Wonder Woman

#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?

Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice

#StokerScore 6/10

Imagine you want to make a movie and you want to make sure it includes all of your favourite comic characters. You have research material for those characters that dates back to 1938 and to top it off, these dramatis personae are iconic to the point that everyone is aware of even small background information, meaning you could theoretically throw the audience into the middle of a story and they'd have a good chance of understanding individual motivations. Here's a quick quiz....

                  1. Is Batman a) a bat, b) a man, c) a genetically engineered man/bat hybrid?

                  2. Was Superman born a) on Krypton, b) on Earth, c) in the wagon of a travelling show,                            whose Momma use to dance for the money they'd throw?

                  3. Is Lex Luthor a) the good guy, b) the bad guy c) the ugly guy?

                  4. Is Wonder Woman a) Amazonian, b) Amazuluian c) Platitudinarian

My point is that that's just how goddamn ICONIC they are, as each new age has dawned since 1938, these guys have been there

Finally, you won't need to worry about box-office returns as the movie is likely to be seen by just about everyone.

There's a lot to like about the new movie. Afleck makes old Batman his own with a believably world-weary performance, ably assisted by the always brilliant Jeremy Irons as Alfred. Gal Gadot looks suitably sexy, feisty and capable but just wasn't really given enough to do to give a realistic assessment. Jesse Eisenberg seems to have gone for a "what-if-I-cross-Mark-Zuckerberg-with-Gary-Busey" idea for his Luthor portrayal and whilst it sometimes comes off as petulant, he certainly seems to be enjoying himself

It's Superman, In my opinion unreasonably saddled with the blame for the destructive events at the end of Man of Steel, who doesn't seem to be enjoying himself. Batman enjoys beating up criminals, Wonder Woman enjoys fast cars and light S&M, Superman gets a brief moment to enjoy bath time for two, but that's it, the rest of the time he's just miserable.

In fact the tone of the movie is pretty miserable too. There's no colour, the season seems to be that moment in Autumn where it rains a lot and the trees are leafless, and for pity's sake how many more cities need destroying?

I have to say that I blame the writer, director and studio for a number of less than positive things about the movie. As a nerd I was able to get most of the references casually thrown about but there were more dream sequences than A Nightmare on Elm Street and as much as I understand the anger over the destruction of Metropolis, surely a vigilante master detective could deduce that Superman wasn't to blame? 

The inevitability of needing a problem so big, it needs the combined powers of the three DC heroes to bring it down is understandable enough as Supe's and WW's virtual immortality is going to need destruction on an epic scale but god help us when we add in the rest of the Justice League, most of whom BVSDOJ gave us a glimpse of, along with an Apokoliptic (sic) sense of doom to come.

I think that at two hours and thirty minutes it was thirty minutes too long. three quarters of the movie is really just set-up for the final battle and the coming JL movie. Did we really need to be shown Bruce Wayne's origin story again? I'm starting to think that there's a contract at DC that says every new reboot of the role warrants a retelling of Batman's origin.

As a blockbuster movie it's ok, but for all of the on screen spectacle it was still missing a WOW factor. I certainly didn't leave the two showings of the movie, one in 2D and the better one in 3D, thinking that I couldn't wait for the oh-right-they've-split-it-into-two-parts-again-to-milk-the-cow-dry Justice League movies.