Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Rating: 7/10 (23 June 2017)

Wonder Woman has received a lot of praise since hitting box offices and rightly so. After so many flops, DC managed to produce a film with enough hits to satisfy critics and rouse fans. Wonder Woman does a lot of things better than its predecessors, chief among which is the representation of women. Diana is a complicated character - naive, strong, bullheaded, vulnerable, etc. - Multifaceted and sometime contradictory, like most women, and more importantly, like most human beings. None of her characteristics is derived or derided by the presence of the male characters in her story line - she is what she is, because that is what makes her, her - an individual. There are many other commendable choices this film made, such as the inclusion of the "personal wars," female characters over the age of 35, as well as the grey and moral dubiousness of all sides engaged in a war.
However, for all the successes, the film is still plagued by the same problems previous DC films have faced, most of which originate in the plot or lack thereof. While the struggles of characters of color as well as the dubious morality of the "heroes" of a war are hinted at, these issues are never explored. While I understand this is tough to do, even in a bloated run time of 2 hours and 21 minutes, even Diana's, the titular character's, plot line is never fully developed. Reading more like an exposition, the movie sports a flaccid story that is hastily wrapped up in the last half hour in the most laughably weak way possible. Make no mistake, I thoroughly enjoyed the first three quarters of the movie - the acting was decent, the action scenes were inspiring (excessively twirling Amazons notwithstanding), and the humor relevant. However, to sum up the whole of Diana's journey from the well-meaning and strong ingÃ©nue to the disillusioned warrior princess to the champion of human kind as the result of a brief sexual encounter with a blonde haired, blue eyed "above average" male character who said he loved her is insulting. It smacks of the backward ideas that all a girl needs to become a woman is "the love of a man." If Diana was male, this ending would still be irritating, but as a female character, it is downright insulting as it trivializes the whole of a female character's motivations, once more, to relying on the male characters. I want to make it clear that this is not the same trope of a loved-one dying to motivate a character for action. In Wonder Woman, as Diana is struggling to find the parts of humanity worth saving, she ignores all the other decent and inspiring parts of humanity (a mother's love for child, the friendship between Sameer, Charlie and Chief, the willingness of Steve Trevor to die so others will not, etc.) and instead finds the inspiration to continue to champion humanity from a one night stand. This is inherently problematic as it is essentially saying that the love of a man is what makes humanity worth saving, not say, the thousands of other beautiful things in human potential. Even if the movie was going for a "Love saves everything" kind of feel (and they so, so where - I mean the end credit song as Sia's "To be Human...is to Love"), they could have done it in a better way.
In sum: DC needs to hire new script writers. Badly. That said, if you can suspend your mind for about two and half hours, its not a bad way to fritter away the time.