The artistry, charm and special effects – and one powerful twist – are the only things that rescue Wonder Woman from its own stultifying clichés: 1. A female-run society is a paradise. 2. Women are great warriors. 3. the hot Amazon supermodel librarian. 4. The incomprehensibly jealous and angry villain.Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
I'm going to assume that you've already seen this movie.
Avast, matey!
Here be spoilers!
So the artistry, charm, and special effects, and one powerful twist are the only things that rescue Wonder Woman from its own stultifying clichés.
First of all, I give you the clichés.
One, a female-run society is a paradise.
See, when there are no men in society, everything is sunny, the landscape is beautiful, the women live in harmony with nature, and everything is wonderful.
That is, at least, until a man shows up, bringing war in his wake.
During the first scenes on the island of...
Well, let's just say it somewhat reminds me of the Greek island of Lesbos.
The skies are blue, the waterfalls seem to spill diamonds, and no woman seems to age much past 45.
The world of men outside this estrogen paradise matrix is portrayed as smoky, foggy, sour and sallow.
Grimy men growl and clutch at weapons, hard-faced, suspicious and violent.
Actually, the beginning of the movie does somewhat remind me of Sweden and...
Now, of course, there are no old women on this island, because that would beg the question, where are all these women coming from?
Is there a gimp in a leather suit, in a box used for sperm harvesting?
A male baby's killed off?
Females are so omnipresent, it almost seems like the student composition of a post-modern college arts class.
I hope my magical powers make me immune to death!
And these Amazons take the only man on the island and interrogate him.
When logically, of course, they should be burying him in affirmative action programs.
This is a reverse Garden of Eden.
In the original tale, a man does well until he is corrupted by a woman, then he loses paradise.
In Wonder Woman, women do wonderfully well until a man arrives, and then at least one of them loses paradise.
Cliché number two.
Women are great warriors.
Now, I've criticized female fighters in movies before for taking on men three times their size with little or no prior training.
In this movie, Wonder Woman, whose actual name is Diana, does go through years of rigorous training, but gains supernatural powers somehow when she hits her late teens.
She magically throws back her trainer half the length of a football field by blocking a sword blow with her golden bracers.
This new power has two primary meanings.
The first is the pushback of an abused child who has grown bigger and stronger than her aging abuser.
The second is the displacement of an older woman's physical attractiveness by a younger woman.
3.
The Hot Amazon Supermodel Librarian A beautiful woman who has no idea how attractive she is.
The dream of beta males everywhere.
Who've never listened to Stanley Kowalski from A Streetcar Named Desire.
Who says this to an erotic woman fishing for compliments.
I never met a dame yet that didn't know if she was good looking or not without being told.
And there's some of them that give themselves credit for more than they've got.
Trust me, the lead actress may be playing a naive, otherworldly warrior, but in real life, she knows exactly how attractive she is.
She was a model who married a man who sold a hotel for $26 million.
Here's a hint.
You're not going to take off her thick glasses, tell her she's beautiful, and have her fall in love with you.
4.
The Incomprehensibly Jealous and Angry Villain Now, the intergalactic badass in Wonder Woman is the god Ares, who becomes jealous of Zeus' favorite created toy, humanity.
So this is basic sibling rivalry cliche 101.
The elder sibling resents the younger sibling for the attention paid by the parents to the new arrival, who has displaced him.
This monstrous myth of malevolent motivation serves as a convenient excuse for sibling viciousness, but has no actual basis, in fact.
Birth order seems to have little, if any, impact on personality.
Sometimes siblings are just jerks.
Now, to be fair to the movie, there is one stunning piece of originality in the villain, which we'll get to in a moment.
Diana, princess of blow-dried hair, shopping and not eating.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Wrong, Princess Diana.
Diana, princess of Themyscira, possesses powers that make no sense at all.
So, Ares, the god of war, kills her father Zeus.
Now, Ares has been provoking fights among mankind for thousands of years.
But Diana was molded of clay, and Zeus was supposed to have breathed life into her a few short years before the movie began.
Diana is an Amazon with superpowers.
But the Amazons are mere mortals felled by a single bullet.
It's all very confusing, even by superhero backstory standards.
Now, Chris Pine.
Chris Pine is in fact a charming pile of J.Crew waspy hotness and helps carry the movie with his one-liners that shouldn't be one-liners.
Now, as the audience, you become attached to him, and then, of course, he has to die, so that the population of the world always gets used to male disposability.
And even the way he dies makes no sense.
He's piloting a plane full of poison gas, which he chooses to blow up, rather than, say, land safely.
Because...
Why?
Landing the plane safely would allow the poison gas to be deactivated.
Blowing it up in mid-air will just spread the poison gas for hundreds of miles, causing countless deaths, the prevention of which was the whole point and MacGuffin of the movie to begin with.
But, you see, men must always be expendable, so plot and logic must be expendable as well.
And if you think I'm kidding about male disposability, think of this.
Remember the evil woman, Dr.
Poison, who concocts the genocidal gas?
Remember how Wonder Woman spares her life?
She gets to live, the good guy doesn't.
Now, as usual, almost all the on-screen deaths are male.
Female deaths are inevitably deployed as a plot device to heighten the stakes, to raise attention.
Men die anonymously.
In quick succession, women die slowly or off-screen.
Huh.
Using sympathy for women to provoke male aggression does not seem very feminist to me.
Ah, well, maybe it is.
Hard to tell these days.
So, all men are evil or incompetent, except for non-white males, of course, with the exception of one, the Chris Pine character, who must die.
Now, all women are wonderful and good, except for one, Dr.
Poison, who gets to live.
And what is the role of women in raising such nasty and violent men?
Completely absent from the film, of course.
Men are just...
bad.
The women who raised them were just saints.
For feminists and leftists, environment is everything.
You know, you are a criminal because you were raised poor in a poor neighborhood, except for men.
Well, they're just bad regardless of environment, regardless of the mother's and female daycare workers and female primary school teachers who raised them, regardless of the welfare state policies that women vote for.
Environment creates badness.
Except for boys raised by women.
Then the badness of boys has absolutely nothing to do with women at all.
Tell these people that poverty shapes personality, they nod as if you're discussing the reality of gravity.
Tell these people that female primary caregivers shape personality, they get very angry.
Men are just naturally bad, right?
Logically, though, if they are, then they're not to blame.
Any more than a wolf pack is to blame for hunting a deer.
Ah, logic.
Always so inconvenient to exploitation.
See, men generally pay the taxes that support feminist fantasies.
And who wants to humanize the tax livestock?
See, humanization and exploitation are opposites.
Now, the one point of originality that redeems the movie in many ways is the identity of the villain.
So Diana repeatedly states her belief that when she kills one bossy German, the war will end because that German is clearly Ari's the god of war in disguise.
However, after she kills him, the war continues, which of course makes no sense to her.
So as it turns out, Ares turns out to be the head of the British government, Sir Patrick, who has been prolonging the war by inspiring and collaborating with the enemy.
Huh!
There is a conflict that cannot be ended, and it turns out it is the local government, your local government, that is collaborating with the, quote, enemy to prolong the war.
This brings to mind so many things.
The US arming and financing Al-Qaeda, the Afghanistan Mujahideen, ISIS invading Iraq and Afghanistan, helping to overthrow the governments of Libya and Syria, bomb everyone, bring everyone.
That's the twist.
That's the twist.
It is the innocent-looking, benign, stuttering, polite, democratically elected leaders, your leaders, who are provoking and prolonging And the media, of course.
Well, that goes without saying.
Now here's something else that's interesting.
Wonder Woman was created in 1942 as a specifically American patriotic heroine.
Her costume was red, white, and blue.
The new Wonder Woman, this movie's been in development for like 20 years, It has nothing whatsoever to do with America, which has a kind of economic logic to it, right?
70% of Hollywood movie profits come from outside America, which is an interesting byproduct of increasing foreign wealth.
See, profits require that you short nationalism and long globalism.
In storytelling, nationalism reduces international profits.
Globalism increases them.
There's some value in this aggressive nationalism.
It has been a problem in the past, to say the least.
