Wonder Woman script review

From collider, So here’s my review…

Ehhhh,

It’s okay.


Not good, not even interesting, just okay…

When you’ve read enough of these big-budget scripts, you learn not to really expect much. Character work is always really slim, the action beats are relentless and written essentially to give CGI artists something to do and to fill seats with an audience.

The writer decisions are pretty clean. Set the piece in the 40’s. The villains are Nazis but the kind you find in a badly written comic book, rather than an interesting story. They deal with the Steve Trevor problem by making him subsidiary heroic. In other words, even though he can’t save the day ‘cause he’s not the lead, he gets in enough good licks so you don’t think him a total pussy. As for the lead, their decision is to base their character on the George Perez/Greg Potter take from the late 80’s. For the record, this particular run of the character is the best run ever. If you’re interested you can pick up the trade paperback of the first six issues of the comic. They’re spectacular, but their version, even though based on this ground-breaking revision fall flat in that it doesn’t seem to have any real depth. Just surface…

Like I said, the script isn’t complete crap, but it isn’t good either, just okay.

Amazons, Greek mythology, Nazi villains, Invisible plane, magic lasso, bullet repelling bracelets: you’d think it would be pretty straight forward; but I’m telling you from experience, trying to write a straight forward serial based action script is hard. When you try, you truly appreciate what an incredible job that Lawrence Kasdan did when he wrote the first Indiana Jones film. People have tried to repeat that formula for decades and I can’t think of another film that’s been able to do it. And this script is yet another failure.

Another problem is pretty boiler-plate and one that most writers run into when they try to translate any character that has a several decade long publishing history. It takes a steady hand to pull out the bare essential of a character and translate it into motion picture form. There are so many little neat bits and you don’t want to forget any and so you stuff in as much as possible; and then you discover that you put in too much…

All their mistakes are pretty basic.

Like I said, “Ehhhh.”