No, they’re Prussian Germans.
I liked that their training was straight up, brutal “defeat your opponent as quickly and definitively as possible”, instead of the usual dancing around and showing off cool moves we usually see in man vs. man sword fights.
One interesting point/question
Considering the size/scale of the entire WW1 battlefront. How effective could Wonder Woman be against the entire German Army?
The movie shows her going across No man’s land but even then she gets bogged down by all the fire coming her way.
Could she take on the entire WW1 German army and win?
What if she had the support of the entire Amazon team behind her? Would that help or would they still be outnumbered?
On a similar point, suppose Superman (One with the power of the original Superman in the comic books - who could only leap and not fly) was also helping her. Could they defeat the entire German army ?
Yes, I know a lot of this depends on how much power the characters are given in the story but I have tried to give a semi-reasonable definition of their powers.
Thanks
She could be pretty effective, actually, thanks to the specific circumstances of WWI.
Most of the war, the two sides were locked into fixed positions that they held for years. The ideal was to achieve a “breakthrough” - a hole in the enemy lines that would allow you to pour your troops through and outflank the enemy. The problem was, once you took the trenches on the other side, it was impossible to hold them - they only worked one way, and the opposing side could move their reserves into position to push you back out.
Conceivably, someone with the powers of Wonder Woman or early Superman could be enough to hold off the counter attack in that specific point until you could fortify your new position and start moving your troops behind the enemy line. Do that repeatedly all down the length of the front, and it might be enough to win you the war.
Of course, it does require that the enemy play to your hero’s strengths. Notice how none of the machine-gunners aimed at her thighs, for example.
Though once she’s in full demigoddess mode like she was at the end would bullets even effect her any more than they do Superman?
Did we see the same movie? Since we saw a lot of jumping around, twisting in the air, cool slashing of swords. The only reason the Amazon’s won is since the troops of the Seebattlion went out of their way to ensure the would lose.
Or that, aside from an initial mortar, no other mortars (that wouldn’t be able to be blocked by her shield while she was simultaneously taking automatic fire) seemed to be aimed her way. Or artillery. Her durability seemed pretty fuzzy. She gets a quick-healing cut in the beginning, but never seems to be cut or bruised after that throughout the movie during all of the rest of the fights.
It seemed like a good movie overall, but the main message seemed to be incomplete and not fully thought through.
[spoiler]Diana says that it is important to believe in something and says that she believes in love after watching Steve die. Then she refuses to kill Dr. Poison, but kills Ares with his own lightning. If by believing in love, she meant she understood Steve’s point that humanity isn’t all good but instead some good and some bad, why would she spare Dr. Poison? Particularly since she knows that Dr. Poison is responsible for creating the gas that wiped out the village she helped liberate? She killed members of the German landing party at the beginning and of course Ludendorf, thinking he was Ares, so she obviously doesn’t have a personal code that forbids killing.
It seems like her realization of what she believes in should have been along the lines of the epiphany in the “Angel” tv show - that in the final analysis, if nothing she does matters, then all that matters is what she does. That even if people have both good and bad in them, she doesn’t think they should suffer because if there is no bigger meaning, then selflessness (and love) are the greatest and most profound things in the world.[/spoiler]
Mortars and artillery have minimum ranges. Through tactical genius, intuition or sheer luck, she faced that machine gun at the perfect distance - too close for indirect fire, too far for grenades.
Mortar range is about minimum 70 m IIRC. Was she that far?
Plus the Germans also had to worry about the rest of the British battalion which started its own attack shortly after, not like the Mortar crew did not have other targets to engage very soon.
Remember that Dr. Poison was just cowering, resigned, in front of Diana while Diana held a tank over her head. Dropping it on Dr. P would have just been cold-blooded murder at that point, different from Diana fighting to liberate a village, stopping an attack on her people or breaking through a cordon to reach Ares. Even during the village fight, Diana doesn’t go out of her way to kill – I noticed that most of her moves are kicks, sweeps, elbow blows and shield bashes. She uses her sword to cut through wood pillars or furniture more than flesh. After the village was gassed and she rides past the guard post, she straight up cuts a couple guys down which seemed deliberate movie-making to me, that she wasn’t pulling punches now. She does kill the Not-Ares General while he’s down but she thought he was Ares and that killing him was her destiny. Different than dropping military hardware on someone cowering before you.
Anyway, while she is willing to use lethal force, she isn’t interested in killing indiscriminately.
A thought while watching the movie: Steve Trevor went undercover in the Ottoman Empire, stole a plane to escape, and crashed on Paradise Island. Given the extremely limited range of aircraft at the time, this would place the island on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean, probably in the Aegean Sea. This is completely appropriate given the Amazons’ Greek iconography. Then Steve and Diana take a sailboat off the island and wind up in London. This would require them to traverse the entire Mediterranean, past the Straits of Gibraltar, around the Iberian peninsula, up the coast of France, through the English Channel and the Strait of Dover, and up the Thames River. Quite a journey on a simple sailboat.
Anyway I loved the movie. Gal Gadot was wonderful. Her chemistry with Chris Pine was wonderful. The obligatory comic book poses were wonderful. DCEU finally hits one out of the park.
I kind of want to see a deleted scene where Steve says to Diana, hey, how about you jump in the water for a bit and hold the boat like a kid with a kickboard floatie?
I’m talking more about the “traditional” 1-on-1 sword fights we see in movies, dragged out for dramatic effect, each participant trading blows and parries until one of them finally makes a mistake and gets run through (or just short of getting killed, if it’s a training/sparring match). The Amazon training looked a lot more like my understanding of actual ancient/medieval melee combat, where each fight was less “honorable duel” and more “end the threat NOW”. Heck, forget swordfighting - the principle is still in use. We hear complaints about “why did the police need to shoot him so many times”; well, it’s exactly the same thing: end the threat NOW.
Another question about the movie
Why use WW1 as the backdrop as opposed to WW2? (which is the era in which wonder woman was originally developed)
Was it mostly that WW2 had been done many times (original WW, Captain America) and there are not as many WW1 movies as a backdrop
Symbolism of Wonder Woman crossing no man’s land. Also WWI represents the end of romantic war and transitioning into the modern era which parallels Diana’s journey from naive to realistic.
My only previous exposure to WW is from the animated stuff and her durability is fuzzy there too. She uses her bracelets and shield to block bullets and energy blasts, she goes out of her way to avoid edged weapons, but when it comes to blunt force she’s basically Superman. She can be knocked through a wall or punched in the face by Darkseid and only be a bit woozy.
It’s also tough to gauge because even explicitly normal humans in comic books are vastly tougher and more resilient than real humans.
I think using World War I as the backdrop was an inspired choice. It’s the centennial of the Great War. In fact, exactly one hundred years ago, the Battle of Messines took place where the British recaptured Messines Ridge. The British were also in the early stages of Operation Hush, the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to capture the coast of Belgium. In about a week, the Germans will conduct the first successful heavy bomber raid on London. A little later, the first American troops will land in France.
The Second World War had some clear Bad Guys and Good Guys. I mean, who doesn’t want to go and fight Nazis? In the First World War, much as the French and the Brits would like to vilify the Germans, there wasn’t a clear line between good and evil. The movie used this to good effect by allowing Diana to think German General Ludendorff was the Big Bad driving the war when in fact Ares had disguised himself as the British spymaster.
The war in the Western Front especially was a giant meat grinder. Troops would hunker down in trenches. Periodically, the generals would send them over the top where they would be cut down by opposing machine guns. Even if an offensive was successful and you took the enemy trenches you’d have gained maybe 100 yards at best. The enemy would come back, probably drive you out of the occupied trenches, and you’d go back to your original trenches to do the whole thing over again. Both side ultimately developed tanks to cross No Man’s Land. In this movie, WW was the tank that allowed the British to break through. WW wouldn’t have made that big a difference in Second World War, which had real tanks and planes and ever more accurate artillery. Also, there’s some great symbolism in getting Wonder Woman to cross No Man’s Land.
We the viewers also know that the War to End All Wars was just a prelude to an even greater war to come. The troops fighting in the trenches then would become the commanders sending even more troops into battle. Ares was ultimately correct. If you wanted a war to demonstrate to the naive Diana the futility of fighting, World War I was the war to do it in.
They choose WW1 so they would not be sued by Marvel.
[QUOTE=Terminus Est]
We the viewers also know that the War to End All Wars was just a prelude to an even greater war to come.
[/QUOTE]
That said, my jaw dropped at the elegance of having that “War To End All Wars” line come from Steve Trevor when being questioned by the Amazons: there was, in effect, exactly one right answer he could’ve given in that situation; and it just so happened to be the slogan for WWI rather than anything that got said of WWII.
I loved Diana when she said “You let that little thing tell you what to do?”
As they approached London on the sailboat, Trevor makes a comment about ‘catching a ride’.
They picked WWI to differentiate themselves from Marvel. Marvel doesn’t have the rights to all superhero movies set in WWII because of Captain America.