I just wanted to jot down a thought I had while eating lunch today about Hollywood spectacle and the silent contract between audience and filmmaker.<\/p>\n
For the most part I really enjoyed Wonder Woman. I thought it was pretty great actually! Gal Gadot gave a spot on performance as a powerful, but emotionally sensitive and almost motherly hero, while also measuring a good dose of supermodel poise. Some of the scenes where she’s reacting to the horror of war really affected me.<\/p>\n
I went into the movie after having breezed through some of Ron Rege’s documentation of the early days of Wonder Woman and her heavy emphasis on cosmic\/occult Love conquering Man’s world of lies, hate, and jealousy etc… I really didn’t think Zack Snyder would make room for that sort of thing in the the dark and desaturated world of the DC cinematic Snyderverse. Surprisingly there was a decent dose of that in the movie, and the finale actually comes down to a major statement about Love in her stand off with the god of war.<\/p>\n
As she made that statement in the middle of everything exploding all over the place, I thought to myself, “Well, how can she take a stand for Love when inevitably she’ll have to destroy Mars with an energy bolt or whatever?” Superhero movies almost always boil down to a final crossing of pee streams and then the villain gets blown up, as well as whatever subtext was going on. After it happened I was like, “Whatever, it had to happen that way. What was she gonna do? Hug him into submission?”<\/p>\n
But as I was eating my lunch today I tried to imagine myself as the screenwriter, and I think they could have really gone for the Love idea and flipped our audience expectations. I mean, one of the most powerful submissions of a villain was Luke refusing to kill Darth Vader and then Darth sacrificing himself to save his son after being exposed to the power of Light.<\/p>\n
Or this scene in Excalibur, which is so potent, it might as well be real.<\/p>\n
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