Wonder Woman

I really enjoyed this movie despite its many, many bad attributes. Here's my Letterboxd review - one of my better ones, I think. Or at least hope.

Man. Suffers from the same old case of superhero movie bloat, lasting for half hour too long with a plot held together by duct tape and shrugs, capped off by a third act that is entirely like, no shit, a new age Final Fantasy boss fight in sensibility, logistics, and general inapplicability to everything that came before it. But damn - all the important parts work beautifully. The fight scenes are distilled elegance, all bicycle kicks and misty flips and choreographed computer-generated ropework like nothing you've ever seen. And no matter how dead the horse is, let's never forget that representation matters, and that a demographic that comprises half the goddamn population just got its first slice of hero-cake after, like, forty of these friggin' comic book blockbusters. It's wonderful. You should be very proud.

Now, for the rest of my post, a word on rankings, ratings, grades, and the problem with scoring and comparing movies. I gave the movie four stars despite my better judgment - that what I was really watching was another very long and very stupid PG-13 movie with very many fundamental problems. I mean, on so many levels, guys, this felt like a three, three and a half out of five, that might have even been a straight up two. It felt very confused by its own message at times, unclear on how it felt about humanity, about men, about war. Upon even a moment's reflection, it's devastatingly, overwhelmingly hawkish. Gal Gadot might be stunning and athletic and perfectly cast here, but she can't actually act, it turns out, which is something I never noticed about her when she played, say, "Crewmember #4, the sexy one" in The Fast and the Furious all those times. Also, for a movie about empowering women, there's an awful lot of Chris Pine heroism here, a whole lot of naivety on Diana's part necessitating a whole lot of mansplaining. There's a scene early on where Diana explicitly rejects the idea that women need men for any sort of sexual pleasure, and then later on there's a scene where she gives (gets? gets.) a big old nighttime smooch from Chris Pine. I swear, so little of it makes sense or holds up with any sort of thematic consistency.

But like I said in my review - none of that really seems to matter, not to me and certainly not to anyone else based on the soaring universal acclaim this thing has, because it's about a beautiful demi-goddess kicking all kinds of ass with grace and power and what on earth isn't there to love about that? Like seriously, how did it take this long to make a woman-superhero movie? It's fun and it feels relevant and meaningful in the bigger, broader context even though the movie itself is extremely apolitical and tepid with its "feminism" and should be inoffensive to even the MAGA-est guys you know.

I already think of this movie like I think of The Fast and the Furious movies - ridiculous, stupid, all kinds of fun, almost immune to any level of serious criticism. Or maybe it really is just that Gal Gadot is distractingly beautiful to the point where my simple manbrain stops functioning the right way. But no, really, to bring it all back home where I started from here - this has so many hallmarks of a #BadMovie. But it's also so goddamn fun, at least in the moments its trying to be fun. I mean, I simultaneously think that this is dumb and messy DC trash but also just a big old blast. Like, it's not a bore whatsoever, and as Trevor so often says, boring is the worst thing a movie can be. (He's not wrong!) And today, for whatever reason, the feel-good vibes I got from this one are outweighing the cynicism (which is good! it is good to like things! #hottake) and I'm happy to call it a four. Even though there are so, so many threes and three-and-a-halves out there I'd probably call "on the whole" better movies. And I can see the case for giving it the full-blown five. And I can also see the case for the two.

Bottom line, sometimes you have to ignore the numbers, ignore the ratings, acknowledge that sometimes a bad movie can be better than a good one, know that sometimes the best movies have all kinds of flaws and shortcomings. And so on.