Whereas I find the frequently used Marvel trick of very very short cuts of any action that is happening, with a close enough shot that everything moves through the frame very quickly, to be more annoying. I believe they do this to not give your brain enough time to process the flaws in the CGI. WW would stay with one action take for more than a few seconds even if it gave your brain enough time to figure out it wasn’t quite real… which on a whole I prefer.
I suppose it’s a matter of taste, but the MCU microcuts of action scenes get very annoying to me.
I noticed that as well. All the fights, you could actually follow what was happening versus the “bunch of quick-takes and close-ups of fighting then one guy is down” which seems pretty common these days.
We saw it last night and enjoyed it for what it was, a comic book movie. Perhaps it’s because I’m a fan of The Great War channel on Youtube which has an episode a week on what happened that week a hundred years ago (plus lots of specials), but I commented after WW’s charge across no man’s land that they’d left out the barbed wire.
One of the things Indy Neidel, the host of TGW, has pointed out is that, while the Germans were undeniably evil during WWII, in WWI, not so much. Yes, there were atrocities but they were committed on both sides and there was a lack of the industrial-scale killing of civilians the latter war had.
Oh, and after the credits finished, I whined loudly as we were leaving, “But where was Stan Lee?” making the other half-dozen of so die-hards guffaw.
No post-movie scene? Kind of glad. My wife was annoyed at making her wait for it and I eventually caved in and we left. If we had waited and there was no post-movie scene, I would really have been in the shit.
Liked it. I read the Brian Azzarello reboot of WW as the daughter of Zeus so I guessed what was coming at the end. But the Telekinetic Goddess schtick really needs a good nerfing. If you can destroy the God of War by crossing your wrists then no need for those sidekicks constituting the Justice League, really.
I haven’t read anyone’s comments but I just left the theater and I fucking loved it so much that I don’t think I need to see another superhero movie ever on my life.
I find myself in essential agreement with all of the points that DSYoungEsq makes, and in addition, the pacing of the film is just terrible. It had a sensible structure–the expository backstory on Themyscira, the intrigue and recruitment in London, and the fighting in Belgium–but it takes more than a full hour to see Diana actually bust out her powers, and she does it running across ‘No Man’s Land’ in what should be a hopeless charge that would get everyone killed. (Were they really just stopped from advancing by one machinegun nest?) And that bears another problem; the movie makes much hay about how aghast Diana is about the brutal maiming of soldiers and the unnecessary deaths of civilians, which is perhaps understandable as the Themyscirans have never seen war in her lifetime, but the film portrays the war in a decidedly sanitized fashion that doesn’t make it seem all that awful. Even in the gassing of the village we don’t see any villagers maimed or dying of the toxin. Of course the movie needs to retain a PG-13 rating, but the indiscriminate horror of war is just not presented.
I don’t understand the near universal acclaim given to this film by reviewers. It’s a serviceable film, and Gal Godot does an excellent job of inhabiting the character, but the film plays like someone’s first draft of a screenplay, and the overuse of Lord of the Rings style facial closeups combined with what seems to be a DCEU style of ending the film in a giant, fiery, impossibly destructive and incomprehensible battle that bystanders nonetheless walk away from just breaks the tone.
Both commendable qualities, though I’d differ with categorizing as “good”; it is serviceable, largely due to the performance of Godot, Connie Nielson, and what I just realized was an unrecognizable Lucy Davis from The Office. It’s a solid C+ effort being celebrated as an A. Granted, the previous DC films are nearly unwatchable muck, but that’s a hell of a grading curve.
I saw someone share a photo on social media, it was Carrie Fisher from The Force Awakens and Robin Wright from Wonder Woman. The caption read “I have lived to see my childhood Princesses become Generals.”
Plan 4a: Order Steve to not kill Ludendorff, to drive a wedge between WW and any human she has respect for, when Ludendorff then commits a straight-up war crime.
Just got home from seeing this. My only initial thought is: did it bother anyone else that the Germans were speaking English to each other, in their own high command? In fact, the Germans spoke English exclusively throughout the movie (with German accents). At least they were consistent, but it still bugged the shit out of me. If they did some sort of language switcheroo vis-a-vis The Hunt For Red October, I missed it.
One thing I did like: like The Dark Knight Rises and “Catwoman,” at no point did anyone ever utter the words “Wonder Woman.” They are obligated to call the movie that, I understand, but they wisely chose to leave those particular words out of any actual dialogue, thus no hilariously cheesy, “I’m Wonder Woman” moment.
You’re supposed to understand that they’re speaking German to each other. You hear German being spoken in the background. This is a common understanding of how you portray foreigners in fiction.
They did it on the the Six Million Dollar Man because it looked less silly than speeding up the film to make it look like Steve Austin running fast.
Dude, they’re magic. The Amazons were resurrected from the souls of women who had fallen in battle. They have superhuman powers. They’re supernatural beings. Diana is literally a demigod.
On the age thing, my theory is that they age slowly until they reach the point at which they are most beautiful and then they stay there.
I don’t think Marvel would have any argument on this front. The similarities were all common war/action movie tropes.
I knew that there would have to be a turncoat. In these kinds of movies, a turncoat is either (1) Your direct boss or some other superior, (2) Someone offering you critical material assistance, like money or supplies, or (3) a member of your own crew.
I suspected that one of the members of the infiltration team would go bad, but I couldn’t figure out which one, because none of them were shady and each one was too good an example of “the … guy.” None of them was just regular guy. Regular guy is usually the turncoat.
The other option was Lupin, and I had him under my eye from I think the second time I saw him on screen. Just the way he was paying attention to things was not right, and by the time Steve was calling Etta on the phone, the way Lupin was looking over from the next room was definitive. He was a bad guy. I didn’t know that he would be Ares, however, but I wasn’t shocked when he turned out to be.
So true. This film has been graded on a massive curve. It’s not bad, but it basically falls flat on its face right when the movie should have been reaching a great finish.
Incidentally, I think the movie would have worked had they completely subverted expectations regarding Ares. I am generally sick of Hollywood, or other half-baked western media, using mythological figures as convenient shorthands for “Evil”. Classical gods, whether Norse, Greek, or Egyptian, were almost always intriguing and contradictory figures with immense storytelling possibilities. (Marvel, of course, immediately saw this with characters like Thor and Loki.) And it’s OK for them to be antagonists! But to make them boring is a massive waste. I would have been much more interested if in fact he wasn’t a villain, though, and instead of a massive superheroic brawl, they remember that Diana’s core characteristic is compassion. Make that the centerpiece of the finale.
There’s different ways to do it, but I would have suggested doing something like this:
(1) Ares shows up as in the movie… but he’s not the villain and actually did want the war to end. Because he’s not just a god of arbitrary conflict, but clashes of warriors. He wants humans to define themselves through conflict, not carry out vicious massacres like cowards. Hell, being filled with warriors, he knew exactly what was going on with Paradise Island and saw no reason to bother them.
(2) Diana starts the fight, trying to fulfill her semi-self-appointed destiny.
(3) She achieves victory by turning away from the battle (which she can’t win, as it just makes Ares stronger - which he points out) and holds off an army so Trevor can get to the plane.
(4) Have Ares nod respectfully and even admire her, because she did indeed define herself in conflict like a true warrior. Have him give some cryotic warning about the next movie (cough, I mean, the next war).
I’m not saying this is a perfect plan, but anything to not be as supremely dull.
20 years ago, I’d have told you it’s a convention for mainstream Hollywood movies, that it’s just the way it is. Think of it as insta-translation: the characters a speaking German but it’s immediately translated through the actors mouths.
In recent years, however, mainstream audiences have become much better acclimated to subtitles… at least in small doses: soldier/administrative speak amongst groups, so long as the important speeches and dialog with the English speaking heroes is all done in English.
So, yeah, I was disappointed as well. It was a familiar convention, but a return to the “bad old days” I’d say. Practically none of the dialog between the Germans was important enough to have to catch every single word. Perhaps the dialog between Ludendorff and Poison would be best kept in English: I’d have solved that by having her be a non-German ally/collaborator and English would be a second language for both of them that they shared in common, thus the most efficient way for them to communicate.
So, again, not an unheard of convention for a mainstream American film but it’s something that been more and more consistently done away with. I was disappointed to see it back in use.
ETA: Acsenray, I was typing while you were posting.
Yes, you’re entirely correct. It’s just that it’s an inelegant solution. The spoken foreign language is better for mood, realism, establishing “otherness”, and it more clearly establishes when a bilingual character is changing language based on who is being spoken to.
Finally got to see this. It’s pretty good, feels like DC finally made a (middle of the road) Marvel movie. The last act was the weakest, unfortunately. Ares just didn’t work for me (especially the shot of him being beaten by Zeus and still having his WW1-era mustache), and the final fight scene felt like the typical unimaginative “hero and villain shoot lasers at each other, villain tries to talk down hero, hero responds by saying she has the power of love/friendship/hope/whatever and then her laser gets more powerful and beats villain” scenario.
I think the assumption is just supposed to be that they’re speaking German. A lot of people really hate subtitles, I’ve found, so I think that’s why they do it (have them speak in English w/ German accents).
