Thanks, I Hate It: Wonder Woman

At a German gala held by the High Command at the height of World War I, American infiltrator Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) flirts by the fireplace with Isabel “Dr. Poison” Maru (Elena Anaya), a badly disfigured chemist manufacturing chemical weapons for the Axis Powers. In Anaya’s performance you can see that she knows, on some level, that she’s being played, but that the intoxication of emotional intimacy—and, implicitly, the prospect of sex—are so alluring to this isolated, unwanted woman that she’s willing to let it play out just the same. It’s a riveting moment, a genuine mess of human prejudice and yearning. Unfortunately, there’s about an hour and ten minutes of drivel on either side of it.

Taking a moral tarpit like World War I and casting it as a clash between good and evil is repugnant enough on its own, but Wonder Woman has nothing going for it to offset that queasy decision. Braveheart (which I love) might be dumb and horny and unconcerned with actual history, but it’s got believably hot actors, lots of mud, blood, and grime, and a sense of earthy irreverence to ground us in its setting. Wonder Woman has studio-polished super-beauties like Gal Gadot, who crosses the killing fields of Europe without picking up so much as a scrape. Its vision of war is sterile and bloodless both in a literal sense and in a moral one.

One of the film’s fundamental flaws is its treatment of the real historical figure General Erich Ludendorff (played here by Danny Huston). The actual Ludendorff was staunchly pro-war, to be sure, and his eventual prominent position in Hitler’s Germany speaks perhaps as ill of him as anything can of anyone, but the film’s portrayal of the general as a cackling cartoon villain robs his real-life horrors of all weight. In order for depictions of human atrocity to matter, we must understand that it is humans, not monsters, who perpetrate them. A war is a cascade of human choice and cultural pressure, not something Ares (David Thewlis) magically compels just by existing. 

When, after Ares’ death at Wonder Woman’s hands, the German soldiers appear to rouse as though from a daydream and look out in wonder at the night sky, the movie reduces the human phenomenon of mass slaughter to, like, a switch evil wizards can flip in our brains to make us Bad. It absolves all parties of responsibility. This kind of trite moral compromise might actually fly in a movie with a faster pace, or more engrossing visuals, but Wonder Woman never looks like anything but the dull, smeary post-green screen mess it is. I also cannot express how badly David Thewlis is suited to flying around in Power Rangers armor and delivering dialogue about destroying the world. It’s like casting Gilbert Gottfried as Han Solo and expecting him to sell it, you know?

Christ, what a dud.