Introduction: WONDER WOMAN is a pretty terrible movie. Once again it’s made by hack writers who have realised that audiences appreciate some effort being put into their favourite superhero blockbuster cash grabs. I am grateful for their efforts but although some things are better, some things are alot worse. This is the first standalone DC movie since Man of Steel and this time the story is the plot of Captain America: The First Avenger with the only difference and selling point being that it has crossed a line that no superhero movie has ever crossed before. Our lead hero is a GIRL. LADIES AND GENTLEMEN WE’VE ENTERED UNCHARTED TERRITORY! REPEAT, WE HAVE GONE WHERE NO SUPERHERO MOVIE HAS GONE BEFORE!!!!

Girl Power: After the confusing Batman vs Superman and the incompetent Suicide Squad DC wasn’t looking too good. Since closing up shop wasn’t really an option, because they have promised 70 more sequels in the next 3 years, Wonder Woman was the life support they needed since it did very well at the box office, it got a lot of critical praise and it got the certified Rotten Tomato thing. People clearly like this one which I can understand, unlike with the last 2 movies. But with Wonder Woman it was getting the same over-hype treatment that Black Panther is getting and it from these early reviews I have seen it looks like Aquaman might suffer it too. People were saying this movie has saved the DCEU, it’s not your typical superhero movie, it does women justice and all of that. Too bad this over-hyping praise pretty much died out when Justice League came out. (Can’t wait for that.) Maybe then this movie would have been offered Best Picture.

Well enough about what other people think, I’m going to say what I think and express how I feel about this movie. Kind of like with the other ones I’ll be mainly focusing on the story, especially with this one because…..it’s really bad.

Everything on Gymnastic Champion Chick Island is Bad: So Once Upon a Time gods made the heavens, the grass, the fish and all of that. Then one day Zeus (the all powerful god) made man. After that he had a fight with his son Ares and everyone died except Ares. Before Zeus died he made an island full of warrior chicks and they all went to the same acrobatic badass arrow shooting school as Legolas from Lord of the Rings. This is where Queen Warrior lady creates our hero out of clay because there is no men around for death by snu snu.

So we meet little baby Diana. Isn’t she so cute that she can’t even pull off Gal Gadot’s accent. These early scenes feature the most cliched opening fantasy world building I have ever seen. Our main character is incredibly special for some reason, her mother doesn’t want her do anything, she has to be trained in secret, she has a secret power that she can’t find out about and that first paragraph I wrote is all from the exposition dump scene. Cut to whenever the kid is replaced with Gal Gadot and nothing has really changed. Around this time Chris Pine joins the movie when his plane crashes through the bubble shield. The Germans enter too and we get some good looking slow-mo shots of Amazonian women leaping 20 feet in the air performing Legolas like stunts. Robin Wright’s character dies, it’s cliched and Gal Gadot’s acting ruins the scene along with a few more of these deaths later on. That’s pretty much what most of the action consists of – good looking slow-mo shots, half naked warrior women jumping 200 ft in the air and it’s all laughably bad. Speaking of things looking good…

Wonder Woman: The Picture Show Movie: Just to quickly go off the story let’s talk about the presentation. If you look carefully Warner Bros clearly picked up on the complaint with SS’s bland colour pallet because this movie is filled with colour. Even with an incredibly boring cliched story at least you’ve got something nice to look at. Sometimes this kind of backfires on them whenever it’s like an action scene and it is very obviously filmed in some studio. It does work effectively in some places like the scenes in 1910’s London.

I see this movie as a good picture show it’s mainly because of how stunning Gal Gadot looks as Diana aka Wonder Woman. She looks very good but she can’t really act. If you go back to my earlier DC reviews I mentioned that some of these actors more just look the part than can act the part. When I thought of that, Gal Gadot was one of the first people that came to mind. Half of the scenes she is in look like she is posing for a magazine cover or walking on a catwalk. Sometimes the green screen looks so bad that I feel like I’m watching an advert tie in to this movie. She feels like more of a good Wonder Woman cosplayed than an actual actress and some of her scenes I really can’t take seriously.

Let’s jump to some of the good bits:  The movie starts to get better when they are away from clichéd island and it’s just Diana and Steve Rogers (or Trevor, same thing) actually having some pretty good chemistry together and their romance is probably the best part of this movie. Since Diana is from a island full of women she has some pretty cute “fish out of water” moments when they’re in London. I only say cute because it’s as funny as the scenes from the first Thor movie and this movie is pretty much ripping off Thor. I mentioned the colour and that’s pretty much it with pros because this movie is really stupidly bad!

Goddess of War v WWI Nazis: Wonder Woman climbs up this tower (she suddenly forgot about the super jump power) to retrieve a god killing thing so she can kill Ares and end World War I. She has this viewpoint for the whole movie but no one thought of challenging this black and white opinion. (Not even Steve Rogers.) We’re introduced to the main Nazi World War I villains: General Red Skull rip-off and the Dr Zola chick rip-off. They want to gas people and they’re so cartoony that they’re laughable. (Moans!) I’m so over talking about one dimensional villains so let’s get back to Diana. Steve and Diana have this argument for the whole movie that Ares is corrupting the Germans and that killing Red Skull would end the war. But later on the movie when she kills Red Skull it doesn’t end the war because as Steve explains that’s not how humans work because people are more complex than that, which is very true and I’m glad Diana learned this lesson and I’m so grateful that there is no overpowered supervillain fight. OH FOR GODSAKES!!

But then right after that we get the worst plot twist I have ever seen in one of these movies. It turns out that this random British guy who was only in two scenes for the whole movie, he’s Ares. Ares is real and all he’s been doing is corrupting people to do bad stuff because that’s not their fault it’s just one evil British guy telling them to do the bad stuff, which I cannot believe is what they’re going with!! This is so freakin’ stupid it completely ruins this movie’s last act with another god damn explosion fight. I absolutely hated this ending, it completely cripples what little love I had for this movie. The Ares plot twist feels like it was thrown in there for no reason and the message is now like all you need is love because that’s the only power you will ever need.

Also Chris Pine dies and that’s also ruined too because Gal Gadot loves to ruin every single emotional scene in this piece of garbage movie with her stupid ‘Nos’. Turns out Wonder Woman was right all along because killing Ares ended the war but I’m guessing not for long because World War II still exists and 9/11 and war is still everywhere so maybe in Wonder Woman 2 she’ll be just siting around looking at photos while 9/11 happens and she will have to fight Osama bin Laden because Ares has corrupted him, it’s not his fault he’s a dangerous terrorist, it was all Ares doing.

Tones are non-existent in the DC Universe: So our movie is about a young super powered woman (I presume she’s a young woman, immortal characters always have confusing ages) wanting to fight for truth, justice and the American way in this gritty war drama and this stupid superhero movie. It can’t really decide what it wants to be. How I see it is it’s like with SS where I think I can see Patty Jenkins’s original vision and also Warner Bros preferred version. This hasn’t been confirmed or it may not be even true but that’s how I felt.

So I think Patty Jenkins was going for like a war epic with this strange super powered person as she proves to be an aspiring hero for the British soldiers and it will end with taking out an evil German’s plan to bomb London.

Warner Bros wanted the dumb prophecy stuff and the idiotic twist villain because I think Ares was originally supposed to be like a metaphor. He’s inside all of us or something instead of being very literal. So pretty much all the stupider moments I would say were Warner Bros idea and all the artsy slow-mo shots  and colorful scenery were probably Zack Snyder’s idea.

The tonal issues aren’t as bad as SS’s but it still feels somewhat inconsistent. I think the other main problem would be that it’s trying to be like Marvel again. In this case, more like Captain America: The First Avenger with the super strong proud American hero, the Nazi Germans in World War I, Steve being separated from his love involving a plane, unnecessary side characters, explosions and the really boring origin story. But I think Cap 1 is the much better movie and this is an inferior copy.

Conclusion: Here we are at the end of another review and do I think this is the best DCEU movie? Uhhhhhhhhhhhhh… maybe. I think its pretty much tied with Man of Steel, but I think I would watch this again over Man of Steel because I think if I just zoned out then I would probably have a much better time. That’ll do for this one because the real star is coming up very soon. CAN’T Wait!

I’ll see you all then, The Blog Complainer, Signing Out.