KING OF /tv/ ON WONDER WOMAN

File: 1489031769088.jpg (19KB, 300x279px) Image search: [Google]

19KB, 300x279px

>Gal Gadot is a tomboy superheroine designed for our PC times.

>Is Diana of Themyscira, the super Amazon heroine played by Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman, a character or an icon? The Wonder Woman movie, part of the Zack Snyder DC Comics universe magnificently dramatized in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman, never gives us her essence. Director Patty Jenkins examines her subject less deeply than Snyder has done. Could Jenkins, director of Monster (2004), about psychotic serial killer Aileen Wuornos — one of the most repugnant and perversely “feminist” movies ever — fashion a viable superhero? Instead, Jenkins’s Wonder Woman veers between myth, what we learn from myth, and what is popularly and simplistically demanded of myth these days.

>One cannot ignore the fact that Wonder Woman was made under cultural pressure. Jenkins is not an action director; clearly, she was hired only as a politically correct token. The best action sequence follows a bullet hurtling to its fatalistic destiny, recalling Snyder’s breath-baiting image of a bluebird fleeing the talons of a hawk in Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’hoole. But Jenkins’s Amazon warriors rappelling down cliffs and shooting arrows against German rifles lacks the daring, visual extravagance of Zhang Yimou’s The Great Wall. In all film history, Leni Riefenstahl and Kathryn Bigelow remain the only women to exhibit proficiency at kinetic filmmaking.

>Except for a flashback sequence that depicts the mythic history of the Amazons in a series of slow-motion Renaissance-style paintings (evoking the bas-reliefs in Man of Steel and the hieroglyphics in The Prince of Egypt), too much of Wonder Woman is realistic in a conventional Marvel Comics way, without Snyder’s visual passion. Maybe it takes PC women and whipped men to split that difference, but it’s a real let-down to realize that neither Bruce Wayne nor Clark Kent will appear to spark things up. Or maybe some fans will simply enjoy banality.