#StokerScore: 9/10
Rivalries. Competition. Winners. Losers. For as long as man has existed, these things have been around. Over the millennia, mankind has found opportunity to cultivate the necessary skills to be able to be a part of the game. Naivete encourages us to believe that win/win situations are the best. Where everyone involved walks away with something. Why is this naive? Well, how often do we see win/win scenarios?
Take commerce and business. Coca Cola do not want to see Pepsi have a significant market share, I prefer to believe that they want to destroy their competition wherever possible and therefore provide more dividends to share holders. The same could be said of Apple and Samsung, Ford and General Motors, heck we could even try Nikolai Tesla's rivalry with Thomas Edison.
In sport, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frasier, Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, the world loves to see these rivalries played out.
There is a darker side to rivalry too. Criminals evading capture, con artists and their 'marks', our conditioning in morals and ethics encourages us to decide which is right and which is wrong. Or maybe we follow the likes of philosopher Walter Benjamin who stated that "History is written by the victors" because Ad Victorem Spolias (To the victor, the spoils)
Wonder Woman has rivalry at its core; the continuing struggle of women to rightfully take their place alongside men, without fear from either gender; the arrogant paranoia displayed by certain Greek Gods; the need for one or two generals to win World War One by any means necessary. This is a superhero movie that needs to follow its roots and dispaly the classic rivalry between Good and Evil and, for the first time since the creation of the DC Extended Universe, Warner Brothers/DC have shown that they might be able to compete with Marvel.
Gal Gadot is about as perfect a casting choice as there is ever likely to be. Throwing off a brief cameo in Batman vs Superman, here she shows exactly what she can do and you can't help but feel what her Amazonian Princess is feeling as she confronts a world that shatters her naivete at every opportunity. She is that good.
In support, we have fine performances from Danny Huston, David Thewlis, Lucy Davis and Elena Anaya (who I haven't seen since Van Helsing). But my favourites were Connie Nielsen and Robin Wright, as Diana's Mother and Aunt respectively, for the growing-up/training montages.
Yet the time on Themiscyra, before Diana's journey to battle Ares, is also where the movie lets itself down. It's not the acting, no it's the writing that suggests that a voyage of self-discovery is a much better idea than being told a few facts of life. Facts that could determine her very own life or death and subsequently that of the entire human race. Superman's family were not so much dead as erased so he had to rely on holographic images and a huge library to find out what he was capable of, Batman's dead parents were no help either but he did have the trusty Alfred to help explain. Diana on the other hand could be given every opportunity to prepare but is seemingly, deliberately, not told the truth to protect her from the impending destiny that she tells her mother she is going to face anyway.
Apart from this relatively small gripe I enjoyed the movie. I liked the touches of comedy, the costumes, the fish-out-of-water, and Chris Pines opposite of whatever a damsel in distress is....and yet he wasn't. At no point did this movie make out that men were inferior. You could argue that next to a woman made of clay and imbued with life by Zeus that most people would appear tame by comparison but instead Pine is a constant reminder of teamwork between the sexes.
It is still a dark movie so is in keeping with Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman, but it appears to be a huge improvement on those two movies and provides hope that the Justice League, Aquaman and Flash movies have potential to impress rather than shake your head while looking forward to the next Marvel movie. And with that we must now wait to see who is the supreme heroine when Brie Larson's Captain Marvel reaches the screens in 2019...could it be win/win for Marvel and DC?
Yet the time on Themiscyra, before Diana's journey to battle Ares, is also where the movie lets itself down. It's not the acting, no it's the writing that suggests that a voyage of self-discovery is a much better idea than being told a few facts of life. Facts that could determine her very own life or death and subsequently that of the entire human race. Superman's family were not so much dead as erased so he had to rely on holographic images and a huge library to find out what he was capable of, Batman's dead parents were no help either but he did have the trusty Alfred to help explain. Diana on the other hand could be given every opportunity to prepare but is seemingly, deliberately, not told the truth to protect her from the impending destiny that she tells her mother she is going to face anyway.
Apart from this relatively small gripe I enjoyed the movie. I liked the touches of comedy, the costumes, the fish-out-of-water, and Chris Pines opposite of whatever a damsel in distress is....and yet he wasn't. At no point did this movie make out that men were inferior. You could argue that next to a woman made of clay and imbued with life by Zeus that most people would appear tame by comparison but instead Pine is a constant reminder of teamwork between the sexes.
It is still a dark movie so is in keeping with Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman, but it appears to be a huge improvement on those two movies and provides hope that the Justice League, Aquaman and Flash movies have potential to impress rather than shake your head while looking forward to the next Marvel movie. And with that we must now wait to see who is the supreme heroine when Brie Larson's Captain Marvel reaches the screens in 2019...could it be win/win for Marvel and DC?
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