Review: Wonder Woman (2017)

In recent times we have seen quite a lot of action hero origin stories. With dramatic improvements in techniques relating to in production as well as post processing of movies, big production houses calling for a reboot of a franchise is not totally unreasonable.

However what is unjustified is the lack of attention they have been giving to the sexes! All the franchises have one thing in common - their intent is to showcase macho men and how the world becomes a better place because of them (with the exception of X-Men)!

While the back story from Diana's childhood (involving ancient Greek gods) continue as the central theme of the movie, I felt that the storyline did not have enough meat or surprises to outpace other recent superhero movies! To me characters like Charlie or Sameer (the artists themselves did a good job) were unnecessary to the plot itself. These were possibly introduced only to help improve the humour quotient the movie lacked. I will discuss that in my more detailed review.

Spoilers Ahead

The Back Story: The story begins in mythical island of Themyscira, home to the Amazons. Diana is shown as a young girl who wants to learn how to fight in a war and her mother Queen Hippolyta is bent in not letting her in. Unsurprisingly, the island is made of woman with Hippolyta's sister General Antiope leading their small army.

Their presence is to defend earth in the event that Ares (the God of War) decides to make a comeback. In a story book style rendering Hippolyta retells the myth in which Zeus (the God of Gods) creates mankind to live in peace, and how a jealous Ares (Zeus's son) corrupts man's mind to wage wars and kill.

Ares keeps killing most of the gods when Zeus intervenes and in the ensuing conflict, Ares is badly wounded but survives plotting to return and destroy humanity once and for all.

The Main Story: Diana grows up learning more of her past and of a sword known as God Killer with which, she believes, Ares can be stopped. Steve Trevor crashes into the island (which is behind some kind of invisibility field). He is saved by Diana, but an entire navy ship is hunting him.

They manage to get into the island and a small battle begins in which General Antiope is killed. Trevor is questioned & is found to be WWII British spy who has witnessed Dr. Maru aka Poison (Elena Anaya) & General Erich Ludendorff (David Thewlis) of Germany working on a poisonous weapon.

The Queen of the Amazons does not want her warriors to participate in the war, but Diana decides to get hold of her primary weapons - the sword, shield, lasso and her armour and elopes with Trevor. According to her Erich is Ares re-incarnate.

In a few days, the duo end up in London in a small sail boat (god knows how)! Diana meets a few of Trevor's friends and also Sir Patrick (David Thewlis) who aides financially and further's their mission to kill Erich.

The entire part of them meeting up with characters like Charlie and Sameer is extremely dragged and I found it completely unessential to the movie as a whole. In many ways it was a complete waste of 20 minutes of screen time, that was better off used in some action sequences within London (for Diana) to build their chemistry! Lucy Davis as Etta also makes an appearance.

Special Effects: When you think superhero it is all about special effects and in-human stunts. Wonder Woman does lack the firepower in the first half in this aspect. But the moment Diana and Trevor enter the war zone we are treated to what we dream of experiencing in our mundane life - a glimpse of a real hero.

While Diana's antics like plummeting into a war tank or bringing down a church chapel with one hit makes for great stunts, it is her valour and courage of stepping into no-man's land that gets the applause. The moment when she is first shown in her wonder woman costume and is taking in a load of bullets on the shield is spectacular to watch.

Diana and Trevor get some time alone. While parents are nervy as to what is to ensue between them, the PG-12 rating keeps everything in balance! Eventually she meets the evil German General and sticks the sword into him after a short fight. But this does not stop the war.

The Plot Twist: Be it real life or Hollywood, you cannot take things in their face-value. Although the evil nature of Dr. Poison and General Erich is shown in a few scenes, true evil lurks on the other end of the battlefield.

Diana gets a rude shock when she realizes it is Sir Patrick who is Ares re-incarnate. To let it sink in, the director even went to the extent of dressing up the old limp in a shining and mighty looking warrior armor.

When Ares begins forging and assembling weapons on the fly and floats in the air, you know you are dealing with super-villain Level 99!

Direction: It is moments like the climax in this movie where the direction could have shined. But instead we are treated to cheesy villain dialogs like 'kill the humans & side with me', 'the humans are unworthy' etc. instead of stunning special effects or showing that a hero can emerge from a common man like Charlie or Sameer (who were both in that scene)! I even felt that the audio in this sequence was badly superimposed.

Same goes for the final scene in Louvre, I could notice that the set and Diana were possibly filmed in different frame rates. The final sequence where you see wonder woman leaping towards a random place was also nothing short of corny!

Final Words: I felt that though the artists, the camera and to some extent the action stuck faithfully behind pushing a new superhero into limelight for the kids, the direction and plot became a pitfall!

The plot of the story kept weakening with every scene. It was only the dedication of the stars themselves that seems to have saved Wonder Woman some grace.

I found the villains unconvincing, the plot banal and the writing to be loathsomely lazy. I would strongly urge you to go see the trailer in the theatres, for it has the best scenes of the movie already. If you still want to watch the rest of it, just wait for the DVD!

Image Credits: All image courtesy IMDB. Copyrights for the images used rest with respective media houses.

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