WONDER WOMAN

So as longtime readers know, my favorite James Bond film, and one of my favorite movies ever, is On Her Majesty's Secret Service, a 140-minute opus that features an athletic lead whose acting abilities received some criticism, begins with a fight on the beach, features an obviously doomed relationship, and has a story wherein a spy and his band of unconventional allies must stop a plot involving chemical/biological weapons.

Since Wonder Woman is a 140-minute opus that features an athletic lead whose acting abilities received some criticism, begins with a fight on the beach, features an obviously doomed relationship, and has a story wherein a spy and his band of unconventional allies must stop a plot involving chemical/biological weapons, it has some really, really big shoes to fill.

It mostly succeeds, although it did kind of lose its stakes when Diana got buried under a building and walked it off during the final fight. A-.

It's also, before I get to the spoiler section, astonishingly conservative. Consider that Wonder Woman was invented by a BDSM enthusiast who used his swimsuit-clad heroine as a siren song for the matriarchy, and then consider that this film sees Diana leave her liberal feminist (hinted lesbian) paradise to go fight a war against an enemy her mother/queen insists does not actually exist (he does), using enhanced interrogation techniques and a massive sense of gung-ho interventionism along the way.

Oh - and I couldn't place him while I was watching the movie, but Field Marshal Haig, the guy in charge of the British war effort, is Lord Commander Jeor Mormont. Just throwing that out there.

Spoilers below.

Okay, I actually said almost everything I want to say already. The film's biggest flaw is its big reveal: that Ares is not proto-Nazi Samuel Adams but rather peacenik Remus Lupin. His whole goal is to get the two sides to sign an armistice, which is what basically rules him out as Ares and makes the reveal more shocking... but then they have to explain why Ares, the god of war, would want the humans to sign an armistice, and he says he just didn't think they'd keep it. Yeah... okay...

Also, changing the setting to WWI kind of raises the obvious bit of foreshadowing: Diana's going to kill Ares in this film, right? If Ares is the source of all evil, then explain, you know, Hitler. (The answer is, of course, the other reveal, that Ares is not the source of all evil and he's kind of just dicking around with humanity for kicks.)

EDIT: Oh my God I'm f*cking thick. In real life, the shitty armistice that Ares is trying to foist on everyone is exactly what led to World War II. ...wait, does this mean WWII doesn't happen in the Wonderverse?

Anyway, those were my two gripes. That and the comic-book-movie final battle. Other than that it was great.