I wasn’t going to write this. I was going to have my little private rant with my friends and fret over the fate of Patty Jenkins touching the Star Wars universe and go on with my day.
Then, today happened. I’m not going to get into the long drawn out melodrama of it, I’m just going to say it’s not a great day, and when I sat myself down on the couch, I was stream surfing in a bit of a mood.
I needed to laugh. And, though I wouldn’t typically admit it, I also needed to cry.
Somehow the fates (and Amazon recommendations) aligned and gave me Alice Fraser- Savage. It was hysterically funny and sad and raw and enlightening and transcendent and fearless.
(I know, I’m going the long way around here, hang in there, I’ll get there, I promise.)
I finished drying my face when it was all over, and watched Turia Pitt’s Ted Talk that was discussed and felt the power of what Alice had said all over again.
And when I thought about how honest and full of heart and how those two women had fed my soul in half the time it took Gal Gadot and Patty Jenkins to utterly destroy a comic book character… well, it was time to write about it. Especially since the first one had done just a little tiny piece of feeding the soul, too.
Spoilers, duh.
It’s a shampoo commercial, guys. The bold and brave Diana who left her entire home thinking she could do some good has become an aloof coward who connects with no one and no thing. She spends her days preserving art, then callously destroys art when it suits an action beat. The flick spends so much time focusing on physical beauty and grace that it turns the main character into a disgusting caricature- an empty shell of a person who believes in nothing and has nothing to give back to the world anymore.
And as a viewer, you can’t invest yourself in someone that empty. So she flies now? Sure, whatever. Golden armor? OK, yeah, oooooh shiny.
The plot device doesn’t take itself seriously.. it makes up rules as it goes. And forget supporting characters.. they are all flat and one dimensional and ultimately pointless. A woman is pretty and on camera or utterly unimportant. Men exist to hit on Diana and whatever the Kristen Wiig’s character name was when she’s hot, and ignore her when she’s not.
It’s shallow, bankrupt, silly, narratively messy, and boring as hell.
The worst part? There’s going to be another one.
Curiouser and Curiouser 