Wonder Woman — Will Beauty Save the World?
Yes.
Finally, the DC Films managed to make a sensible superhero blockbuster after series of failures. It’s time to breathe a sigh of relief, rejoice and hope that the next DC movies will be made at the same high level. The last time I got the same amount of pleasure from the action scenes was when I watched the Zack Snyder’s Sucker Punch back in 2011. Some of the battle scenes there also took place in the setting of the First World War.
In Wonder Woman unlike Suicide Squad we have:
- proper introduction of the main character;
- proper becoming and development of the main character;
- proper motives of heroes and villains;
- epic action scenes;
- drama;
- humour;
- side characters introduced;
- side characters advance the plot;
- great acting as a result of great casting;
- Gal Gadot!
The Wonder Woman movie has 3 timelines:
- The shortest one which includes the opening and the final scene takes place in the current time of XXI century.
- The childhood of Diana is shown at the unknown time. As she hasn’t aged in a hundred years since the First World War till today, it would be wrong to assume that her childhood was shown at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries. Most probably childhood events are shown in the fictional time right after the end of the reign of ancient Greek gods.
- The becoming of Wonder Woman and the story of the movie takes place in the year 1918 in the closing stage of First World War.
Most events in the Wonder Woman film take place at three main locations:
- Themyscira — home island of Amazons where Diana was raised and where she first met Steve Trevor.
- London — where Steve and Diana assembles a team whose main task is to end the war.
- Front of war — somewhere in occupied Belgium.
The cast can boast not only big names like Gal Gadot and Chris Pine, the film also found a place for:
- Spud from Trainspotting films (Ewen Bremner)
- Claire Underwood from House of Cards TV series (Robin Wright)
- V.M. Varga from the 3rd season of Fargo TV series (David Thewlis)
- and many other talented (but less familiar for me) actors and actresses.
Gal Gadot’s performance is flawless, she manages to play the naive and innocent princess and the fierce warrior at the same time.
Such diversity of entertaining characters, events, and locations together with amazing action scenes and surprisingly good script(by comic book standards) form a great entertaining movie. Movie that is vivid and colourful, and not primitive and dull, as Suicide Squad is.
I would like to talk more about a story and a plot twists in it, but I won’t, as it will be extremely hard to avoid spoilers. Considering the fact that I’m writing this review a day before release in the US, the risk is too high to ruin someone’s impressions from the first viewing.
I hope that DC will be able to stay on the wave of success of Wonder Woman and borrow some of well-played-out techniques and elements for their upcoming movies.
Meanwhile, grab your teenage kids and run to watch this comic book based masterpiece from the director Patty Jenkins.