Hello!
This time it’s thoughts on the fourth DCEU film, Wonder Woman, plus a pile of small details!
*Warning:
There will be analysis. And spoilers for the DCEU films so far as well.
Starting with the comics.
Wonder Woman first appeared back in 1941.
Her creator was William Moulton Marston.
As well as writing comics, he was the man who invented the lie detector.
That side of him comes through in Wonder Woman’s Lasso of Truth.
And despite more than 75 years of history, she had barely been filmed at all. A raw deal.
Presumably nobody was convinced a female hero could turn a profit.
Times have changed!
This film went on to record the biggest box office of any solo superhero movie ever!!! Unbelievable!!!!!
More heroes who have never been adapted before, please!
This one belongs to the universe called the DCEU.
Wonder Woman herself first turned up in Batman v Superman. Her appearance was kept secret, so it was a real shock at the time.
And that music was so cool!!
Her official theme now, I suppose lol
It sticks in your head!
Right, on to the review, working through the trailer.
Ohhhh man. Overwhelming action!!
The set pieces drop into slow motion so the audience can actually see them. Everywhere else the camera rolls and swoops around. Not one dull moment!!
Something about it brought The Matrix and Spider-Man to mind.
And on the subject of archers, let’s not forget the DC show Arrow lol
Very good indeed!!
Arrow — Season One Promo Poster | Drama TV Series | Pinterest
Doctor Maru abruptly making General Erich Ludendorff breathe in the gas got a laugh lol
Wait, is that allowed?! No testing first?! That was the reaction lol
Wonder if she was ever caught in the end.
Maybe her talents earned her a lighter sentence in exchange for cooperating?
At the very least she doesn’t appear in Justice League.
There’s a rumour Wonder Woman 2 is set during the Cold War, so possibly… though by then she’d be a very old Doctor Maru lol
Themyscira, the home of the Amazons, was beautiful.
A remote island wrapped in mist always brings King Kong to mind lol
This island holds a Mother Box, one of the most important objects in the DCEU. Queen Hippolyta appears in the Justice League trailer too, so the Amazons are definitely coming back.
Will Wonder Woman ever make it home to the island…
Steve Trevor was excellent too.
He’s played by Chris Pine.
The actor best known for Star Trek.
In the back half you can feel how badly he wants to pin humans killing each other on a god. Beautifully handled.
And he can’t say what his life would have looked like if the war had never happened. That says everything about how bleak the era was.
And then the ending!
I can save today. You can save the world.
That moment was unbelievably cool.
A big London station, so is that King’s Cross, the one from Harry Potter?
And knowing London gets flattened by the Blitz in the next war makes the shot land a lot heavier.
That’s an actor called David Thewlis.
Best known as Professor Lupin in Harry Potter.
He did seem a bit suspicious, sure. But the man behind everything? Never saw that coming.
His argument is that humans started the war, so none of it is his fault. He was doing plenty of scheming in the shadows himself though, so that one is hard to accept.
In the comics he’s sometimes Wonder Woman’s mentor, and since the world was rewritten in Flashpoint, maybe he has ended up as her mentor in the current continuity too.
The scene where he forges armour out of the wreckage got me fired up.
Armour straight out of The Lord of the Rings lol
It really came across that this god is a son of Zeus after all.
Using an axe to plant a grenade on the wall and blow it — the coordination there was so tight. Very cool.
In this scene he asks Wonder Woman whether she will destroy humanity.
For a film built on Greek myth, all the talk of sin and atonement felt very Christian.
Image: Comic book movies aren’t only Avengers! Justice League is finally under way for real — NAVER Matome
This story is set a very long time ago.
And on 23 November this year, Justice League arrives.
That one has a whole roster of heroes joining forces against evil, like Marvel’s Avengers.
A few threads lead into it from here. The Amazons, for one.
As mentioned above, the Amazons are holding an important object called a Mother Box. So there is no doubt they turn up in Justice League.
Then there’s the photograph from the opening. The company that delivered it is called Wayne Enterprises, and as everyone knows, that’s the company Batman runs.
If Wonder Woman was fun and Justice League is next on the list, then Batman v Superman is worth watching first.
Machine guns hadn’t really reached practical use before the First World War.
Then a man named Hotchkiss made them work, and they were thrown into WWI.
They show up in the trench fighting against the Germans.
The film also shows the war grinding into a quagmire because of that worst of all tactics, the trench. Nicely done.
There are loads of little touches like that which click if you’ve done any world history. Great fun.
The gas in this film is mustard gas.
In actual history it was not cooked up by anyone called Doctor Maru lol
The nastiest thing about mustard gas is that it refuses to read the room. Being heavier than air, it settles and stays put, so the concentration never thins out. Corroding rubber is another of its charming properties.
This was also the first war in which aircraft were used. Unlike today they weren’t jets; propellers did the work. And the wings came in multiples — biplanes. The tactics were like the ones early in the film: firing machine guns at the enemy, or throwing grenades out of the cockpit. Bombers did appear in the First World War though, and that’s what shows up later on. Bombers, capable of doing enormous damage to buildings and the like, are of course still in use today. The firebombing of Tokyo, the Blitz, the Vietnam War — those are the famous ones.
This film takes on WWI. As everyone knows, Germany lost, was saddled with enormous reparations, and that became one of the things that let the Nazi Party seize power. In the end humanity couldn’t stop the wars, which is a sad thing. Wonder whether Wonder Woman 2 will show what she was doing during the Second World War.
Ludendorff was a real German general. During the First World War he was apparently a national hero. Historically he seems to have gone on to serve under Adolf Hitler.
On July 24, 202…
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