Marvel and Disney have created a sort of perpetual motion machine, churning out intellectually spare but critically and commercially successful films based on beloved comics. But DC has done them one better, creating a morally serious cinematic universe devoted to an interesting question: How would humanity respond to the discovery that gods walk among us?
Wonder Woman, like Man of Steel before it, tackles that question largely from the god’s view of things. Diana (Gal Gadot), a demigod raised by the Amazons on the island of Themyscira, was raised to believe that mankind was inherently good until the god of war, Ares, corrupted him in an effort to sour Zeus on his inferior creation. Diana, trained in the art of war for the purpose of ending Ares’s wickedness, enters the fray after war comes to Paradise Island in the form of WWI and Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), an American spy carrying news of a German super-poison back to the Brits.
Throughout, Diana is defined by her naiveté, her unfamiliarity with the World of Man. This serves a comedic purpose: The scenes of Diana trying on Edwardian-style outfits while commenting on their fitness as combat garb and trying to get through a revolving door with a sword and shield earned numerous laughs, earning goodwill from critics leery of the serious tone that DC mastermind Zack Snyder has set.
But it serves a thematic purpose as well: Diana simply does not understand this world or the people in it. She’s hopelessly naive, committed to a children’s fable about the nature of man. Steve Trevor helps her understand her folly and see that maybe humans are not prone to violence or evil because of outside forces but because of the choices they make. Wonder Woman, then, is an examination of the idea that gods may be able to save men, but are unable to redeem man.
The broader question, of course, is whether or not man wants to be saved, an issue considered in Snyder’s Man of Steel. Though much derided by those seeking a campier incarnation of Krypton’s last son, Snyder’s film took seriously the idea that an alien with godlike powers would destabilize humanity.
Pa Kent (movingly portrayed by America’s Dad, Kevin Costner) understood the dangers such a revelation would present — to his boy, to those who would fear and try to harm him. Whether or not Clark would be “good” or “bad” was irrelevant to the fact that he existed, that he proved not only that man was not alone in the universe but also that he was inferior.
This is why, in the prologue of Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, a title card informs us that we are witnessing Metropolis’ introduction to “the Superman” — not “Superman.” Though one may be tempted to dismiss this as little more than pseudo-intellectual frippery, one would be mistaken: It’s the whole point of the movie. Batman v. Superman is an examination of how the most powerful men in the world would respond to their displacement at the top of the food chain.
Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) is a psychotic billionaire trapped in J.J. Watt’s body; Lex Luthor (Jesse Eisenberg) is a psychotic billionaire trapped in Mark Zuckerberg’s. One is driven by the generalized need to protect humanity, an urge created when his parents were brutally murdered in front of him; the other, by a more personalized need to maintain his own place in the world, to ensure that no one can hurt him ever again. Neither man can be faulted for wanting a silver bullet to take down the alien whose appearance coincided with the destruction of Metropolis and the deaths of thousands, even if they were, ultimately, misguided.
Speaking of misguided, we come to Suicide Squad. A cinematic train wreck, David Ayer’s film still had an interesting idea at its core: How would the government respond to the appearance of the Superman? The answer, unsurprisingly, was “in a way that makes things worse.”
An interesting idea can’t make up for the bizarrely incompetent way in which Suicide Squad unfolds. But an interesting failure in its mold is almost always more memorable than bland competence such as Ant-Man or Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. II — even if bland competence seems to be what critics prefer.