Wonder Woman

I really wanted to like the Wonder Woman movie.

Now would be a good time for the world to have a movie about a powerful woman being powerful. Less so for a movie about a powerful woman being the meat shield while her boyfriend repeatedly saves the day.

She does get to beat the crap out of a lot of people, which Emily found "very cathartic". So that's nice.

And I'm really conflicted about even posting this, because on the one hand we should all go see this movie to demonstrate to the movie studios that yes, we want to see movies about powerful women being powerful! Yes! Make those movies! But on the other hand the writing is.... geez, it's bad. Like,"this script consists of a dozen writers shooting down each others' ideas" bad.

But mostly it's how the movie keeps undermining its whole reason for existing. Female characters other than Diana, in order of appearance, are: Training montage, Wrong About Everything, Undermotivated Evil Cackling, and So Thinly Characterized I Can't Even Tell If She's Supposed To Be Good At Her Job (Which Appears To Consist Of Pointing At A Map Once).

Robin Wright is the training montage. (No complaints there, this is fine). Queen Hippolyta is wrong ("The sooner we tell her the truth, the sooner he finds her." They don't tell her the truth. Two minutes later, he finds her. I'm sure there was a story draft in which there was a point to all that?) Evil Cackling is the masked sidekick of Herr PCP, and Thinly Characterized is the secretary who takes Diana on her (ugh) clothes shopping montage.

A clothes shopping montage.

Better a flawed movie about a heroic woman than none at all, I guess. I just wish it hadn't had to be quite so flawed