a warrior after all

A cou­ple weeks-late re­view of Won­der Woman (2017).

DC fi­nal­ly made an­oth­er good movie af­ter Dark Knight Ris­es (2012). It’s a stan­dard ori­gin sto­ry of a su­per­hero, but tries a lot of new things along the way; ac­tion is­n’t one though.

The sto­ry it­self is a stan­dard ‘fish out of wa­ter’ plot, most akin to Thor (2011) in that sense. How­ev­er, the graph­i­cal bru­tal­i­ty of war set­ting which is rare in su­per­hero films con­trasts the pro­tag­o­nist’s naive­ness ef­fec­tive­ly. She is a war­rior af­ter all, and mur­ders her en­e­mies with­out re­morse (some­thing Man of Steel (2013) tried to make one of main themes but failed spec­tac­u­lar­ly). An­oth­er con­trast to Sny­der’s Su­per­man is that its cliche ques­tion of “is hu­man­i­ty worth you?” is much bet­ter han­dled. So the sto­ry, while noth­ing spe­cial, is con­fi­dent­ly directed.

I am not ter­ri­bly con­vinced with the cast­ing of Won­der Woman. Her ac­cent is fine giv­en her non-na­tive back­ground in the set­ting, but she strug­gles to hit strong emo­tion­al tone at cer­tain places. Com­bined with ridicu­lous amount of CGI ac­tion scenes that did not need her to do a lot of chore­og­ra­phy by her­self, she did not feel born to play this role. Gadot is great and does enough job to car­ry the film, just not a per­fect choice for me.

A char­ac­ter is only as good as its in­ter­ac­tion with oth­ers, and the sup­port­ing cast does­n’t dis­ap­point. They are the com­ic re­liefs, gate­way to the world that is not as in­no­cent and sim­ple as it seemed to Di­ana (Won­der Woman), and show gen­uine re­ac­tion to a woman who is much stronger than oth­er men, both phys­i­cal­ly and men­tal­ly. I’m not a fan of David Thewlis’ role. He’s sim­ply not that type of guy.

The best scenes of the film are all char­ac­ter-build­ing mo­ments out­side ac­tion, and ac­tion scenes are CGI mess­es that are not very well edit­ed. It is un­der­stand­able giv­en that the di­rec­tor is new to ac­tion genre, and oth­er scenes did make up for it, but I hope the weak ac­tion di­rec­tion will im­prove in the future.

It’s a com­pe­tent­ly made film that takes ad­van­tage of the char­ac­ters and set­ting. There are some weak­ness­es, and I pre­fer a su­per­hero film with good char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion with weak ac­tion rather than the oth­er way around.

7.5/10
 
 

—toshi oma­gari

Flom­mist Toshi Oma­gari fights many things, most re­cent of which is the auto-cor­rec­tion of his ti­tle to florist. Copy­right © 2017 Toshi Oma­gari. Foto by mehallo.

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