DC Animated Superhero Retrospective Series - Wonder Woman (2009)

Written In January 2014

While watching this movie, for some reason my mind wandered off into a couple Transformers references. One was when the monsters are messing with the Lincoln Memorial and Steve Trevor is outraged by this, causing me to flashback to this scene in Dark of the Moon. And the other was when Ares and Persephone have to sacrifice one of their troops to open the gate to the Underworld, the flashback being this scene in Revenge of the Fallen. Or maybe more appropriately this scene from South Park.

Onto the review!

Plot Summary Taken From Wikipedia:

Centuries ago, the Amazons, a proud and fierce race of warrior women, led by their Queen, Hippolyta (voiced by Virginia Madsen), battled Ares(voiced by Alfred Molina), the god of war, and his army. During the battle, Hippolyta beheaded her son, Thrax (voiced by Jason Miller), whom Aresforcibly conceived with her, who is fighting for his father. Hippolyta then defeated Ares, but Zeus (voiced by David McCallum) stopped her from delivering the death strike. Instead, Hera (voiced by Marg Helgenberger) bound his powers with magic bracers so that he was deprived of his ability to draw power from the aura of violence and death he could instigate, effectively rendering him mortal, and only another god could release him. In compensation, the Amazons were granted the island of Themyscira, where they would remain eternally youthful and isolated from Man in the course of their duty of holding Ares prisoner for all eternity. Later, Hippolyta was granted a daughter, Princess Diana (voiced by Keri Russell), whom she shaped from the sand of the Themyscirian sea shore and gave life with her own blood.

Over a millennium later, an American fighter pilot, USAF Colonel Steve Trevor (voiced by Nathan Fillion), is shot down in a dogfight and crash-lands on the island, where he soon runs afoul of the Amazon population, including the warlike, aggressive Artemis (voiced by Rosario Dawson). Steve and Diana meet and fight, and she defeats him, taking him to the Amazons. After interrogating him with the use of the Amazons’ golden lasso, Hippolyta decides he is not an enemy of the Amazons and as such, tradition dictates that an emissary be tasked to ensure his safe return to his own country. Diana volunteers, but is assigned to guard Ares’s cell instead since her mother argues that she has not enough experience in dealing with the dangers of the outside world. Diana defies her mother and, her face hidden by a helmet and her guard duty covered by her bookish but kind-hearted Amazon sister Alexa (voiced by Tara Strong), participates in contests of strength and wins the right to take Trevor back to his home.

In the meantime, the Amazon Persephone (voiced by Vicki Lewis), who has been gradually seduced by Ares, kills Alexa and releases him. With the additional task of capturing Ares, Diana brings Trevor to New York City, where he volunteers to help Diana on her quest. An investigation uncovers a pattern of violence created by Ares presence that will lead to him given time, and the pair go out to a bar while they wait. After some heavy drinking, Trevor makes a pass at Diana. They argue outside, but are attacked first by thugs and then the demigod Deimos (voiced by John DiMaggio). Deimos kills himself to prevent being interrogated, but Diana and Steve find a clue on his body that leads them to a concealed gateway to the underworld guarded by members of a still-extant ancient cult of Ares.

Once there, Diana attempts to subdue Ares, but he summons harpies that knock her unconscious, prompting Trevor to save her instead of stopping Ares. Meanwhile, Ares performs a sacrifice to open a gate to the Underworld where he persuades his uncle Hades (voiced by Oliver Platt) to remove the bracers, though Hades does not tell Ares that the ultimate cost of removing the bracers would be Ares’ own death in combat. Later, Diana regains consciousness in a hospital and is furious that Trevor saved her rather than stop Ares. Trevor argues against her abuse with his own criticism of the Amazons’ self-imposed isolation and their generalizations about men, and reveals how much he cares about her.

Ares and his army attack Washington, DC. Trevor and Diana arrive to battle Ares and are soon joined by the Amazons. While Ares manages even to summon the Amazons long dead from the Underworld to fight their own sisters, his scheme is stopped by Alexa, a member of the undead host, who reveals to Artemis a chant which nullifies Ares’s control over them. The undead then turn on Ares but are destroyed by his powers. Hippolyta faces Persephone in combat and kills her, but in her dying breath, Persephone makes the queen realize that in shutting the Amazons away from the world of men, she has denied them the chance to live their lives as women.

Meanwhile, the President (voiced by Rick Overton) is influenced by Ares’s power and orders a nuclear missile against Themyscira, presuming the island nation to be the source of the attack on Washington. This act of supreme aggression increases Ares’s power, but Trevor takes the invisible jet and shoots down the missile just before it hits the island. Finally, after a brutal beating at Ares’s hands, Diana finally outwits and kills him. Subsequently, Ares is condemned to the underworld to attend Hades as a slave alongside his son.

Later on Themyscira, in memory of Alexa, Artemis takes up the hobby of reading (with severe difficulty). Hippolyta realizes that Diana misses both the outside world and Trevor, and to make her happy again, she gives her daughter the task of being a channel for ‘communication between men and women’. Diana accepts and returns to New York, where she enjoys the company of Trevor. Their relationship comes with the understanding of her larger duties, such as when Diana sees Cheetah robbing a museum and she excuses herself to stop the supervillainess as the newly christened Wonder Woman.

Before I get into my lists of pros and cons, let’s talk about something real quick. Why does Wonder Woman not have a live action theatrical film yet? It’s not because she’s a comic book character, those movies have been making bookoo bucks since ‘78 when they released Superman: The Movie with Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, Margot Kidder and Marlon Brando. It can’t be because studios aren’t sure if female led action films are profitable, the Resident Evil series has had 6 installments and made just under a billion dollars total against a total of 280 million for budget. The Underworld series consists of four films and has made just under 500 million on a budget of 177 million. And I doubt it’s because she’s based on Ancient Greek Swords and Sandals style films, because the studios and audiences eat that shit up. Look no further than the fact that we have TWO, count ‘em, TWO, Hercules movies.

I suppose you can make the argument that movies like Catwoman and Elektra tanking at the box office and just generally not being very good movies is to blame. But those movies were made long after the wake of Superman and Batman movies we had. The popular consciousness seems to say that each half the world’s finest had one great movie, one good movie, one not-so-good movie, and one shitty movie. The first movie to hit theaters for either party that was not considered a serial, was the George Reeves pilot back in 1951, titled Superman and the Mole Men. 15 years later, we were all amazed with the campy glory that was Bill Dozier’s Batman starring Adam West and Burt Ward as the icons that are the Dynamic Duo. Then 12 years later we started to believe a man could in fact fly thanks to Richard Donner and Alexander & Ilya Salkind. That soon enough went to shit by the time 1986 came around, but luckily, Michael Keaton, Tim Burton and Jack Nicholson quickly came around three years later to resurrect the once proud and grim series that was Batman. Which also went to shit thanks in no small part Warner Bro’s interference but also thanks to Joel Schumacher, Val Kilmer and George Clooney. That series finally went and died in 1997 until Christopher Nolan, God bless his soul, came in and breathed new life into it.

Where was Wonder Woman in all of this? Stuck on the small screen in the form of the Linda Carter series on CBS, where she was accompanied by a collection of Marvel characters, including most famously Lou Ferrigno’s Incredible Hulk and Bill Bixby’s David Bruce Banner, and much less famously Nicholas Hammond’s Spider-Man/Peter Parker, and even less famously Reb Brown’s Captain America/Steve Rogers. What’s my point, you ask? WHY THE HELL ISN’T SHE ON THE BIG SCREEN ALREADY?!?!?!? How come we don’t have a beloved actress who came from being an absolute unknown to the biggest star on the planet, who got that way for playing Wonder Woman? How come we don’t have an already well liked and respected actress that everyone gained a new found appreciation for after seeing their incredible range as a performer after being cast against type as Wonder Woman? How come we don’t have a respected method actress who had a cult following before being cast as Wonder Woman, who is now one of the most famous, beloved and respected actresses in Hollywood?

Why has Wonder Woman not enjoyed the same amount of love and respect as Superman and Batman? I am of course aware that Israeli actress-model, Gal Gadot, has been cast as the Amazonian Warrior Princess, but let’s consider something. Wonder Woman was created in 1941 and brought to television in 1975. And she’s finally going to make her big screen debut in February of 2014, in the form of an animated lego mini-figure voiced by How I Met Your Mother’s Cobie Smulders in Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s The Lego Movie, a movie where she’s likely going to be the equivalent, to a small celebrity cameo. And only two years later, she’ll make her first appropriateappearance in the currently untitled sequel to 2013’s Man of Steel. A movie also not about her, where she’ll be a relatively smaller role, that may or may not be entirely plot relevant.

This movie was made in 2009. It took Wonder Woman 68 years to have her own feature length film, and it’s only a direct to video animated movie written by an admittedly brilliant comic book writer, but still not someone who get a ton of respect in mainstream Hollywood. I don’t feel like saying, I’ll have John Goodman say it for me.

Thank you John. Sorry for the ranting people, I didn’t mean to talk up that for so long, I just needed to get something off of my chest.

Anywho, onto the actual review.

PROS:

• I don’t really know much of Kerri Russel’s work, but she really did a great job as Wondy in this movie.
• Malcolm Reynolds as Steve Trevor! Oh wait no, that’s Nathan Fillion! My mistake!
• Ares is a delightful villain and an intimidating presence, especially with Alfred Molina’s wonderfully slimy delivery. I’m surprised Bruce and Andrea could get a hold of him.
• Hades makes a couple quick appearances in this movie and he is the perfect asshole. He brings in Ares’s dead son in and treats him like garbage, just to humiliate Ares. And to top it all of, he’s voiced by Oliver Plat, who I am again, very surprised to see here.
• The animation and character designs in this movie are all really great, with some wonderfully directed action scenes handled by Lauren Montgomery, who handled the second act of Superman: Doomsday.
• The screenplay written by Gail Simone is fantastic! It’s got a lot of Tumblr Feminist style punches in it, with a few fedora wearing dudebro esque quips, but with just enough intelligence to cut strait through that bullshit and say, both parties are morons and need to work together like smart people.
• Christopher Drake’s score is delightful, although he noted in his Fat Man on Batman interview with Kevin Smith, that they were initially going to go for something in the vein of Queen’s Flash Gordon theme, which I would’ve loved as well.
• I didn’t buy Persephone’s reasoning for betraying her fellow Amazons at first, but then I realized, Diana is the ONLY woman on the island who has never met and/or seen a man. All of these women at one point had fathers, brothers, uncles, grandfathers, cousins, maybe husbands or even sons! Persephone longs to be a wife and mother, in fact I get the impression she once was that, but lost it.
• Tara Strong voices a bookworm Amazon named Alexa, who seems to be the only woman int his movie who doesn’t want to kill something. I kinda like her.
• While Artemis is a frequently a bitch throughout this movie, she’s also quite awesome!

CONS:

• The way Ares is killed is rather Deus Ex Machina like, and I really don’t care for that.
• I don’t get why everyone seems to hate Alexa because she’s a bookworm who can’t really fight. Especially not when Athena, one of the goddesses they likely idolize is known to be a philosopher and quite the reader in general.
• I also hate that Artemis, Alexa’s sister, expresses such animosity toward her. Even in death! I’m not terribly fond of my sister and I’ve cursed at her more times than I’d care to admit, but if something happened to her I’d horrified and heartbroken. Artemis, on the other hand, upon discovering her sister is dead, assumed she just fucked up. And when she meets her on the battlefield as a zombie, she says that she’s continuing disgrace their family name (which we never actually learned).
• Diana’s mother Hippolyta feels too cold. I really question how much she cares about people, she had to kill her own son on the battlefield but she never really shows any concern about it. I get that Amazons are supposed to be really hardcore and stuff, but even the biggest of badasses have their moments where they let their emotions go. In Saving Private Ryan, Tom Hanks, who in the movie is supposed to be the perfect commander, goes off on his own for a minute and outright CRIES for his fallen soldiers. In the first Die Hard movie, when Bruce Willis starts to think he’s not coming back from his current predicament with Alan Rickman, he talks to Reginald VelJohnson and admits that he regrets never actually trying to apologize to his wife, who he is currently in the process of being divorced from. OPTIMUS FUCKING PRIME, apologized to a dead Megatron for it having to be the way it is now in the first Transformers movie. A CHARACTER GRIEVED HIS ENEMY! IN A MICHAEL BAY MOVIE! And not just any character in a Michael Bay movie, a MACHINE! A MACHINE GRIEVED ANOTHER MACHINE! Why do I keep going back to Transformers?

Okay, all that being said, this is a great movie. I don’t think it’s quite as good as a lot of folks say, but it is still a very good movie, that I think could’ve worked as a template for a live action movie, but we’ll see what David Goyer, Zack Snyder, Chris Terrio and Gal Gadot will being giving us in 2016. Until then, I’ll be providing Wonder Woman a 7.9 out of 10.