Post by politicidal on Jun 7, 2017 16:51:34 GMT
We'll see soon enough:
Keep it Simple
Jenkins has gone on record about how she hates the word “cheesy” and wanted to embrace “real sincerity” with comic book heroes. The kind of idealism that comes with a character like Diana is impossible to avoid, and so Wonder Woman just goes right with it and makes it a fundamental facet of the film’s conflict. Diana (Gal Gadot), having grown up in Themyscira in a race of proud Amazonian women, is naïve to how our world works. She’s stoic and believes in good, but she has no idea how to navigate a world where everyone is both good and bad and evil is often without reason or provocation. When Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) brings her to London, she’s frustrated by bureaucracy and new to the bare-faced tragedy of war. Watching dead bodies and injured men be carried back home is a shocking experience for Diana, but it only strengthens her resolve.
This deluge of the cost of war eventually leads to the ‘No Man’s Land’ scene – a sequence that’s become a fan-favorite in which Diana, disheartened by the innocent lives being destroyed during WWI decides to march across No Man’s Land, a stretch of unpassable land between German and Allied forces. Using her gauntlets and her shield with her costume on full display for the first time, she marches across the battlefield, drawing enemy gunfire, allowing Steve and others to move forward. It’s a great piece of action, Diana’s strength on full display as she deflects bullets and holds her ground under intense gunfire. It’s the moment she becomes Wonder Woman and we see what she represents with crystal clarity – she wishes to save us from ourselves and show us a better, more loving and peaceful tomorrow.
This theme reverberates throughout the film as Diana becomes increasingly desperate to kill Ares, learning in the process that sometimes people are just evil, and if her quest is to end war within mankind, she’ll be fighting it forever. So she chooses to be a hero for the human capacity to love and be good, symbolically battling our urge to destroy our fellow man. As Facebook inspirational meme as that sounds, it works, because that’s the Wonder Woman people know and embracing her character as a larger-than-life icon for world-peace is poignant and narratively evergreen. Most importantly, it’s simple and makes it easy for any audience to understand her presence in any given situation.
Simplicity is something that previous DCEU films have struggled with. One of the recurring criticisms of Batman V Superman is how muddled Batman and Superman come out of the movie, neither looking quite like the symbols of justice and hope that they’re supposed to. There’s nothing wrong with exploring darker shades of these characters, but simplicity is key in establishing drama that matters and making sure you, the audience audience, are along for the ride. It makes sure all the individual parts are easy to understand and follow when various plot-lines overlap and does the legwork of explaining the conflict without directly needing to explain the conflict. Moreover, making something straightforward doesn’t mean sacrificing depth or opportunities for real darkness.
TONE IS KEY
As hopeful it is, Wonder Woman is still very much a darker-than-your-average-comic-book-movie story. Set during World War I, the film doesn’t shy away from the realities of the Great War: towns turned into rubble, soldiers who can barely function because of PTSD, immense personal sacrifice for the greater good, it’s all there. The driving force behind the aforementioned ‘No Man’s Land’ scene is Diana hearing a grief-stricken mother and child, and the aftermath of that and the following action set-piece is some village people dancing among their destroyed town, happy to be alive. Wonder Woman exists in the shadow of its setting, but it uses it to create upbeat moments that are all the more meaningful, like Steve teaching Diana to dance while one of their cohorts, Charlie (Ewen Bremner), sings in the background.
The color palette reflects this same balance. The browns, blues and greys of the aesthetic that Zack Snyder set are still present, just with the added benefit of the time spent on Themyscira providing more of the blue sky and green grass some people missed from Batman v Superman. Paradise Island is a shimmering oasis of white, green and gold, and 1910s London is a bustling cityscape of steam and stone. There’s an added vibrancy that makes the whole film more enjoyable to watch and makes the world within it all the easier to become enveloped in. Wonder Woman‘s costume is unabashedly bright and colorful; the red fiery and deep, the blue bold and proud, her gold tiara and gauntlets tying it all together with grandeur. When fighting a sniper, Steve and the squad give Wonder Woman a boost so she can jump up and hit the shooter with her shield. She stands triumphant in the partially destroyed clock tower afterward as the townspeople applaud, her shining costume a glimmer of hope and a sign of possible peace among all the debris and destroyed lives.
A COHESIVE VISION
The real lesson of Wonder Woman, beyond the simplicity and the balancing of tone, is how important a cohesive vision is to a movie. Both Suicide Squad and Batman V Superman were subject to heavy editing in their theatrical releases that really only contributed to their messiness. Famously, Suicide Squad was edited by more than one trailer company, a fact which led many to worry about what was going on over at Warner Bros. HQ.
Wonder Woman isn’t without its editing foibles – there’s obviously seconds cut here and there to trim down the runtime, and some of the action and exposition suffering as a result. A couple of characters all but disappear during the last act too, perhaps a consequence of trying to keep as much of the final showdown and the resulting fallout as intact as possible. But even with these in mind, it never seems like anyone other than Patty Jenkins, editor Martin Walsh, or a filmmaker directly involved with the film’s production had a hand in it. The story has a clean beginning, middle, and end, Diana’s journey is well-defined and the movie doesn’t take on any unnecessary baggage for world-building’s sake.
Wonder Woman is a Wonder Woman film, with a version of the character that’s proud of the history that got her there and a story that’s made to endear her to her audience and demonstrate why she’s lasted for 75 years and, crucially, why she’s still important and relevant. Each of the upcoming solo films should hold the same principles at their core – from the looks of things, Aquaman is already being made in the same vain.
As Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nelson) tells Diana, we don’t deserve her. And all things said we probably didn’t, which is why DC and Warner Bros. should learn everything they can from her while they have the chance.
screenrant.com/aquaman-dceu-movie-wonder-woman/2/