Wonder Woman
Thoughts on the Movie
By the
Panhandling Philosopher
If you are looking for action in a
movie Wonder Woman won’t disappoint. This
Wonder Woman trailer readies you to see a
movie with wonderfully choreographed action scenes sometimes packed with
intensity.
It is a reality in life that one who
has become accustomed to the old will often be disappointed with the new. When
Roger Moore died, the generation x movie goers often lamented the loss of their
favorite Bond, while those of us who were boomers more often favored Sean
Connery as Bond. No story is ever told the same way twice. A different actor
saying the same words from the same script breathes a different attitude into
the words. The Wonder Woman shown in this 2017 version is told uniquely as
compared to comic book and television versions. I enjoyed the uniqueness of
this newest version of the story. Writers Zach Snyder and Allan Heinberg along
with director Patty Jenkins have turned a comic book story of a woman with
superpowers into the multi-dimensional truly human character of Diana Prince,
Wonder Woman, presented by Israeli actress Gal Gadot. For me I will always be
fond of this movie version because this is a superhero striving to understand
exactly how she fits into this world that was so different from the isolated
island paradise she grew up in. This Wonder Woman can be seen as the story of a
gifted but culturally isolated child who grows up and finds herself in a world
very different than she expected. It is also a world where she is called upon
to do important things and make the ultimate difference. This is a Wonder Woman
who is strong and decisive, and this is treated as a positive. Wonder Woman’s
strength and decisiveness are not treated unrealistically (as long as you buy
into someone with special powers). Gal Gadot presents a woman who makes her
dive head first into the world acting on immense ideals, strength, and
decisiveness. The world into which she dives is different from the world she
expected. She imagines saving the world by defeating one embodiment of evil and
then perhaps returning home to her paradise island or perhaps spending a
lifetime with her friend and comrade Steve Trevor presented by Chris Pine. That
hoped for recipe proves naïve. Director Patty Jenkins commented somewhere that
the goal of movie making is to present beauty. There are different forms of beauty.
The beauty of Wonder Woman is the testing of a living being who heads into the
world with beauty, intelligence, ideals, strength, and purpose. We realize
watching this movie that even if one had that entire package that we live in a
world which tests everything about us. It tests using other persons and forces
pressing against us; and we are furthermore constantly tested by our inner
responses to the pressures and temptations we face. The pressures and
temptations we face are often neither as large or scary as we might imagine but
if we can stand firm against monsters, how are we with deceptive bureaucrats
willing to give us a piece of the pie for our allegiance? Wonder Woman will
need more than a swift sword and her battlefield skills to prevail.
One of the interesting changes made
in this version of the Wonder Woman story is how Wonder Woman’s entrance into
the wars of humankind begins in the First World War. In the original Marston
comic book beginnings Wonder Woman is drawn away from her island paradise to
fight Hitler and his Nazi legions. The story from the beginning had feminist
overtones. But in this movie version, Wonder Woman leaves her paradise island
in the First instead of the Second World War.
My suspicion is that the film-maker
saw the story of Wonder Woman as a metaphor of someone leaving an imagined
paradise like isolation to go to a battlefield somewhere beyond the ocean, to a
place “over there.” America’s involvement in World War I began one hundred
years ago this year. It was a pivotal movement in both American and global
history. The war had become at best a bloody stalemate, and as the Russians
began to look for an exit from the war, French and British forces faced the
real possibility of German victory. The sinking of the Lusitania, the Zimmerman
note which was possibly fraudulent along with Allied stories of German
atrocities against citizens of France and Belgium became the basis for America’s
entrance into the First World War. We went over there to make the world safe
for democracy. We were enticed away from our island of neutrality. We were
standing for Liberty, who as a woman stood her ground as a beleaguered soul
came to us for help against the one who threatened freedom throughout the
world.
I imagined this film’s makers to have
understood that in some ways Wonder Woman can be viewed as if a metaphor to the
American experience. We left our isolated island of neutrality against the
advice from some of the older generation that once we left this island it wasn’t
necessarily possible to return. If Wonder Woman had to navigate the world with
less naiveté, because her ideals, intellect and strength were not enough to
keep her soul intact, isn’t that the sort of struggle a nation which left its
island paradise of neutrality has also struggled with beginning in 1917? We
have learned that the world can’t be saved just because you destroy the one who
seems to personify it. We have learned that friend as well as foe has issues of
injustice. If in Wonder Woman there was a true innocence, in our American
history seemed to suggest that we were once innocent even if the truth was that
we traded for slaves and that we ruled over both indigenous peoples and the
darker races as if they were not really our equals. Perhaps it ruins the
wonderful myth of Wonder Woman with our own imagined hero status as America.
Perhaps we are, if less ideal, less strong, less intelligent, less beautiful,
and less everything than this Wonder Woman at the movies, perhaps we too have
left our island and will take a long time before we really understand our place
in this world we thought we could save.
