On The 100th
Anniversary Of The World War I Armistice-Gal Gadot’s “Wonder Woman” (2017)- A
Film Review
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DVD Review
By Laura Perkins
[If the name Laura
Perkins seems familiar to the readers of this space that is right since she has
been the subject of several pieces by Sam Lowell, her long-time companion, who
before his retirement was the Senior Film Critic when the blog gave its personnel
job title under the previous regime. Sam has always called Laura his muse and
now the tables are turned as Laura has decided with this first review to take a
stab at writing pieces on her own. She has told me that she did not feel any
particular encouragement from the previous management to act as anything but Sam’s
muse in this space but the combination of the issue of war and a potentially
feminist icon motivated her when I asked her to take on the assignment. Greg
Green]
Wonder Woman, starring
Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, from the DC comic characters stable, 2017
An essentially blanket
condemnation of humankind’s follies, its folly that war can resolve human
disputes, is a tough dollar to break through as the film under review, Wonder Woman, has made amply clear.
Apparently Ken Burns when talking about his ten part, eighteen hour overview of
the Vietnam War which was a central defining point of Sam and my youth and
thereafter when we tried to keep the lamplight burning on the issues of war and
peace is not alone in his view that “war is in our DNA.” When the whole thing
gets boiled down, both by the dialogue and the action in the film, that is what
stands out to these eyes about the film-makers motivations. Of course since we
are also dealing with a female character, Wonder Woman aka Diana Prince, played
by Gal Gadot, even if a comic super-hero there are feminist issues raised as
well. I want to address them but I have noticed that the folly of war has
gotten lost, as it has lately in at least American society in the almost
non-existent peace movement lost among the swelter of other social concerns
even by progressives and leftists. Believe me Sam and I know of whence we speak
on that one since more than once we have been among very few kindred out in the
street protesting the current craze for war with North Korea or Iran, or both
by the madmen in the White House, Pentagon and the Congress.
As Sam always likes to
say, which I can reveal now that he got from me who got it from my Irish
grandfather, here’s the “skinny” on this one. I will admit I have played a
little tongue in cheek on which seems right or a comic book-etched super-hero.
Apparently Zeus, yes the Greek god, created humankind out of an act of hubris,
who thereafter proved to be troublesome and not into perfection after the Fall,
you know, the exit from the Garden of Eden, that he had created to give them
something to do. His son, mother unknown, or at least unknown to me, Ares, who
will armor up as the God of war in the pantheon, has the bright idea that the
way to bring back the purified Garden now lost due to human culpability, is to
kill off all the citizenry (an idea shared by the various generals in WWI given
the casualty numbers). In short to make the good green Earth a wasteland fit
only for him apparently. Zeus wastes but does not kill Ares in a titanic sky
battle so he will live to wreak havoc another day.
Enter Diana, aka Diana
Prince, aka Wonder Woman, or rather her mother who created her out of clay
although the real deal is that she, the Queen mother, coupled with Zeus on the
quiet. When all hell broke loose in the heavens among the menfolk she led her
Amazon warriors, and no men, to a secluded spot and set up a female commune,
nunnery, convent, military academy waiting for the wounded but not defeated
Ares to make his inevitable charge. Diana will be the vessel who will champion
the Amazons, champion the humankind cause once she breaks out of that female
retreat and heads out into the messy real world.
Enter the real world out
of nowhere in the person of her future star-crossed lover Captain Steve, played
by Chris Pines, who happens to be an American on loan to the British who are
using him as a spy. A spy trying to
figure out what the nasty brutal Germans, the Huns, are up to in the days
leading up to the Armistice maybe trying for one last bit glory and victory.
The German strategy. Develop serious gas to exterminate everybody on the other
side, along with those who get in the way. Steve finds the secret formula book
laying around the secret lab of the well-known notorious Doctor Poison who is
cozy with General Death (Ludendorff but let’s call him by his generic name, an
evil guy no question who has a serious junkie drug problem from what Sam said
when I asked about whatever Doctor Poison provide medication was giving him the
energy to be a bad ass).
After saving Captain
Steve Diana (you already know aka Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman so let’s stick
with her given name) and hears his story about the mass murder, injustice and
civilian collateral damage going out in the real world beyond the retreat she
senses this is the work of that damn Ares her mother keeps alluding to but wouldn’t
confide in her about. Off they go to London so Steve can give the book to the
proper authorities and await further instructions. For a foreigner, an isolated
island young woman, she acclimates to society pretty well. Takes everything in
stride, including sex and other such things that if she was not a super-hero
she would be clueless about. She keeps clamoring to go to the front like any action
junkie super-hero and so Steve and some comrades who Steve picks up along the
way escort her there. Once there she cannot believe what humans will do to each
other for whatever reason those in charge give.
Everything Diana was
bred and trained for back in the barracks at home comes to the fore now and
Steve and the other guys are just ornaments, back-up for whatever caper she is
into. This is strictly her show from here on in. Along the way she solves the trench
warfare stalemate that has taken many lives and driven many generals crazy by a
frontal attack on the German trenches to get to that poison gas lab and a
confrontation with General Death who she thinks is Ares in earthly disguise. Along
the way the obvious attraction between her and Captain Steve plays out and they
go as guys like Sam like to say “under the silky sheets” but I will just say
have sex (off-stage of course). Her intelligence proved to be wrong after a
mini-battle with General Death when she finds that the people are still going
about the business of war full throttle.
These humans certainly
have messy and contrary motives. As it turns out Ares is alive and well in the
area in the person of a British War Council member who is conning the world
into believing that he is leading efforts to bring an armistice to fruition.
(That armistice will come in the real world on November 11, 1918 which is now
commemorated in the United States as Veterans Day which Sam and his crowd is
trying to get changed back to the original intention he wishes me to tell you).
Diana, as you know daughter of Zeus in “real” life and hence a goddess, goes
hand to hand with her brother Ares who now is dressed up in funny costume and
she vanquishes him forthwith. Unfortunately for the lovely couple Steve
committed suicide when he took a plane loaded with poison gas up and exploded
it saving his little segment of humankind. Probably better that he got killed early
on since Diana was still around 100 years later and he would have been long
gone by then. Yeah, she was still around trying to figure what makes these
humans tick and why does she have to endlessly go out and save their butts.
It seems rather fitting,
to me at least who has always been on my own and with Sam interested in history
(we actually met at a forum on the influence of the Russian Revolution of 1917,
the October one, on world politics in the 20th century), that the
backdrop to the storyline in this film is the fruitless, insane blood-letting
of World War II. Yes, the war to end all wars, a faulting premise for going to
war from the start, which this year will be commemorating the 100th
anniversary of the armistice that stopped the slaughter. For a while but as we
are painfully aware did not resolve anything in the great scheme of things.
Ironic as well, and probably every general’s wet dream was to have a warrior
woman who could break the awful trench war stalemate by the force of her
singular personality. The irony being, as is always a subtext in these comic
philosophical underpinning, that the peacemaker will untold wreak havoc on her
chosen bad guys (who not so strangely from an American view, comic strip or
otherwise, happen to be the very same enemies of the British and the Americans
with the “bloody Huns represented by a renegade general as the bad guys) with
as many kills under her belt as any machine gun or bombshell. The old adage of
blessed are the peacemakers takes a holiday in this film except as the two main
characters go back and forth about the foibles of humankind.
To finish up in the year
2018 after all of the stuff about male sexual harassment and sexual crimes
against well-known women, and as it turned out by not so well known women by
powerful public men in Hollywood, Washington, the media, academia and wherever
else some men given an unequal power relationship use that for perverse
purposes I have to deal with the implications of a film showing a super-woman
with plenty of regular woman traits (empathy, sense of justice, compassion,
sorrow) and some useful warrior traits that some of the #metoo women could have
used to advantage. As mentioned above there is an odd confluence here between
Diana’s basic “human” empathetic instincts and her means of playing that out as
an aggressive warrior not unlike every warrior who has come down the path
worried more about kill ratios than trying to figure another way to deal with
the problem. Sometimes that is the only way but not always and you don’t have to
be a pacifist to say that. You also don’t have to be a feminist, although it
helps, to wonder out loud about what image being projected on the screen those
very impressionable girls and young women with the tubs of popcorn and cup of
soda in hand and cellphone at the ready are seeing about the way women have to
navigate in the world.
I won’t bother to
address the “dress,” the scanty dress issue which seems to have been a bugaboo
for some feminists, some women in general since the real point is about the
character was projected and how and not about her attire, well-bundled proper
lady in London and scanty warrior princess on the killing fields.
[I would like to
acknowledge, at least a little, Sam Lowell’s help on this first film review and
some of the touchstone points may reflect the fact that we have been companions
for a fair amount of time now and I have been reading his reviews for years.
After this maiden voyage I will be better able to reflect my own “voice” a bit
better. Sam thinks so too. Laura Perkins]
