II, which
was when the comic-book character originated, but for reasons that aren’t
altogether clear they decided to do it one war earlier and have Paradise
Island, where Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen, still hot in her own right and a
credible action figure) has carefully been trying to shield her daughter Diana
(Lilly Aspell) from the arts of war, which the Amazons have had to learn
because while they don’t have any enemies yet, they have to worry about Ares,
the Greek god of war, who fostered differences among humans and thereby created
all the conflict and strife the human race has been heir to ever since, and who
promised to return and finish the job he started of getting humanity to
obliterate himself. Just how Diana was born remains something of a mystery
until towards the end of the film; Hippolyta tells Diana that she was sculpted
as a lump of clay and given life by Zeus, the king of the gods, though
eventually she realizes that she was conceived by Zeus, the intergalactic
horndog, having sex with her mom in the normal human (or godly) fashion. In any
event, Hippolyta’s sister Antiope (Robin Wright) gives Diana a hard-ass
training in the ways of the warrior, and it comes in handy when Diana grows up
to be Gal Godot and, in 1918, is confronted with the reality of World War I (or
“The Great War,” as the writers correctly refer to it — that’s what World War I
was called before there was a World War II) when a young man named Steve Trevor
(Chris Pine) lands on Paradise Island. He’s flying a German plane but he’s
really an American spy — a bit of information Hippolyta worms out of him by
tying him up with the Lasso of Truth, a glowing bit of incandescent rope (in
the comics it was gold but it didn’t glow) that not only has superhuman powers
to restrain somebody but also makes them tell the truth about whatever they’re
being interrogated about. Unfortunately the real Germans arrive at the island in hot pursuit, invade
it and shoot Antiope. Steve and Diana make their way across the Atlantic to
England by boat, and there are quite a lot of fish-out-of-water gags as Diana
tries to make sense of how the 1918-era humans she’s suddenly found herself
around live and fight. She keeps demanding that Steve take her to the front and
can’t understand his insistence that he go through channels first, and when she
gets to the front she’s even flummoxed at the whole stalemate along the front and
how neither side is attacking because both would be subjected to heavy losses
if they tried it.
Wonder Woman
evokes just about every great movie ever made about World War I, including The
Big Parade, All Quiet on the Western Front
and Paths of Glory, and it turns
into one of the weirdest and most comprehensive mash-ups of previous films I’ve
ever seen. In the opening scenes it evokes Bogart comparisons — in her
interviews to promote the film Patty Jenkins named Casablanca as one of her all-time favorites, and it shows both
in how she instructed Danny Huston, playing German general Erich Ludendorff, to
copy Conrad Veidt’s bad-Nazi performance in Casablanca but also in this bit of Bogartian dialogue the
writers gave Steve Trevor: My father told me once, he said, ‘If you see
something wrong happening in the world, you can either do nothing, or you can
do something.’ And I already tried nothing” — though Bogart usually got lines
like that towards the ends of his films while Chris Pine in this one has to say
it at the beginning. There’s one scene in a nearly deserted French village
where the residents are fleeing and all of a sudden it looks like Shanghai
Express, and towards the end, when Steve
and Diana stumble on a plot Ludendorff and German mad scientist Dr. Manu (Elena
Anaya), who wears a mask across the bottom of her face à la the later versions of The Phantom of the
Opera and who’s invented a poison gas that,
because it’s based on hydrogen, will dissolve all existing gas masks as well as
all human life exposed to it. Ludendorff plots to use this stuff to allow
Germany to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, and when he’s opposed by the
rest of the German General Staff he simply sneaks a bomb containing the gas
into their staff room, seals the doors and knocks them off. (Here Ludendorff
comes off more like a Nazi than one of the Kaiser’s generals, but the portrayal
is appropriate because Ludendorff was an early supporter of Hitler and indeed
agreed to serve as figurehead in Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, though he
backed out at the last minute and double-crossed Hitler when he realized
Hitler’s cause was lost.)
At least one other, much more recent, movie gets
referenced in Wonder Woman when
Steve assembles a band of unlikely commandos to attack Ludendorff’s
installation — and the film suddenly turns into Inglourous Basterds, not only in the appearance of a commando squad
attempting to infiltrate a major German gathering (Diana’s scene in which she
kidnaps a woman invitee and disguises herself as her is one of the most
delightful in the film) but also in its use of real historical figures like
Ludendorff in creating an alternative history which didn’t turn out at all like
the real one. Diana is at first convinced Ludendorff is the modern incarnation
of the war god Ares, but eventually she realizes that Ares has come back to
life not as Ludendorff, but as
the British “peace” activist Sir Patrick — the whole business of having the
ostensible pacifist turn out to be an enemy agent was originated, I think, by
Alfred Hitchcock and his writers
(including Charles Bennett, who worked on six of Hitchcock’s key films and was
essentially to him what Robert Riskin was to Frank Capra and Dudley Nichols to
John Ford) in the 1940 film Foreign Correspondent, though it eventually became an annoying affectation
in Cold War-era movies, where it served the U.S. government’s propagandistic
purpose to discredit all “peace”
activists as either knowing or unknowing dupes of the Communists. Eventually
Diana and Ares (who’s “outed” himself in Greek-mythological drag) have a fight
to the finish, and Steve dies a tragic death (perhaps the biggest surprise of
the film: in the comics he survived and became Diana’s permanent love
interest), whereupon we return to the framing sequence where a chronologically
but not visibly older Diana is
shown working as an art expert at the Louvre, only she receives a glass-plate
negative of the picture taken of her and Steve in that French village (with a
camera that would have been considered already archaic in 1918) and which set
her off on her recollections the way that madeleine did with Marcel Proust.
Charles and I had a mixed reaction to Wonder Woman; neither of us gave it the
greatest-thing-since-sliced-bread response some of the original reviewers did
when they not only hailed it as the greatest comic-book superhero movie ever
made (an honor I’d still give to the first Tim Burton Batman from 1989) but suggested it might become the first
such film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. (It might at that, for
reasons that have little to do with its artistic quality; just as the Academy
last year tried to answer the charges of racism against it by giving the Best
Picture Oscar to Moonlight, a
coming-of-age story about a young Black Gay man, they might give the nod to Wonder
Woman and Patty Jenkins to try to
neutralize the charges that Hollywood is one great big machine through which
men sexually exploit women — and, in the case of Gay Hollywood, young men —
without facing the consequences until now, when the fall of Harvey Weinstein is
leading to a lot of summary dismissals of people on the basis of unconfirmed
allegations in a manner that’s starting to look awfully similar to the
blacklist of Left-wing talents in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.) But Wonder
Woman is a quite estimable film, hardly a
masterpiece but certainly a film of real quality and one which at least attempts some social significance without achieving the
incredible pretentiousness of Christopher Nolan’s Batman movies and Zach Snyder’s Watchmen. Though it’s not really much fun — I can remember
when fun used to be the raison d’être of a superhero movie before the genre started being used for more somber and sometimes
even tragic purposes (Logan was
actually an intensely moving tragedy — it just didn’t have much to do with the
previous light-hearted agendas of superhero movies) — Wonder Woman is the sort of big-ticket blockbuster that a film
buff whose tastes usually extend beyond such films doesn’t have to feel
embarrassed for liking.
