Posted Sunday night, July 9, 2017.
On the way out of the movie theater last night, we followed a pair of couples in their thirties on a double date who’d just seen Spider-Man: Homecoming too. Sounded like they all liked it, but the snatch of their conversation I overheard was about Wonder Woman. Seems that one of the two women didn't like it.
Actually, she hated it.
She thought it was stupid.
It wasn't "real."
I don't think she meant real as in realistic and she thinks Greek gods are mere fantasy while teenagers being bitten by radioactive spiders and gaining superpowers is the sort of thing that happens all the time in real life.
I think she meant that Wonder Woman the movie is grounded in comic books and myth while Spider-Man: Homecoming is grounded in the reality of being a teenager in contemporary New York City.
They tell pretty much the same story. An innocent and naive hero sets out on a quest to do the world a great good and n the process learns that the world is a darker place than they knew and people more complicated and not necessarily as good and deserving as he/she supposed. Diana learns this lesson more deeply and with greater pain and to her own self-disillusionment, but that's because she's part of a tragedy and Peter is still living in a comedy.
Spider-Man in the Avengers series appears to be one of the comic heroes, along with Ant-Man, Doctor Strange, and the Guardians of the Galaxy, and as things are trending it looks like it's the comic heroes who are going to save the day.
Tragic heroes fail even if they survive their ordeals. Comic heroes succeed even if they die.
Spider-Man succeeds and does not die. Wonder Woman fails at the end of her movie.
It's hard to tell what Zack Snyder intends for the Justice League franchise. His Superman and Batman are tragic figures. But I can't tell from the Justice League trailer how he sees Wonder Woman. It looks like she's the most fun character. That's probably mostly Gal Gadot's doing, but maybe Snyder sees her as redemptive figure.
Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne are divided personalities, and both get lost in their other selves. Superman and Batman are identities separate from their "real" selves. That's tragic in different ways for both of them. Clark is pulled towards giving himself up to other people's idea of who he is, which is a form of self-erasure. Bruce is pulled toward giving into his own demonic impulses, to become nothing more than an agent of his desire to punish, which is a form of self-destruction. Diana is completely her own self. Wonder Woman is just a description of her in her armor. We'll see if her example and her affection can save then from themselves.
Batman has forgotten what it's like to be a hero. He needs reminding, and maybe Diana will do the reminding.
Superman inspires the other heroes and gives hope to the people of Earth. But who inspires him? Who gives him hope? I'm hoping it turns out to be Wonder Woman.
Meanwhile, over in that other universe, Peter is having identity issues too. But that's because he's fifteen years old. He's having normal trouble trying to figure out who he is and what kind of adult he wants to be and what career path to choose. It just happens that his choices include superhero. There's nothing neurotic or tragic about it, at least for now.
Both Diana and Peter are fundamentally simple characters and in a way the same character or rather, as I suggested, the same folk tale type. But Peter's life is more complex. More people in it whose interests, needs, storylines are at odds with his own. And that's why, as much as I enjoyed Wonder Woman and didn't think it was at all stupid, Spider-Man: Homecoming is more my kind of movie. It has more people in it.
I tend to like any type of movie that has a large cast of interesting and well-played supporting characters, and that's been one of the Avengers series strengths. The DC movies of the 21st Century, including Christopher Nolan's Batmans, are to my mind disappointingly underpopulated. Wonder Woman continues the trend.
Chris Pine is terrific a Steve Trevor, and he's more than the love interest. He's the second lead. But he and Gadot are pretty much all on their own. I know people were thrilled to see Princess Buttercup as an Amazon Warrior, but that's all Robin Wright’s Antiope is. She's defined by her role as Diana's trainer and the advocate for Diana's ambition. Other than that she has no character of her own. Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) is also defined by Diana's ambition. Like Antiope, she's an attitude, not a character. Steve’s team of commandos and his right-hand “man” Etta have more to do plot-wise and more to say for themselves character-wise, but Etta, delightfully played by Lucy Davis, is basically comic relief, and Sameer, Charlie, and the Chief (Saïd Taghmaoui, Ewan Bremner, and Eugene Brave Rock) are stock characters with the emphasis on character.
I found the guest appearances in Spider-Man: Homecoming by Robert Downey Jr, Marisa Tomei, Jon Favreau, and Gwyneth Paltrow distracting. (Chris Evans' cameos---Yep. Cameos plural---are a hoot.) It's the actors playing Peter's friends, classmates, and teachers who provide the fun and help create the real world Peter is part of and the world that doesn't need him to be real---that is, it's a world that exists apart from its being the background against which Peter's story is played. There's a pretty funny high school sitcom going on off screen that we get to see occasional and tantalizing snippets from, which has an excellent cast, several of whose characters are also major players in the movie's storyline. I'll save my praises for them for my formal review, but for now...everything you've heard about Zendaya stealing the scenes she's in? It's true.
The point here is that the supporting characters aren't defined by their relationships to Peter's story. His character is defined by his interactions with them and Tom Holland's performance is enhanced by his castmates'.
As for the villains, Wonder Woman’s General Ludendorff and Dr Poison are fun as homages to Captain America: The First Avenger’s the Red Skull and his pet mad scientist Dr Zola but not compelling as characters on their own. And Ares is interesting as a villain in both his guises because of the way he's played. In Spider-Man: Homecoming, the Vulture is interesting because of the way Micheal Keaton plays him and because he's played by Michael Keaton, but the character isn't dependent on Michael Keaton to make him a character.
It's hard for me to say which is the better movie. Wonder Woman is the cleaner piece of storytelling, but there's more of dramatic an comedic interest at work in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Right now I'm favoring Spider-Man, but it's a good bet that that's a simple case of Recency bias. I won't know, though, until I've seen Wonder Woman again. Of course Recency bias might affect my judgment then too. I'll report back when the time comes.
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Follow the links to the previous Wonderful Thoughts:
A comic book movie for us guys.
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