Wonder woe-man.

Depending on your perspective, we are entering a fascinating new era of modern cinema. 3D has developed from being an awful gimmick viewable only through the correct application of selected quality street wrappers to an awful gimmick that burdens the planet with yet more easily disposed of but difficult to bio-degrade lumps of plastic that you’re meant to recycle but hardly anyone does and if you wear prescription glasses as well, good luck getting those things to actually sit right on your face. Fringe benefits of looking a bit like Big Jim Martin aside (Google him you Philistines), it’s a shenanigan and entirely wasteful of everybody’s time, money and effort. IMAX snuck up on us and honestly I have no clue what it does other than require a larger screen, look bigger and cost more. Technical improvements and snide remarks aside for a moment; we do appear to be slowly ushering in a new age of acceptance and equality; unholy blights on the planet like Harvey Weinstein are finally getting their comeuppance, people of colour are getting the rounded and well-developed roles they deserve as much as anyone and women are no longer just shrieking damsels in distress or equally shrill love interests with little else going on other than doe eyes and quivering bottom lips whenever the hero takes his shirt off. OK, it’s still not perfect but we’re getting there. Slowly.

You might have thought then, that Wonder Woman would be a shining beacon in the quest for gender equality, even though you might have been just as sceptical as me when you saw the trailer (particularly after having also seen DC’s other output) about how good it was as a movie. Sadly, it sort of blows it on both accounts.

I don’t want to get too hung up on gender politics, that’s an entirely different blog somewhere in the dark recesses of the internet, but it is kind of inevitable really when your central character is basically a female Superman, Princess of the legendary Amazon tribe and probably a fairly decent role model for girls around the globe. I’m going to come back to that, but in the meantime…

I’ve noticed that DC movie fans tend to be a really salty bunch who will staunchly defend their right to enjoy crap movies way past what even I might term excessive. I even saw some tool try to claim that if DC started making their films more like Spiderman Homecoming he’d never watch them again. I only assume he meant that they’d actually be watchable, enjoyable and not just risible attempts to hang on Marvel’s cinematic coattails, but whatever you like buddy, knock yourself out. Wonder Woman was being touted as the best DC movie since the Nolan Batman movies, which when you consider the utter toss they’ve been churning out, it’s a bit like saying that a brain haemorrhage is the best thing that can happen to you neurologically this side of a full frontal lobotomy. Actually I imagine Batman vs Superman is probably the closest thing to a temporary lobotomy many of us will ever experience, so props to them for that at least. The real problem with Wonder Woman as a movie is that it very strictly adheres to as many clichés, tropes and beats as it possibly can and the outcome is yet another fairly dull and uninspiring addition to an already listless list.

Quite aside from some of the dodgiest green screen and effects shots I’ve seen in some time (check out the stunt woman miming firing CGI arrows that don’t appear to come anywhere near either her hand or the bow) and some weird choices of accent, there’s a definite Captain America vibe going on, due to the whole World War I origin story they’ve opted to go for. We get the inevitable training montage, sadly without any inspiring 80s rock, we get a fairly standard “you can’t do that” speech between mother and daughter and we get a rebellious teen/stroke aunt who go ahead and do the stuff they’re not supposed to do because of course they do or this would be a mercifully short but ultimately pointless movie about a Princess who grows up to do Nothing Of Consequence. Plus she has a secret past that she isn’t allowed to know and we’re all set for a voyage of self-discovery kicked off handily by the arrival of a twinkly eyed American spy and some shifty-looking Germans. Cue a bunch of ill-conceived and cringe-worthy bits based on the fact that Wonder Woman hasn’t seen a bloke before (but she has read all the books about how useless they are except for procreating), Chris Pine is a chivalrous ladies man with a heart of gold and it all goes downhill from there. Action wise, it’s not done badly but you’ve seen this movie a thousand times before (think Where Super Eagles Dare in a corset). Everything is underwhelming; the bad guys are barely memorable, there’s a really poor ‘is he/isn’t he’ guessing game thing going on and this version of Ares, when he finally pops his head above the parapet, limps towards the finale with all the menace of week old kitten. There’s even a beat lifted directly out of Return of the Jedi but you know for a fact that Wonder Woman is never going to turn to the Dark Side because a) it’s the wrong movie franchise and b) we’ve already seen that she’s a good guy in the opening seen and Batman v Superman. Plus he’s done in by the Amazonian equivalent of a hadouken we got foreshadowed earlier to the shock and awe of nobody anywhere.

So, elephant in the room time. They had an opportunity to do something inspiring here, but instead everything feels really forced. The secretary joke from the trailer is exactly as awkward as it looked like it was going to be; the scenes of Wonder Woman trying to fit in to 1914 London and get her wardrobe sorted are really ham-fisted at very best and the whole story effectively revolves around her falling in love with ol’ twinkly eyed Chet or Joe or whatever his Very American Name was. In fact, she summons the strength she needs to defeat Ares not because she’s the awesome and feared God-Killing daughter of Zeus but from the fact that Chris Pine told her he loves her and is flying a plane loaded with deadly gas out to sea where it won’t hurt anyone and is not coming back. Obviously, I’m probably going to get hit with some White Male Privilege comments here, but really? Is it more inspiring and empowering that she did it for the love of a man she met two days ago or because she’s just an ultimate bad-ass?

Hey, if you get inspiration from that, fair play, I’m not knocking it (I am knocking it a bit); they just could have done so much better. Rather than write a Wonder Woman as the most awesome, empowering, bad-ass they could have, they’ve gone for the lazy option of pausing every two minutes to remind us how empowering and bad-ass she is. I keep going back to Ellen Ripley, but she’s kind of a bench mark and a really good one. She was an effortless bad-ass in 1979 and nearly 30 years later scriptwriters still struggle to hit that gold standard. I think I may have over-used the term bad-ass.