Alright let's talk about this.
Eh screw that.
Wired ran a piece decrying how during the announcement everybody was excited about seeing seeing Batman and Supes together,but there was nary a word about Wonder Woman, further theorizing that chances are even if they did manage to give her a big role in the JL movie said role would probably suck because people have a hard time writing her right. And also pointed to the fact that W.W's early comic appearances were... weird.
And you know what yes there were, and so were Superman's and Ironman's, and the X-men's and you get the point. The Big Blue Boy Scout started off as more like The Punisher than most people are willing to admit.
That said I am only tangentially antiquated with the character and mostly know about her from adaptations, yet I feel that's exactly why I would like to see a Wonder Woman movie. Sure there are lots of Wonder Woman comics on my list but there are lots of comics on my list. At the end they are a luxury item and as far as luxury items go, right now it's cheaper and easier for me to rent movies, watch Netflix, or catch comic movies on TV. I'm not saying I don't want to her read comics I'm saying right now I can't really read comics period.
Which is why I really want to see her on the big screen. So here is my list with the very limited knowledge of the character I have of how not to make her suck.
1. Consult Gail Simone
Again I have very limited knowledge about Wonder Woman comics, but there is a general consensus that she is probably the best contemporary writer to tackle her character in a long while. Again most of this is second hand, but when it comes to Wonder Woman she is one of the few people who gets her.
2. Yes She Is An Amazonian Princess Damn It
Okay for better or worse most adaptions of Wonder Woman outside of comics or cartoons try to soft peddle the fact that she's an amazon. And no. That is a huge part of her character and identity. I'm not saying do the origin story necessarily, but her being an Amazon is kind of what makes her her.
Furthermore the thing that she generally contributes an the J.L. is that she is a warrior, i.e. soldier. Superman being the general pacifist he is normally is a little antagonistic towards the military, and Batman, well let's just say getting him to trust any large organization with the type of power the USMC. can muster is out of character. You need someone to talk to the highly trained, highly armed, highly disciplined, highly regimented organization, you go to the person raised to command XX chromosome Sparta.
Hell she's probably the only J.L. headliner who is sort of iffy on the thou shalt not kill thing. Yes if it's a numbers game of death she will make the call the others can't.
3. Feminism is Complicated
Okay, being a guy I'm not really going to go on about feminism, but what we call feminism is wide birth of issues and ideas some of which contradict each other. Being as steeped in feminism as she is it's almost impossible to talk about Wonder Woman without talking about woman's issues so I'm just going to say be smart. Whoever does the next Wonder Woman TV show, movie, whatever, really has to think about the message and implications there in.
4. Lead Role
Alright some when it come to comics Wonder Woman is probably the third best known member of the Justice League as has been constantly one of it's lead members, yet in mainstream media, not so much. We've had like 8 batman movies, like 6 superman movies, yet I can't even think of a Wonderwoman movie. Again she's generally considered the third piller of the J.L. being even more important than Green Lantern and Super Girl who both have their own movies, bad movies albeit but movies.
Even without the sexism, there's a joke out there that the only superhero Warner Brothers really knows how to do right is Batman and if they're going to get serious about making a big competitor to Marvel's Avengers, that's going to have to change.
See what made the Avengers work as a movie was that it was able to marry all of the different settings and tones of all the Marvel movies, which were diverse enough to make such a marriage kind of interesting. You've got a millionaire playboy hanging out with a military experiment gone wrong, hanging out with a military experiment gone right, hanging out with a Norse god hanging out with two super spies. All while keeping their strong individual persona's in the fore.
I think this why any J.L./Wonder movie is likely to fail more so than sexism. They're going to bend over backwards to try to ground all of this stuff in reality and for Batman's Gotham or even maybe, I said maybe, Superman's Metropolis that might work but for Wonderwoman, Martian Manhunter, The Flash, and Green Lantern, what makes them them are supernatural fanciful elements. You have basically Hector with boobs, normal sized green man from Mars, human Sonic the Hedgehog (Damn you Movie Bob), and space cop.
You are not going to make that seem normal.
No comments:
Post a Comment