# Wonder Woman - Seen it (Open Spoilers) **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 2, 2017, 6:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918 "2017-06-02T06:26:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 15
**Author:** ![Acsenray](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/acsenray/32/4519_2.png) [@Acsenray](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Acsenray)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 4:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/281 "2017-07-03T16:38:24Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > When Robin Wright’s character, Antiope, is killed on the beach fighting Germans, Diana runs over to her body, clearly more upset than the rest of the Amazons, because Antiope was her aunt. Hippolyta runs over, clearly more upset than the rest of the Amazons, because Antiope was her sister. And a third woman runs over, clearly more upset than the rest of the Amazons, because Antiope was her… really good friend? It’s not even that subtle. When Diana tells Steve about her study of human pleasure it’s clear in the way she’s speaking that the Amazons consider sexual pleasure an important part of life. The Amazons are clearly sexing alone and in combination. ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 7:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/282 "2017-07-03T19:57:41Z")
Late to the party, but finally saw it. Yeah, it was pretty good. Not amazing, not even excellent. Just nice and good and worth seeing. A total B- for me, nothing to be ashamed of. OK, now let me be ignorant and ask an honest question. After the end, I asked my wife this and she kind of agreed, though she had not thought of it herself. While this is nowhere near the first “female superhero” movie, it is getting a lot of attention as the first big one since the movies took off again, and the first of the Marvel and DC movement that began back with Iron Man. Is it weird that in the first recent big female superhero movie, she had a leading star male(Chris Pine) playing such a large role right along side her? Does this strike anyone that the studio was still nervous about a female lead, so they cast a big-name male actor along side her? I’m not saying my thought is right, just that it occurred to me. Anyone else? ---
**Author:** ![Shodan](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/9f8e36/32.png) [@Shodan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shodan)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/283 "2017-07-03T20:38:19Z")
I didn’t notice that Pine had a lot more screen time or plot attention than other sidekicks. I would have expected that to be the case, if the studio were hedging its bets. I doubt they expected it to be the blockbuster it was, but it seems to be getting a lot of attention for having a strong female lead. I don’t recall _Supergirl_ or _Catwoman_ or _Elektra_ well enough to tell if they had any comparable males co-leads. Is Pine that big a draw? Regards, Shodan ---
**Author:** ![Albert\_Rose](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9de053/32.png) [@Albert\_Rose](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Albert_Rose)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/284 "2017-07-03T21:04:36Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > …An island full of beautiful, half-naked women, with no men in sight. And WW mentions reading the twelve volumes of whatever-it-was, that concludes that men are not necessary for sexual pleasure. I realize it has to be PG-13 for a mass audience, but still, perhaps just a little… [In panel 7](http://ic.pics.livejournal.com/mosellegreen/628917/466871/466871_original.png), WW responds. “We don’t call it Paradise Island for nothing.” ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/285 "2017-07-03T21:16:59Z")
> [@Jophiel](#): > > Somewhere in the run-up to WW releasing, someone from the film or DC made the point that, if Themyscira is paradise and most people’s concept of earthly paradise includes physical intimacy, then it stands to follow that the women of Themyscira engage in physical intimacy with one another. QED and all that. That was Greg Rucka, who’s been absolutely killing it as the writer on Wonder Woman. He’s responsible for finally making it canon that Diana is bisexual. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 9:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/286 "2017-07-03T21:41:02Z")
Just saw it last night. Gal Gadot was perfect in the role. Supermodel good looking, but tough and strong. Totally believable. Chris Pine as the love interest was fine. Agreed about not making him a sexist jerk that learns a lesson. If it takes a literally demigoddess before he’ll consider a woman his equal, that’s gonna be some industrial strength sexism. The movie seemed short to me. It honestly seemed they were rushing through the beats. Maybe I’m used to binge-watching TV shows that take 22 hours to get to the climax. My only complaint about the charge across No Man’s Land is that honestly, the Germans should have slaughtered everyone that followed Diana out of the trench. And the reason you can’t just hold up a shield and deflect machine gun fire is that the trenches were set up with machine guns that had intersecting fields of fire. Maybe the machine gun nest in front of you can’t hit you, but the machine gun nests on the right and left can. And there was no barbed wire. I thought the lesson of that scene should have been “you can’t charge machine guns, no matter how tough you are”, and Diana learning that warfare has changed a bit since Ancient Greece. Sure, figure out a way to get over there, beat the crap out of the Jerries and save the village. But charging over the top shouldn’t have worked. The battle when they got inside the village was great. The other complaint was the battle against Ares. I’m kind of tired of characters blasting CGI at each other. When she was fighting Germans with rifles you felt the stakes. With CGI vs CGI there’s no stakes. Of course they had to have Ares chain her up for a bit, because it’s Wonder Woman. They should have figured out another way for her to defeat Ares. Like, I don’t know, the Power of Friendship? If Ares is all about how war is so great, then you can’t defeat him by punching him harder, you defeat him by not punching him. Or lean a lot harder into “I don’t make the hu-mons fight, they do that on their own”. ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/287 "2017-07-03T21:57:02Z")
I rethought my position on this movie over the weekend. I think they chose the wrong villain. They should have chosen Eris, the Goddess of Strife. After all, she caused the Trojan War, and Ares took her MO. They could even have gone all Gotterdamerung and built the fall of the gods into the Trojan War. ---
**Author:** ![Jophiel](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jophiel/32/66_2.png) [@Jophiel](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jophiel)\ **Post date:** [July 3, 2017, 9:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/288 "2017-07-03T21:57:40Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > That was Greg Rucka, who’s been absolutely killing it as the writer on Wonder Woman. He’s responsible for finally making it canon that Diana is bisexual. Thanks. > [@Lemur866](#): > > The movie seemed short to me. It honestly seemed they were rushing through the beats. Maybe I’m used to binge-watching TV shows that take 22 hours to get to the climax. The complaint lengths I’ve seen were that it’s a touch long. Although that usually comes with a criticism of the lengthy ending fight. I think that if five or seven minutes were taken from the Ares fight and moved to the “Diana learns about the world” side, no one would complain. ---
**Author:** ![Malthus](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/85f322/32.png) [@Malthus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Malthus)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2017, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/289 "2017-07-04T19:00:59Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > It was pretty strongly implied that she and Steve did the deed. OK, maybe that was experimentation on her part, and she would settle back into celibacy or being what would appear to be normal for her society, and be a lesbian. That would make for an interesting movie, but more like Game of Thrones and, as mentioned, probably prevent the mass appeal of a PG-13 rating. Hey, if a Disney cartoon for kids can show lesbians kissing, why not an action movie? [An episode of the Disney TV cartoon _Star vs. The Forces of Evil_ had lesbian and gay couples kissing in it - admittedly, in a blink-and-you-miss-it moment, but still!] ---
**Author:** ![Quartz](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/quartz/32/267_2.png) [@Quartz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quartz)\ **Post date:** [July 4, 2017, 7:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/290 "2017-07-04T19:45:51Z")
What happened to her shield anyway? ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 6:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/291 "2017-07-06T06:40:28Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > why would these bad ass Amazon warriors leave a defensible position on the cliffs and charge the soldiers on the beach? Because Diana, the very reason for their existence, was down there _already_? > [@Shodan](#): > > As a huge Harry Potter geek, it took me several minutes to adjust to the idea of Professor Lupin as a bad guy. Never seen _Dragonheart_? I had trouble adjusting to him as _good_. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 6:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/292 "2017-07-06T06:56:25Z")
> [@Quartz](#): > > What happened to her shield anyway? She has a totally different one in BvS, so I assume it’s not really as much of an artefact as, say, the rope. ---
**Author:** ![tim314](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tim314/32/3468_2.png) [@tim314](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/tim314)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 1:41pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/293 "2017-07-06T13:41:24Z")
> [@Broomstick](#): > > The name of the island is “Themyscira”, not “Paradise”. The only one calling it “Paradise Island” is Steve Trevor, probably because “Themyscira” doesn’t roll off an English-speaker’s tongue that easily. It was “Paradise Island” in the original Wonder Woman comics, and only later became Themyscira. I thought having Steve call it “Paradise Island” (somewhat sarcastically, I think) was a nice nod to that. ---
**Author:** ![Broomstick](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/broomstick/32/246_2.png) [@Broomstick](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Broomstick)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/294 "2017-07-06T14:33:44Z")
I was speaking in the context of the movie, but yes, in the comics it was Paradise Island first. ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [July 6, 2017, 5:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/295 "2017-07-06T17:30:40Z")
> [@Shodan](#): > > I’ve never gotten around to reading _Seduction of the Innocent_ - perhaps I should. n Dont. It’s half made up shit and the rest is 90% bullshit. > **[Seduction of the Innocent](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduction_of_the_Innocent)** > > Seduction of the Innocent is a book by German-born American psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, published in 1954, that warned that comic books were a negative form of popular literature and a serious cause of juvenile delinquency. The book was taken seriously at the time in the United States, and was a minor bestseller that created alarm in American parents and galvanized them to campaign for censorship. At the same time, a U.S. Congressional inquiry was launched into the comic book industry. Subseque... ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 15, 2017, 3:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/296 "2017-07-15T03:14:55Z")
Finally saw it. It was not without flaws, but it also did a lot of things right. First, the bad. My biggest complaint is the dea ex machina nature of the fight at the end. I like my superheroes to have well-defined powers, with well-defined limits. Most of the movie was pretty good about this, with Diana gradually discovering what she could do before she needed it in a climactic moment, but then suddenly she’s flying and telekinesing and holding lightning and so on. Ares talking about how he just tells them how to make the weapons, but doesn’t tell them to use them, falls kind of flat with a WWI setting. Because just a few decades later, it turns out that we do just fine at inventing our own superweapons, without any divine assistance. I, also, wondered how she got the dress from the German socialite. I can’t buy Wonder Woman using violence against a harmless civilian woman, but I also can’t buy her giving up her dress without a fight. I suspect that this is a scene that got cut because they just couldn’t find a way to make it work. And the chemistry bothered me, too. I can buy that Frau Doktor Poison has come up with some super-poison-gas that eats through gas masks; that’s the sort of thing that comes with the genre. But it works better if you don’t try to explain it, and that’s true even if your fake chemistry does make sense. Here, though, it didn’t. It doesn’t make sense, chemically speaking, to replace sulfur with hydrogen. It doesn’t make sense that the British suits would immediately recognize that doing so would make gas masks worthless. It doesn’t make sense that, just because it contains hydrogen, it would automatically be flammable (it was already established that it was, so that works, but Chief Smuggler shouldn’t have known that). She’s read a twelve-volume treatise on sexuality, and she’s never heard of the concept of marriage? You’d think that somewhere in twelve volumes, there’d be at least a mention. And this one is really nitpicking, but in the training battle at the beginning, with eight-year-old Diana watching, we see one Amazon warrior pull off a neat move where she leaps into the air, somersaults, and throws her sword to another Amazon. Except that the warrior throwing the sword was on the Gray Team, and the one catching it was on the Yellow Team. And now, the good. I knew going in that Gal Gadot would be good, because that’s the first thing everyone is talking about, but I was pleasantly surprised by Chris Pine. All I’d seen him as before was Kirk, and assumed that that was just him I was seeing, but he wasn’t at all assholish here. Trevor was well-characterized, too. No, he wasn’t particularly flawed. But he did have to learn, gradually over the course of the movie, that Diana really doesn’t need protecting, and she does know what she’s doing, and he should just stand back and let her do her thing. I also appreciated the lack of false modesty: Yes, he is above average, and he admits it. The secretary was another great character, who I’d like to have seen more of. She’s not super-powered, she’s probably not even super-skilled, but she tries as hard as she can to do as much as she can. Like, in the alleyway: She knows she has no business being in an action scene, and she has no idea how to use the sword she’s been entrusted with, but she still tries. Gal Gadot in the evening gown was beautiful. In the armor, she was sexy. But in the Mary Poppins outfit? Oh. My. Goddess. “Isn’t the idea supposed to be to _not_ draw attention to her?” The characterization of the two human villains worked, even if it was a bit simplistic. The scene where they gas the other generals, with Herr General Nazi throwing in one gas mask, was genius. And finally, the surprises. It didn’t exactly twig to me that Diana’s title was the Godslayer, but it was pretty clear anyway that that was her purpose, so that wasn’t a big deal. In my previous entry into this thread, I saw a post something about “I figured out who Ares was before the reveal”, and during the movie, I kept thinking “So? Big deal. It’s not like they were trying to make a secret of it.”. Perhaps because of that, I missed the foreshadowing on Sir Patrick. Someone earlier in the thread mentioned something about “When you’re looking for the God of War in a war, look on the winning side”. But historically, not so much. In the myths, Ares has a long tradition of being on the losing side of wars, because he keeps getting his butt kicked by a goddess. Speaking of which, I was a little surprised that there was no mention made of Athena. They didn’t try to hide that Diana-as-golem was just a cover story, but I was expecting the Big Reveal to be that she was actually Ares’ daughter, not Zeus’. Maybe they thought that the villain saying “No, I am your father” would be cliched? ---
**Author:** ![TYphoonSignal8](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/e99b99/32.png) [@TYphoonSignal8](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/TYphoonSignal8)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2017, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/297 "2017-07-21T02:30:53Z")
> [@Mahaloth](#): > > Late to the party, but finally saw it. > > Yeah, it was pretty good. Not amazing, not even excellent. Just nice and good and worth seeing. A total B- for me, nothing to be ashamed of. > > OK, now let me be ignorant and ask an honest question. After the end, I asked my wife this and she kind of agreed, though she had not thought of it herself. > > While this is nowhere near the first “female superhero” movie, it is getting a lot of attention as the first big one since the movies took off again, and the first of the Marvel and DC movement that began back with Iron Man. > > Is it weird that in the first recent big female superhero movie, she had a leading star male(Chris Pine) playing such a large role right along side her? Does this strike anyone that the studio was still nervous about a female lead, so they cast a big-name male actor along side her? > > I’m not saying my thought is right, just that it occurred to me. Anyone else? I think you’re right. There was an interesting article in \*The New Yorker \*about ten or so years ago - maybe longer? - where the author of the article noticed that Will Smith was being paired up with white talent like Tommy Lee Jones… just in case a white audience wouldn’t react well to a black lead. Sounds really odd, now. (I remember the article well, because it had a cartoon featuring Clark Gable chuckling with Will Smith: Smith had given Gable a gag cigar which had exploded. The comparison within the article was between Gable and Smith, and both the cartoon and the article noted that, at that stage, Smith’s humour was carrying him forward in his career. Google cannot find it - or rather, me using Google cannot find it.) So, yes. Twinning the pretty much unknown, female actor Gal Gadot with Pine seems right out of that playbook. In other Wonder Woman movie news, I see the movie is now banned in Tunisia, because Gadot is Israeli and was an Israeli soldier back in the day. I gathered from the news article I briefly scanned on the subject that this wasn’t the first Middle Eastern country which has done this. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2017, 12:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/298 "2017-07-21T12:43:53Z")
It’s my understanding that all Israelis have been soldiers back in the day. They have a few years of mandatory military service for everyone. Come to think of it, that might have been a factor in casting Gadot. I can see how someone with genuine military experience might have an edge in playing Wonder Woman, and there are a lot fewer women with that experience than men. ---
**Author:** ![SciFiSam](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/47e85d/32.png) [@SciFiSam](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SciFiSam)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2017, 5:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/299 "2017-07-21T17:53:52Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > It’s my understanding that all Israelis have been soldiers back in the day. They have a few years of mandatory military service for everyone. > > Come to think of it, that might have been a factor in casting Gadot. I can see how someone with genuine military experience might have an edge in playing Wonder Woman, and there are a lot fewer women with that experience than men. Yes. Mandatory service. She taught calisthenics to the troops, though presumably she went through normal training too. Her being in the Israeli military just means she’s Israeli. Lots of countries still do this - my friend’s son is due for a spell in the Finnish military, for example - though it’s less common for it to applied to women too. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [July 21, 2017, 6:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918/300 "2017-07-21T18:11:15Z")
> [@SciFiSam](#): > > Yes. Mandatory service. She taught calisthenics to the troops, though presumably she went through normal training too. Combat Fitness Trainers do three weeks of basic training followed by a 14 week course at Wingate Base. She then served as a fitness trainer at the Command and Staff College, which makes sense - she had already been a beauty queen when she enlisted, and it was obvious that one of the more prestigious units would call dibs. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918.md?page=14) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/wonder-woman-seen-it-open-spoilers/787918.md?page=16)