Wednesday, June 07, 2017

"Wonder Woman": 2 takes

[WARNING: BIG SPOILER!]

What did the talking heads on YouTube think of "Wonder Woman"?

Rossatron has a very positive take (6.5 minutes).

The ever-curmudgeonly Stefan Molyneux has a decidedly negative take (11 minutes).

I think Molyneux gets a lot of things wrong in his attempts at dismantling what he sees as the illogic of the story.* He also seems to forget that the movie is just a fantasy, no different from the way "The Dark Knight" is a fantasy. He should unpucker his sphincter and try a little harder to enjoy the experience. While he rails against perceived feminist self-delusion, I came away thinking of "Wonder Woman" as feminist in a generally positive, healthy way. Sure, there's admittedly the princessy element that little girls can latch on to (although the PG-13 nature of the story will keep most little girls from seeing the movie), but Diana Prince comes off as both sure of herself and open to learning more about the world, exercising a moral clarity that girls everywhere can respond to, and which stands in contrast to the moral murkiness of her male superhero counterparts in recent films.



*For example, at one point, Molyneux complains about how the poison in the explosion that kills Steve Trevor at the end of the movie would have dispersed throughout the atmosphere, killing thousands on the ground. But he forgets that that issue is addressed in the movie when Trevor confirms that the poison has a large hydrogen component, thus making it highly flammable, which means that any toxins would be consumed and rendered inert by an explosion. That, at least, is the story logic: whether this all makes actual scientific sense is another matter, but when you're watching superhero films, you basically throw science out the window. Go to my blog's search window, up top, and type in the phrase "Hollywood physics" to see how many times I've dealt with this very issue. I've had my complaints, too, but I generally know when the issues are really worth bitching about and when they're just minor technicalities that don't disrupt the larger story. In this particular case, Molyneux's complaint isn't valid because the story does, in fact, address that very issue.



No comments: