As Bland The Second Time As The First #BladeRunner2049 #review #spoilers #movie

As Bland The Second Time As The First #BladeRunner2049 #review #spoilers #movie

All pictures courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures and Sony Pictures

Oh god. Here we go again. You know, this year has been really tough for me. Outside of starting my new episodic serial Extraordinary (#Extraordinary season one out now), a third season of The Writer (#TheWriter out now), trying to get the two mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear (#KnowFear coming soon) and The Man On The Roof (#TMOTR coming soon) out, and doing a ton of other writing projects on top of blogging, I feel like a lot of the entertainment I imbibed did not live up to any level of expectations. You can scroll back through to read my Summer of Suck (#summerofsuck) reviews on all the music, TV and films that came out this summer and see that I understood precisely why the box office was in such a funk. And now with the fall/winter/holiday/award season kicking into full gear, and being just a few weeks away from Thor, The Greatest Showman, and Star Wars, I am anticipating some pretty great entertainment. Unfortunately, we can’t always get what we want. “Well, that was fine and dandy, Michael, but what about the actual film you’re here to review? You know, Blade Runner 2049?” Right? Well, is this film franchise like the energizer bunny and has plenty of juice left in the tank for great storytelling, or is it time for these movies to power down (and maybe even reboot)? Let’s find out together.

Let me first start by saying that I just recently saw the original Blade Runner in preparation for this movie because I wanted to really see this movie because I am an unapologetic Ryan Gosling fan and it looked cool and I like sci-fi. For me, Blade Runner was always one of those “gotta see” movies that you never can quite get around to actually seeing until it happens into your lap one day. So, when it was playing on cable last week, I recorded it and hurried up and watched it before my Tuesday 2049 showing. Well, I have to say that I wasn’t all that impressed with the first one and don’t fully get why so many people say that the original Blade Runner was the film that informed over half of all the sci-fi films and TV shows that came after it, even unto today. But, giving it a hard think, I am willing to concede that argument, as most sci-fi pre-80s (from what I can think of) had a much lighter tone that mimicked something like Star Wars or Star Trek, with the exception of cross-genre horror flicks like Alien. If this—similar to how people talked about Twin Peaks (that travesty of a time-waste)—influenced future filmmakers, then so be it. With that said, I will keep most of my thoughts about the original Blade Runner for later in this review, but will mention the main plot as it was pertinent to 2049.

In the original Blade Runner, a private investigator named Deckard (played by Harrison Ford) has a special job in the future (at the time, 2019) of decommissioning (read: killing; we’ll discuss this further later) old or malfunctioning humanoid robots known as replicants. This job title is known by many as a Blade Runner for reasons that I can’t remember. Actually, I’m not sure they ever explained why they have this name, but I digress. In that film, it is becoming harder and harder for people to tell the difference between the real humans and the robots, especially the ones who have escaped their slave-worker camps to dwell in the grime that is future LA. This is so difficult because they not only look human but their creator has recently figured out how to implant fake memories into them so that they can have an entire past life that they never lived. Deckard falls in love with a replicant played by Sean Young, does some stuff, then watches a replicant die. It’s all very “Oh! That’s nice.” And the one big question from that film (I actually didn’t want to include this so early in the review at first but changed my mind last minute) is: Is Deckard himself a replicant?

Blade Runner 2049 stars Ryan Gosling as one of the new Blade Runners 30 years into the future in 2049—self-explanatory. What’s interesting about Ryan’s character who is called K but really has no name, is that he is a replicant and knows that he is a replicant. He’s one of the newest models who has been commissioned by the LAPD to destroy or “retire” the older models. The older models have been deemed dangerous because they never listened and obeyed their end-users quite like the newer models. For those who haven’t seen either movie, understand that these replicants aren’t like most film robots. They live autonomous lives like regular people when they aren’t slaving away “off-world” or on other planets, I assume, harvesting their trees and fighting blue cat aliens. Still, the end-users are their workplace bosses or their sex-work clientele if they’re pleasure bots.

Back to the plot, Gosling starts the film by decommissioning Dave Bautista’s character who talks some gibberish about miracles and how Ryan or K should be ashamed for putting down his own kind. Ryan takes his eye, checks Bautista’s serial number, scans it into the police database and discovers the replicant was a field medic. He then is about to leave when he has his drone do a geo-mapping of the area and finds a large box buried beneath a dead tree. His captain orders the box be dug up and brought back to HQ. In the box they find the bony remains of a woman who was previously pregnant but died in childbirth. They think that the medic helped deliver her baby and tried to save her. The big problem that they discover when looking closer at the bones: the bones/DNA strands inside the marrow have a serial number on them. That’s right, the dead woman who had given birth was supposedly a replicant. But how could that be when replicants are robots and robots, as we know, are inorganic objects that can’t reproduce. This is the miracle the medic was talking about.

So now the police captain is intent on finding this baby (should be around 30 by now) so that she can destroy it because if the world knew this could happen, it would change everything and maybe they wouldn’t be able to use replicants as mindless slaves anymore.

Billionaire Wallace

Meanwhile, the new billionaire (I assume he’s a billionaire but they never say) tech guy behind the newest crop of replicants is Wallace played by Jared Leto in a role that’s more wasted than your uncle Dale was at the last family reunion picnic. Dale know damn well he need help. He need more help than Jack on This Is Us, but I digress. Wallace is blind because... well, there’s no real reason it seems. It’s just a character thing, and that’s fine. He believes that creating replicants to use as slaves is somehow holy because it helps to further civilization’s dominance both on earth and throughout the galaxy, “but [he] can only make so many.” He has cracked the code on how to make better replicants—something that the original creator from the first movie couldn’t do—but can not figure out the ultimate trick that his predecessor could: how to make a replicant produce on its own. Upon hearing about this supposed baby, he wants it so that he can study how it came into being.

Now the race is on between Ryan/LAPD and Wallace to find this grown child. SPOILERS AHEAD!

SPOILERS!

So, if you are sorta paying attention, by now, you’ve probably figured out that the female pregnant replicant in question is the same character played by Sean Young in the first film. Yes, this also means that the child is the son or daughter of Harrison Ford, hence his appearance in the film.

But before we get to Ford, we are introduced to a mix of other characters. We have Wallace, who, as I said, is played by Leto and is blind. He runs many companies, one of which is a farming company that has saved the world from famine. Keep this salvation-theme in mind for later. We have his righthand woman in Luv. Luv is a unique character in that she, too, is a replicant that knows she is a replicant. In fact, it weirdly seems that all replicants know they are replicants, which, to me seems to defeat the purpose of giving them fake memories. But I digress.

Anyway, Luv is not just Wallace’s eyes, but is also the main person who runs his businesses and also seems to be an enforcer. She is overly suspicious from the start, seems to always have a brooding rage just beneath the surface and is almost always seen in white. It is rather unclear whether she is also programmed/made to be a pleasure bot for Wallace, as she is the only being he has almost any interaction with and is female. Though I see nothing on his part, she almost seems to be in a state of awe-struck yearning when around him as if she is not only there to learn from him but wants to love him (as her name implies) while also envying him. The actress’ performance is unique in its subtlety.

On K’s side there is Joi. Joi is unique in that she is NOT a pleasure bot. In fact, she is not a robot at all, but is an interactive augmented reality-esque program. For those who didn’t see the movie, think of her as if your Google Home or Amazon Echo had a holographic projection of a woman. Her use is both weird and expected from K (Gosling; trying so hard not to call him by his real name) the replicant. He is, technically, a computer. She is, technically, a computer program. Thus, they complement each other. Joi is K’s live-in companion/spouse program. The funny thing about her is (and I’ll really have to speak more on this when I get to the critiquing section and talk about other reviewers calling the film sexist) that she really is solely there to cheerlead him. As just a holographic output of a program, she doesn’t cook, is not really shown cleaning, though I assume the main computer hub-attachments can do that, and can’t even sleep with him. Almost any sort of objectification of this character in other reviewers’ minds is purely fantastical and wishful hating. Oh, and even though this character has little to no influence on the film, she is the dark-haired button-nosed young woman featured in most of the advertising.

Joi

Joi’s inclusion is important only because K buys her an emanator which allows for her as a hologram to transmit anywhere that he takes this computer key thingy (so she can go with him out of the city), and to actually feel the touch of physical things but only for seconds at a time (she can feel his synthetic kiss).

Anyway, K has this memory from his early childhood (again, he never had a childhood, so it must be false, right?). In it, he is running from a group of boys who are trying to steal a hand-carved wooden horse from him. All he has, he wants to protect the wooden horse at all costs. He finds a hiding place for it in some abandoned factory then goes back to the boys to catch his beating. Well, as he is going around to other cities (the dump that is San Diego), checking for homeless kids and seeing the seedy underbelly of black market child labor, he happens to wander over to a man who had a child matching the information that he found on this supposed replicant baby from 30 years ago.

At this rundown place, while he finds nothing of import on the baby (the records have been removed from that year), he does see an abandoned factory. Yep, the same factory from his memory. He follows it down to where, in his fake memory, he placed the wooden horse. He grabs into the hiding place and... Holy crap, there’s the horse with the same date on the bottom and everything like in his memory. Now he believes that he is the replicant-born child.

Sup, Doc

He goes to this woman Dr. Anna Stelline who contracts for Wallace to help make the replicant memories. A bubble-girl like Jake Gyllenhaal, she explains how she doesn’t implant real memories but creates them from her imagination like an artist does a painting or poem. But when she says that she can examine his memories, she does say that this memory of the wooden horse that he had is a real memory. The way she says it is quite important.

So now K is losing it. He knows that he is the kid but doesn’t know what else to do. He goes home and has a strange threesome between Joi and this street hooker-replicant which a lot of critics are talking about. After reading a few non-spoiler reviews about this thing, I thought I was gonna get something on a Caligula level that is draped in weird and insatiable debauchery. Nope. The amount of outraged reviewers is stupid and their claims unfounded. It’s actually quite artistic and thought-provoking the way it is done. It reminds me more of that Robin Williams film Bicentennial Man in which all he wants to be is human.

OK, so the setup is that Joi wants to finally make real love with K, feel it, experience it as a real person. But, again, she’s just a computer program with a holographic output that only allows her to feel things in rather shifty intervals. But apparently if she overlays her holographic programming over a replicant’s body, she can interact with the real world more readily. So she essentially steps into the hooker-replicant who wears Joi sorta like a second skin. They make out with K a little and then we jump to the next morning. That’s it! That’s literally all that happens. They don’t even both get undressed. Yes, both Joi and the replicant-hooker start unzipping and taking clothes off, but you don’t see anymore. The way some reviewers talked about this scene, I thought I was going to see two sets of naked breasts overlaid atop each other, zooming in and out or two women orgasming at the same time or something that geek-boy fantasies are made of. Nope. Nothin’. It’s literally the next morning almost immediately and you get a silhouette of the replicant-hooker naked from afar. Not to be a horn-dog, but I was quite confused not because I wanted to see more nudity but because I then took eight minutes to have an inner-debate about what the hell people were so offended by. Moving on...

After K tells his boss that he’s found the natural-born replicant (doesn’t say he thinks it is him), she gives the malfunctioning replicant time to flee the city. He then goes in search of his would-be father Harrison Ford. He finds Ford in old Las Vegas in what is now supposedly a radioactive orange wasteland. After they fight for a while for literally no reason whatsoever, save to show that Ford is and can still be a badass—and I’m completely here for that—they have a chat about the kid. Ford says that the plan was always for him to leave and get as far away from his kid and the mother (Sean Young’s replicant character) as possible in order to protect them both. K never intimates that he is Ford’s son and doesn’t get a chance before Luv and her goons show up and bust up the place. Luv had been tracking him and even killed his police captain to figure out where he went after her own tracer went dark. She crushes the program stick containing Joi on it and leaves him to die.

Pleasure Bot Prostitute

K is rescued by an underground group of replicants who are set on revolution. Surprise, surprise, the replicant-hooker, played by the lovely Mackenzie Davis, is actually part of this group. A woman who has removed her right eye where her serial code would normally be is the leader. She not only has been tracking K’s investigation but she was there when the baby was born years ago. She says that the baby was a girl and that she saw it with her own eyes. And we finally get a few flashbacks to show that the doctor who makes the false memories is the real little girl, and we understand why she identified his memories as real the way she did. Somehow, either by accident or on purpose, one of her own memories got placed in his conscious almost exactly the way it happened to her when she was young and living as a homeless impoverished kid in San Diego.

CGI Sean Young 

Anyway, we get some fan service where a CGI’d Sean Young appears (seriously, they did a better job on her than when Jeff Bridges played both his young and old self in the recent Tron: Legacy) just to tempt Ford into giving up the location of his replicant child. But he has no idea where the child is and doesn’t even know the gender. Even more important, Wallace doesn’t know that his most prized memory-making contractor is the very “thing” he is coveting the most in life.

Admittedly, I lost about a minute and a half of time at this point in the movie because I was checking the time and couldn’t believe it was still going, so I missed the reason for moving Ford. Just know that they put Ford in a transport along with Luv to take him somewhere. Where, I don’t know. But I do know that it must be outside of an ocean city (maybe LA, maybe somewhere higher up or lower down the coast) as the climactic fight takes place just outside a city sea-wall in which the rain and storm-tide is crashing against the downed flying car and threatening to drown everyone.

As you can guess, K tracks them and fights with Luv one last time where she stabs him a few times. He gets the best of her and drowns her, then frees Ford and takes him to his daughter. And we get a first-time introduction between Ford and the memory doctor while K is slowly dying on the front stairs. The end.

What’s my grade? I give it a C+, B-. Again with the double grade, uggghhh! Why? Well, similar to what I thought about FOX’s The Orville, I thought that this movie and to a greater extent, this franchise, has a lot of flaws but that some of the chief flaws can be fixed by making one or two large tweaks. Where the Orville needs to pick one solid genre (either drama or comedy. It’s not good as a hybrid of both), here, both the original Blade Runner and 2049 need to be shorter.

To me, the producers who first bought the short story “Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep?” from Philip K. Dick (RIP to him. Outside of never being read, one of the worst things to happen to an author is to die before you’ve seen your work truly influence others; he died before the release of the original Blade Runner, FYI) created a two hour movie that should’ve been about fifteen minutes shorter. Blade Runner 2049, as a sequel, took an already longer-than-need-be film and added almost an entire extra hour, when in fact it should’ve been even shorter than the original. You could seriously cut a full hour, maybe hour and 15 minutes from this movie and lose almost nothing. Some fans will say, “But you’ll lose the spatial dissonance and artistic integrity and—” No, you won’t. Almost every single scene in this movie went on for too long. Consider this, I went to see this movie at 11:40am in the morning, expecting to sit through about 12 minutes of commercials and be out of this movie around 2:30. I checked my phone’s time at 2:00pm just after the Vegas confrontation with love and thought, OK, this is good timing. 

From there, there was literally still about 45 minutes of the movie left. But check this out, of those 45 minutes (excluding credits) there was only about six (seven if ultra generous) scenes left in the movie. They were: 1) K awaking to the underground replicant rebels, 2) Ford meeting and being interrogated by Wallace, 3) K seeing the Joi program advertised on a big digital interactive holo-display, 4) the climactic sequence with the flying car crashing into the water and the fight (again, you can divide this between the crash and the fight if really generous), 5) K and Ford arriving to the outside of where the doctor is, and 6) Ford meeting the doctor. Frankly, even that is being generous as I counted what should technically be one scene in Ford meeting the doctor and them arriving where she lives as two scenes. That’s six scenes. Six! That averages to nine minutes on every scene. This is already after almost two hours of the movie. The climax alone took at least 15 minutes, which still seemed like too long. And climaxes are always alotted the most time in a film outside of, maybe the opening sequence.

Look At All The Vast Amounts Of Wasted Time

Right now, some fans are calling me a smartypants and egging me on to find places to cut. For starters, everything doesn’t necessarily need to be cut but some stuff can be sped up in the editing bay. But I’d cut at least a minute from the opening convo/fight with Bautista, cut K smelling the gruel (why include it if we don’t see him eating any and he doesn’t even make a hard enough face in either way of liking or disliking what he sees/smells for us to understand his thinking). Frankly, as much as they tried to make this a love story, you can pretty much cut Joi as she is wholly superfluous to the story, which means you can cut the Joi advert scene at the end too. Again, you lose almost nothing by cutting her character completely or having her in far fewer scenes. K’s reach to be more human-like could be better explored by having more interaction with the replicant-hooker. By playing them off each other more often, you could explore how the humanity or perceived humanity of others influences our own. This was tried and failed through the Joi character. Plus, the hooker at least has an important role in bringing K in contact with the underground group which is clearly a setup for future films.

Cut three minutes out of the fight with Luv, another two from the fight between K and Ford. Speed up the scene where K is shot down by the San Diego scavengers. Speed up the scene where Wallace is introduced to the new replicant he quickly kills. And finally, speed up the Vegas scene in which he is walking around the outside of the city. Again, by making these alterations, making the characters walk faster, talk a little faster, snipping camera shots two seconds sooner, you can easily get this film down to two hours and still have a plethora of informing silence which is what the fans love so much. Silence from characters is great when used properly.

I have to jump around a little here because I had a succinct train of thought on what I would hit one point after another but lost it. So let me jump to the criticism that I thought was unfounded about this film. I thought the sexism criticism of this film was unfounded and, frankly, kinda stupid. I know I sound, yet again, like a misogynist who is trying to silence a few female critics out there, but critics of all kinds have really burned my oatmeal this year with their over-bloated infatuation with movies that weren’t worth a damn. I read three criticisms from much higher-paid film critics than me (all three women) who said that the movie was overly sexist and that if you were a woman you weren’t going to like it because you can only view everything through your righteous feminist hat, and I’m like, “What?” First off, give women some credit. Second off, this movie was hardly sexist. And third off, you don’t have to be a woman to not like this movie.

One of the critics insisted that all of the female characters in the movie were only there as playmates or additives to the male characters. One didn’t like the cutesy names of the women (Joi, Luv) and another found the “gratuitous nudity” offensive and chauvinistic. Miss me with the BS. For starters, the main women of the film got more screentime than all of the main men. Wallace was not in a scene without Luv being seen. K, for large chunks of the film, was always in a scene with a woman: Joi at home, his captain at work, Luv while out detecting, or the hooker. The only one who stands alone and has enough screentime to merit him not being considered a minor character is Ford. If anything, the female characters have more depth than the male characters and allow the men to be shaped and constrained by their opposing energy.

On top of that, the females are shown to have at least four notable archetypes, something the men aren’t given. We have Joi who is the 1950s quintessential mother posing as the Nurturer. She is there to nurture K, yet the fact that she doesn’t conform to other supposed 50s standards as cooking and cleaning like a housewife strips what little sexist criteria that would exist away from the character. We have Robin Wright’s Boss character. She is the one who drives K to complete the investigation and knows or at least thinks that she knows what is best for the world by destroying this baby. We have the replicant-hooker who stands in as our stories Jezebel of sorts who is supposed to be a temptation for our hero, but then, in a narrative twist, actually turns out to be an ally in disguise when usually all we get in films are traitors in disguise. And finally we have our rather complex Luv who stands in as our ultimate foil and personified avarice and jealous ex and strong-willed, strong-headed woman. She is literally what a lot of people think about when they think of a modern feminist as opposed to what feminist ideal-ize themselves as: she is strong, independent-thinking, takes little to no shiznit from anyone, is always well put together and is always on task. And yet, if looking for it, there is always this slight twinge of softness and vulnerability when in the presence of Wallace. It seems that she knows how valuable she is to him while also realizing that she is wholly disposable to him because she is nothing more than a creature.

As far as the nudity, gratuitous? Hardly. As I said, they didn’t even have an actual sex scene in the supposed “threesome,” and the only offense I could see from that scene is some notion that it is disgusting for a man to be thinking of having sex with a different woman while with you, but even then women do that just as much as men do. And while I saw no detailed full-frontal nudity of a woman (usually filmmakers even in modern days will have women either “grow it back” or put some kind of privates wig down there for full effect) we did see multiple shots of full-frontal male nudity in tanks. Yes, we saw the breasts of the newest replicant, but this scene hardly played as sexual, especially after Wallace gutted her. Now, I can see a complaint of racism from this with its not-too-subtle allusions to slave auctions, but sexism? No. I will concede that the giant statues of women in Vegas and the superfluous scene of Joi at the end were both unnecessary but even then I can hardly call them sexist. And even while they are playing into the idea of the male gaze in media, they also are informing of both the environment and the characters at that point in time. 

And finally, the scene in which Sean Young’s character is shot in the head was a very “eh!” situation. Yes, all of the female characters in the film die save for the hooker and doctor, but this is not an indictment on the disposable nature of women in film; rather, it is confined to the actual plot of the film. I hate when film criticism is more mired in social justice or political causes on either side that it can’t see the very nature of the film and what it is trying to say. EVERYBODY IN THE FILM WAS DISPOSABLE! How is that not clear? To point out that it is just the women is alarmist and looking for offense. Hell, K seems very much to be dying on the stairs and nobody gives a single damn at the end. Or what about all of the nameless, faceless male characters that die throughout the film. Was the San Diego dump bombing scene necessary? No. But who were killed? All men. A brigade of them. Coco in the police force is smacked in the back of his head and we can’t be bothered to care. We hardly even feel anything for Bautista’s character at the beginning and lord only knows what the hell happened to that black dude who was in, like, what, two scenes? Wouldn’t be surprised if his character’s name literally was Token.

My point is that just because you see a few naked breasts and choose to ignore the naked male penises, or see the female characters die (replaced quickly with new ones for a sequel: the hooker, the memory doctor and the rebel leader) that does not make the movie sexist. In fact, they showed women in a wide range of character archetypes, bein careful not to have most of them overlap for fear of showing these android-beings as being too human.

Now that that’s outta my system, let’s talk about the generality of the movie. I thought that this was rather boring and bland just like the first one. Do I get it? Again, yes. The thing I dislike about critics these days is that they have gotten so high on themselves and what they think about film that they carry an air of superiority that the fans do too. When I read on Indiewire how if I thought the movie was too long I, apparently, didn’t get it and couldn’t be an intellectual like the author thinks of himself, I was rather pissed. Even in gist, calling someone stupid for not liking a movie is abrasive to say the least. Yes, I called the sexism criticism stupid but that is because it is very overblown. Again, if you want an actually sexist movie watch Ex Machina, this year’s Wonder Woman or Nolan’s Inception. I thought this movie failed on a few levels.

For starters, the reason why I still gave it a fairly decent score (the B-) is because, if you take this as its own film and not the sequel to a film that is 35 years old (literally older than most of its cast), then it is actually a fairly decent movie that is thought-provoking and has a great social commentary, even though it still doesn’t fully exploit the myriad of possibilities that are intrinsic in this narrative.

If, however, you take this film as a sequel to the original Blade Runner (the C+), then I think that it fails, like most sequels do, to live up to the catch of the first one. The original Blade Runner had a ton of room for improvement but it had a few things going for it. It was an old-fashioned Noir, gumshoe detective story with a detective who meets a beautiful (synthetic) dame and has to figure out a crime. Deckard had the usual flaws of a Noir PI: he drank too much, had a weakness for women, hung out in seedy places and had an air of cockiness about him. In the film, he spouted off dime-story philosophy to try to sound deep and all the fanatics of the film took said spoutings as being deep. It was highly stylized and gave the future a dark and brooding dystopian-like aesthetic when most people were used to bright and cheery sci-fi like Star Trek. Deckard kept us informed of his thoughts at all times and possessed a certain street-tough, louse-ish charm that endeared audiences to the character. But the biggest flaw of the movie was that in this Noir detective story, very little detective work was performed. Deckard looked hard at a photo and followed a person around for a while, but that was generally it. No, administering the human test does not count as detective work. He lucked into the end after being told where the replicants he sought were (at the house of one of their makers) and ultimately couldn’t even defeat the main replicant, instead being saved by him in a huge twist. This was Blade Runner.

While Blade Runner 2049 does make one huge improvement—the character is actually seen doing real police work—almost everything else is changed or discarded in the new version. There is no self-kept log of K’s feelings or facts about the case as a whole. K, while Gosling does possess a certain natural charisma, possesses little to no charm or even foibles like Deckard had. Is he a hard drinker? A druggie? Had he tried to have some kind of strange replicant wife? When did he learn he was a replicant and how did that impact him? None of this is explored and while we are given hope for some kind of charm in the opening scene, it is quickly wave-crested by his arrival back home to Joi who, seemingly, sucks all of his joy out. Yes, an allowance can be made that he is almost devoid of any personality because he is a replicant, however, the discussion in the pop culture realm surrounding the first Blade Runner is so heavily entrenched in the “Is Deckard a replicant?” question that it almost seems like a betrayal that this new replicant isn’t allowed to have a personality. K acts cold and inhuman, not even bothering to straddle the line between human and robot. It almost seems like the movie, while trying to skirt answering the question about Deckard’s humanity as it is never answered whether he is or isn’t human, inadvertently answers it twofold: by having allowed him to show far more humanity than any replicant character so far and by allowing for him to have had sex and father a baby. Or it just brings up another intriguing question about how real all of the replicants are, like... you know what I’m getting at, right? Right? Like, do they produce... bodily fluids of all kinds?

I guess that the answer to that question is assumed but it really only begs more questions. Now I am going to delve into a little bit of real sexism here and do some mansplaining. It doesn’t take a genius to know that for years a great deal of nerds (most are male) have wanted to build life-like replicas of females (girls and women) so they wouldn’t have to interact with the real thing either out of fear or frustration. If they have the ability to one day do this, why and what sense would it make for them to create a bot that is so life-like that it even has the supposed “icky” (again, something nerds or a sexist would say) parts of a woman (or a man for that matter) as any bodily fluids outside of lubrication and saliva? Wouldn’t the replicant who got pregnant have to have had a menstruation? This would literally be a flaw for replicants in either of their two main uses: off-plant laboring and/or sex work. Even when allowing for the possibility that, like 2049 supposes, she was made specifically for that meeting with Deckard so he could fall in love with and impregnate her, it then seems almost to negate the entirety of the original film. Because the only reason Deckard meets her is because he goes there for info on the rogue replicants. We would therefore have to assume that the original creator knew of those replicants and possibly even freed them himself to give the LAPD purpose to come visit him. But again, I digress.

Back to 2049, not only is the hard-boiled noir style gone, but so too is the aesthetic style and the music palette. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved the visuals in the film which is one of the biggest reasons why it hasn’t sunken down into the D-grade territory, and I also really like what Zimmer has done with the remnants left by Vangelis on the soundtrack, but it’s far different than the original to me. Where the original Blade Runner was like looking at everything through a gray smoke-screen of futuristic decay, this film was far cleaner, far crisper and had many of its visual cues from more recent Tom Cruise sci-fi pics Edge of Tomorrow and Oblivion. In other words, it wasn’t unique. Maybe that’s just a product of the times but it felt like they were going too much for new-age cinema style rather than an update to what had been established. This, to me, is the difference between Mad Max: Fury Road and this film. Where Fury Road felt like a poet or writer going back to re-edit an old work after growing and learning newer words or how to write more poetically, Blade Runner felt like the original author had died and a new author came in to continue the franchise (example: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo/Millennium series). Yes, I know the Blade Runner films had two different directors so it should feel that way, but still, this felt more like one of those sequels from the Cloverfield universe. For those who don’t know, instead of writing actual Cloverfield sequels, they buy cool specs and tweak the concepts to fit into the Cloverfield mold. Blade Runner 2049 seems like a spec script that was co-opted into the franchise and given that name because execs thought it’d make more money.

Also, I think that one of the biggest misses of the film is its lack of good philosophy to build on from the first one. Here, we are heavy on religious philosophy, allegory and metaphor which I find to be perfectly fine, but I didn’t feel that it made a real point to challenge or say anything of value that hadn’t already been brought up in the first one. Where the first one challenged what it was to be human and how the unknown of death influences how we live (Batty’s whole struggle is not to be human or more human-like but is really with time. Death is not what he is angry about having, but the fact that he knows when he’ll die and that his time alive is so finite and wasted in-part by trying to gain more time is really what’s the most heartbreaking issue rooted in his final speeches), this one didn’t really challenge anything so much as it gave us a bunch of cool what-if scenarios to ponder. There is never a question about K’s humanity neither from him nor anyone else because we already know he is a replicant. And the idea of dying for something being noble is really only prevalent at the very end of the film. But even that idea is not thoroughly realized because there is little to no ponderance of what death truly is, truly means and how it frames our lives. There is no pull for him to become more human-like, nor does there really seem to be a thrust for him to shy away from any unprogrammed humanity. And even his pursuit of the truth and the idea of reality being an easily manipulated fiction is hardly breathtaking. We’re just sort of seeing this mystery unfold.

Even more, there really isn’t a great big challenge of the concept behind the baby. Admittedly, the critique about the film being sexist almost made me ignore the very question that the film never actually poses itself, but is hidden within its layers: Is the child actually a good thing? Knowing Wallace’s intent for the birth algorithm, is it OK for us to actually root for him? Because he wants to make more slave replicants in order to expand humanity’s domination throughout the universe, make humans’ lives better. If you side with the replicants, that’s not a good thing. On the other hand, what would be the upside to replicants becoming every bit like humans both for humans and for them? In other words, what is the point to something gaining humanity? This question runs counter to the one most usually asked in cinema: What would it be like to gain the power of god?

Finally, to the idiots who insist that because someone may not like something they automatically don’t get it, give me a break. I got how this story was an allegory/metaphor for God, the devil and Jesus’ birth. I understood that, as it was so blatant it almost got on my nerves. For those that didn’t see or get this, consider some of these things if and when you re-watch the film. Luv is, essentially, Lucifer (see how they share the first two letters of the name). At first, I thought that the name was silly too and you may think that my inference just off the name is silly if you didn’t see any of these religious undertones. OK, consider this: there is almost not a single scene in which Luv is in where light doesn’t play a role. For instance, when she and K are walking through the Wallace Industry archives, notice that the lights are always crawling on the walls and often toward her. At first, the BR fan might easily dismiss this as an ode or nod to the scenery during the Deckard test in the original, but this is done on purpose in multiple scenes through the movie. Why? Because Lucifer is the “Morning Star (angel),” the “Bringer of Light.” Hell, even when she enters the captain’s office, the first thing she says is something about the light and turns it on. She always wears light colors or white to try to symbolize her purity though she has none and has to stand through all of Wallace’s musings on angels and creation.

So if Luv is Lucifer then that, by default, makes Wallace God or at least some form of god (argument can be made that the original replicant maker from the first film is actually god in this interpretation). With that in mind, his blindness actually makes sense as an allusion to God’s supposed blindness to the plight of his creation. Yes, the replicants are suffering but why would he care? He sees what he is doing as necessary for the universe.

You have the child as Jesus—funny how this is 30-some years after the baby was supposedly born, right? She is a doctor so you know she is smart. She was also raised in a rather tough upbringing. Biblical scholars believe that Joseph either left the family or died sometime in Christ’s youth, hence why Ford’s character is not around. She’s born to a “virgin” replicant or someone who, for all intents and purposes, should not have been able to give birth, and blah, blah, blah. Look, there’s more allusions in there but I am running out of time and this review is already too long.

Ultimately I feel like they have made two fairly lackluster films in this franchise, both of which supply great visuals and music but are sorely lacking in excitement. While this film made for a coherent plot, it did nothing to win over new audiences. I think that this idea has, to a great extent been squandered and almost deliberately so. Realize that we still haven’t seen any off-world stuff, nor any place outside of the US west coast and have no idea why they speak the language they speak. There is so much untapped potential here that this could literally be a shared cinematic universe all itself, and yes I am still including the artistic integrity of each picture. You don’t have to remove the philosophy, weird parts or even a lot of the slow, brooding silence, just add in more action and let the replicants and the humans have slightly more personality, then give each film to a visionary and explore off-world colonies, other places in the world, hell even show a full-on war rebellion or something. There’s so much to do here. Yet, for some reason I feel like in the last few years we are being punked by Ridley Scott. As one of the exec producers on this, it seems as if he’s tried to ruin his own legacy of decent/good/great films by going back to retread them in some way. He did it with Alien, he’s doing it here. If I hear anything about them trying to do a sequel or prequel to Gladiator, so help me God...

Should you see it? Eh! If you were a fan of the original Blade Runner, then chances are you probably already have seen it. I can’t say that you, as a new fan that knows nothing about this film should go see it. Gosling fans feel free, Ford fans feel free, but again, it might not be satisfying after nearly three hours of runtime. It’s just an OK movie.

What do you think? Was I too hard on this film? If you haven’t seen it, do you plan on going now? If you have seen it, what did you think of the film? If you think it’s a masterpiece then tell me how. And do you think K actually dies at the end or no? Would you be willing to see a sequel? Let me know in the comments below.

Check out my 5-star comedy novel, Yep, I'm Totally Stalking My Ex-Boyfriend. #AhStalking If you’re looking for a scare, check the YA novel #AFuriousWind, the NA novel #DARKER, #BrandNewHome or the bizarre horror #ThePowerOfTen. For those interested in something a little more dramatic and adult, check out #TheWriter. Seasons 1, 2 and 3 are out NOW, exclusively on Amazon. Stay connected here for updates on season 4 coming summer 2018. If you like fast action/crime check out #ADangerousLow. The sequel A New Low will be out in a few months. Look for the mysterious Sci-fi episodic novella series Extraordinary on Amazon. Season 2 of that coming real soon. And look for the mystery novels The Knowledge of Fear #KnowFear and The Man on the Roof #TMOTR coming this fall/winter. Twisty novels as good as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train, you won’t want to miss them. Join us on Goodreads to talk about books and TV, and subscribe to and follow my blog with that Google+ button to the right.

Until next time, “What do androids dream of?”

‘What every thing dreams of: something better.’

P.S. You can’t tell me that if you’re a fan of Blade Runner you don’t like that sign-off. OK, it probably won’t work well as my ultimate sign-off for everything, but it works here, doesn’t it? No? You don’t like it? Not thought-provoking enough? Fine. Whatevs! My feelings aren’t hurt. Nope. I’ll think of a better sign-off next time. 

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Third Highest-rated Comic Book Movie Ever? Why? #WonderWoman #Review #comicbookmovie #Spoilers

Third Highest-rated Comic Book Movie Ever? Why? #WonderWoman #Review #comicbookmovie #Spoilers

So, I just saw Wonder Woman (#WonderWoman), and after reading online that it was not only good but that it was the third highest-rated comic book movie ever, I had high expectations. However, I also had to temper them knowing that this was another DCEU film and that they are three films deep into this thing and it has yet to get on the right track. But were the critics right? Did DC and Warner Bros. Finally right the ship, or is all of this talk of this film being good total bunk? Keep reading to find out.

Let me first start by saying that I absolutely called this a year or even more ago (it was either in a Suicide Squad review or in my Batman v. Superman review, I can’t remember. Although, now that I think about it, I’m not sure I ever posted my Suicide Squad review. I’m too busy to remember these things, and this parenthetical is already running too long, so...). What, you ask, did I call? The good movie reviews. I knew this was going to be a movie that you had to judge not just for what is on the screen but for all the things going on outside of the film, mainly politics and big money. I also called that this would be the first “successful” DC film as far as critics go. And, I even called some of the headlines that literally read: “Wonder Woman Shows the Men How to Do It” and “Of Course A Woman Would Save the DCEU.” OK, those are paraphrased or off by a few words, but I guarantee you can find those types of headlines all over the internet and in various publications. Remember, I called this before ever seeing the movie because I knew, regardless of whether the film was good or not, it was going to get a majority of good reviews. Why? We all know why, but before you push me aside and say I’m being sexist, hear two things: first, know that I’ve been pretty right on a lot of my predictions about the DCEU (still don’t know why we call it that instead of the DCCU) even dating back to Man of Steel, but that was before I had this blog and you couldn’t possibly know that so... Second, while I have been known to make plenty of remarks that can be construed as sexist, I am not, in any way, against female superheroes nor against Wonder Woman. And third—or, wait, did I say just two things? I meant and second part deux, while most of my criticism has nothing to do with the superhero being a woman, some of it does have to do with the fact that I still would like to write (read: reboot) the DC universe and do some Superman movies and a Justice League movie of my own, and know that the success of this current iteration may stand in the way of that if they decide to continue in perpetuity. Gahh! OK, we ready? We all good? Let’s get to it.

Do not believe the hype, Wonder Woman has fixed almost nothing in the DCEU. And, while I hate to say this let’s get this out of the way first before I level my criticism: yes, most of the reviews stem from the fact that she is a woman superhero, which has caused many critics and fanboys to overlook some of the film’s glaring mistakes. There, now with that said, let’s take the sexism blinders off and start looking at the film through the lenses of being the “third highest-rated superhero/comic book movie of all time” and being a “DCEU film.” We’ll start with the same criticism that some feminist might say to me: “Oh, if it was a guy, you’d love the film.” No, I would not. In fact, I know this unequivocally because it is essentially the mash-up of two other male-driven superhero films: Man of Steel and the first Captain America. Don’t get me wrong, I really liked Captain America, however, a lot of people didn’t and I understand why. But we can’t take some of the same criticisms we had of those films and completely ignore them here.

Women Warriors! Loved The Look. Story Is Flawed

For starters, at the beginning of Man of Steel and Wonder Woman, we see life as it is on the planet/island/realm from which our hero/heroine originates. I like that Themyscria is given some screen time, however, unlike in Man of Steel, I never quite felt as immersed in the island and its culture. To me, unlike in Man of Steel (which, I thought Krypton was one of the best parts of that movie), we don’t get as much world building and what we do get feels lackluster. OK, there’s some kind of hierarchy and they spend all their time training and fighting all day, but that’s about it. Not only do we not get great world building, the rules of the film are hardly defined here. I know, they did that little cartoon history lesson (again, just like in Man of Steel) to show how the island came to be, but everything went so fast, I only half-paid attention.

The rules? Right. As I was saying, while they are on the island I never get a full understanding of who the Amazons are. So, in that history story we have the gods, right? And we have the people. Did Zeus make a secondary race between gods and people in order to keep people from killing themselves and that’s what the Amazons are? Again, if we are just talking about the film and NOT the comics which are filled with lore and answers for every question, the film doesn’t properly answer this, because if they are just normal people, then how do they live so long? Does that island-protection spell also have something to do with keeping them ageless? Or has time stopped on the island? I just, I don’t understand. Assuming that they fought this great war back when Greeks ruled the world, that would make the island and every inhabitant thousands of years old, including Diana, right, because Zeus is dead and the last thing he did was make Hippolyta’s clay daughter Pinocchio to life. And if it wasn’t during Greek reign, then when (and why are they dressed akin to Greeks)? Or does the film technically start during ancient days (remember, historians, Greeks ruled even before Romans so we’re talking 3000 years ago here) and Diana slowly grows over the course of 100s of years? And for that matter, since she is the only child on the island, how is she the only one aging?

I hope by this time you’re starting to see that a lot of my criticisms really aren’t going to be sex-based. Granted, you can say that this criticism was a nit-pick but it really confused me because of Batman v. Superman. In that movie, Diana is shown once again not to have aged since World War I. And while we know that Captain Steve Rogers in Captain America was put into a deep freeze that the super-soldier potion allowed him to live through into modern day, we are given no standard by which Diana ages neither on the island nor in the world of man. However, maybe she returns to the island in-between the end of Wonder Woman and Batman v. Superman, which could explain her absence during Man of Steel. If we think of it that way, then she only pops out every few years or so as a vacation into man’s realm, just so she can be seen on camera because the island itself is magic.

I wish the island criticism stopped there but it doesn’t because while I can piece together how Steve Trevor just happened to fly through the island’s barrier after it had remained hidden after however many years—Diana smacking her arm bracelets and sending out that power wave—I can’t, for the life of me figure out why it was so easy to kill these women. Again, what the hell are they? If they’re gods, how weak of them. If they’re demi-gods, same thing. If they’re just regular humans on a magical island, then shouldn’t the island have more magical stuff that could heal them from things like gunshots and whatnot? I know, a gun is a gun, but you see them all training for so long, so many years, and suddenly the slaughter is on when a tiny brigade of men come? Really? Really? So, in other words, ladies, you can work your ass off, get all the education you want and could possibly ever need, do everything right for years and as soon as you’re up against a man for anything, you’re never going to be good enough? Maybe that is the artistic point they’re trying to make there, an ironic commentary on real-life women routinely getting passed up for positions they are qualified for, and if it is, then I can accept that. But I also wish they had done it in a better way that set clear boundaries as to what these women can and can’t do. With Superman, while you’ve always had some abilities ambiguity, Krypton has always been portrayed as a planet with a bunch of regular people. Superman, therefore, gets his powers from our yellow sun and hasn’t been born with them. The whole Wonder Woman movie (before the end, which I could have guessed even if I didn’t know anything about the comics), I kept thinking to myself after that beach scene, “Why don’t they just shoot her? Just shoot Wonder Woman. Two to the gut and this’ll be over.” And not at her like all the gunmen did, but actually shoot her. Catch her from the back or in the leg. Her shins may have been guarded but her thigh was out and easily shot. But I digress.

Moving on, in this opening we get the textbook definition of, “Well, it’s not OK when I do it, but you can do it all you want?” that men and women have complained about to each other since the dawn of this current society's feminism. For years, we’ve heard a chorus of people say that little boys should be admonished for wanting to rough-house and seek out rather violent ways of expression. We’ve had articles on how little boys playing warriors or cops and robbers, or playing violent video games is wrong and it reinforces “the patriarchal archetype of boys wanting violence,” yet in this film, Diana explicitly wants violence as a child. Unlike, say... Rey in Star Wars, she doesn’t just want to go out to explore beyond her island home, she is looking to conquer. She is born and raised in a fight culture that glorifies battle and whose sole purpose is to train and ready themselves for a war against man and Ares.

Now, while this criticism is overtly sexist, I have to also mention that some of the critics and fans didn’t like the first Captain America because of Steve Roger’s lust for war. Even though he wanted to go to WWII in order to help his brothers, some saw it as a lust for violence, which is the same thing Diana has here and throughout the movie. There literally is no other motivation, save for to murder.

Speaking of murder, this movie has the same exact problem that made so many critics hate Man of Steel: the death toll. Granted, maybe at this point in time we’ve gotten so used to our heroes killing people that we’ve become numb to it, but if that is the case, then I contend that we need to all go back and re-view Man of Steel in this light because it could change the entirety of how we view the film. In a universe where both Batman and Superman kill (two superheroes who were always determined not to kill at any cost), I thought maybe Diana would take the lead here and show the boys how it was done. But no. Yes, Diana is a warrior but again, why is it OK for her to kill at will and cause destruction but not any other superhero? We are shown a few scenes in which she slices the throats of some of the Nazi soldiers; she shield-bursts through a sniper’s tower (very similar, albeit fewer victims, to Superman and Zod bashing into buildings), and stabs through the guy who she thought was Ares all Terminator 2 style (remember that final scene where T-2 stabs Arnold through, then Arnold has to pull the rod out? Totally reminded me of that). And this, of course, is after the beach slaughter.

 Granted, it’s war and people do die, but the whole point of superheroes was for them to be better than regular heroes like soldiers and firefighters. Batman didn’t kill Joker, even though he was evil incarnate. Superman wasn’t supposed to kill Lex Luthor even though, again, he was a bad guy. Wonder Woman? Eh! Kill whoever you want, they’re just Nazis.

And as if that weren’t bad enough, we have to hear her run around the entire movie talking about how badly she wants to “kill” Ares. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the word “kill” in a superhero movie that often, and especially not coming out of the mouth of the superhero. The villain, sure. But the hero (heroine) having a killgasm like that? No. As an aside, I thought this was actually bad writing as they couldn’t come up with another word other than kill? Even Deadpool had other ways of saying what he wanted to do.

And one more thing about the murder rate in this thing, that end scene where she goes all hell-hath-no-fury on all of those soldiers either proves my killgasm point or is the worst, most blatant, “See? They’re really not dead and all is well,” cover-up since Batman v. Superman’s line about “luckily downtown is empty and everybody’s gone home for this death battle with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Doomsday.” This woman was lifting up tanks and exploding through buildings just a scene ago. You’re telling me that when she loses her cool and can’t control her rage, her punches and kicks aren’t killing soldiers? Give me a break.

Then there are the characters. Steve Trevor is... sigh. To me, he was very one note. I liked the scene in which he and Diana are talking in the baths and he talks about his father. And I also liked the boat scene (though, I have gripes about that one too), but other than that, I found a lot of his scenes ushering on the movie. There was a lot of, “OK, Diana, we have to go. No, we can’t do that, we have to be here. Now we have to be here.” It felt more like he was a theater-house usher than a real character. And that dancing scene felt charmless to me. I don’t know, maybe I’m just not a fan of Chris Pine as he is also just OK to me in Star Trek. So, I’ll leave it at that. I suppose I can buy the romance between them. And also, what was he? I missed it when he said his rank and all of that. I know he’s a spy, but was he supposed to be American working with Brits? It just stood out because everyone else in the film has a thick accent, then he doesn’t. Confusing.

Anyway, the other characters were fine, albeit forgettable. I did find the scene between Diana and the Native American ironic, but I’m not going to waste time explaining why. But moving to the villains, well... sigh. To me, they were actually quite useless, almost as useless as most Marvel villains. I felt like Danny Huston’s character (can’t even remember his name he was so pointless; the general dude) was literally thrown into the movie as a red herring for the sake of having a red herring. Look, I don’t know the history of that particular character, so when I’m watching the film I want something explained to me. Why the hell is he taking that pill/capsule? Who was he really? And how did that capsule “restore him” or whatever? You see what I mean when I say red herring? He was there solely so you could think he was Ares. For a film that was touted as “reinvigorating the comic book genre,” I found this to be wholly unoriginal and uninspired. I didn’t even see the point of his evil, which is really hard to do with a character that is a Nazi. In comparing him to Red Skull, we at least knew that the red guy had other plans that superseded even the Furor’s and would continue regardless of what happened with the war. Here, does Huston’s character want to rule the world, is a psychopath that likes killing people for the sake of it, or what? He doesn’t seem to sway strongly either way. He doesn’t even seem to have a seething hatred for the enemy, he’s just... there, because why not?

Again, Huston’s character is there for the sake of throwing you off to think that he is Ares. A braver, smarter idea would have been to make Ares’ character genderless or gender-ambiguous in the opening story so that then they could have the doctor lady be suspected as Ares, only to have it be the British bloke or vice versa. I have not and will not ever understand women (and some men) who argue against a female superhero having a female villain to fight. The question of “why can’t they fight a man” is stupid to me. Yes, they can fight a man but when thinking about casting a film and the roles in a film, there are so few female villains, you’d think that Wonder Woman would have a strong one. Especially considering that villain roles are so often described as being some of the best, juiciest roles. Cate Blanchett looks absolutely wicked in the Thor: Ragnarok trailers and the female villains on ABC’s Once Upon A Time are so sinfully good. If the chemist woman was the main villain throughout most of the film, it would have made for a braver narrative. Instead, they had her as a secondary villain character, then are foolish enough to not even have a single scene of meaningful interaction between her and the heroine. And if you wanna talk patriarchy, Wonder Woman, after being raised in a matriarchal society, still somehow sees the evil woman as the delicate, helpless victim. And she spares her. Are you serious? “Yo, I’mma kill all these dudes because, you know, men are disposable and that’s what soldiers do, they die, but as soon as I see one woman, I’ve got to come to my senses and claim that love defeats all.” How is this any different than that Man of Steel family-at-the-museum scene that so many people hated? Seriously? The only difference is that Wonder Woman, unlike Superman, gets to actually say her piece on why she believes the villain is wrong, and uh... of course, it’s got somethin’ to do with love. But with that said, I believe Ares was pretty good for the tiny bit of screen time he had as the revealed villain. In fact, I dare call the performance inspired. Were he to have stayed around he could have been DC's Loki, but instead we are left with the sniveling Lex to fill that position, so... yeah.

While I thought that the linear storytelling was good this time around as opposed to Man of Steel’s time jumps, I still felt that the pacing was off here. There were huge swaths of this movie in which nothing of importance really happened. How many scenes do we honestly need of Trevor explaining the ravages of war to Diana? And the climax felt clunky and more distracting than anything as they switched back and forth between Wonder Woman and the others trying to stop the planes. It felt like they didn’t stay with one for longer than a minute at a time, which more so distracted than intensified the tension. It felt very much like how they kept cutting away from the Doomsday battle to show Lois being useless and the military being useless in Batman v. Superman. Hell, even the scene in which they’re trying to dress her goes on for too long. I can’t believe that a shopping montage went on for too long, yet it did. It blows my mind. But again, I digress.

Now, there are a ton of other nitpicks that I can make that I’m sure will one day be pointed out on CinemaSins, so I’ll just run through them here. First off (and this is definitely a personal nitpick), why do all of the superheroes now suddenly have their costumes just lying around? And more importantly why are the costumes always the exact colors that just happen to align with America? “Oh, we’re going to fight on the Allied side of WWI? I just happen to have a red, white and blue costume ready to go (I know it red, gold and blue but you get the point). Oh, I’m Superman and I’m from another planet? I just happen to have a blue jumpsuit with a red cape. How coincidental those are American colors.” Face-palm! Again, this movie was touted as being refreshingly new and invigorating to the superhero genre, yet... Just like in Man of Steel we get a, “Noooo!” scene at the death of a key character; just like in Man of Steel we get a strange apocalyptic vision/dream sequence in which the real villain shows our hero/heroine the world that could be (sans the cool skull sinkhole); we literally even get the same shot/plot point of a character long-diving off of a structure and going into water (Jor-el did it in Man of Steel, Diana does it on the island to go save Trevor; we have no hidden identity (Trevor was always meant to know but he then proceeds to tell everybody who will listen what kind of a wack job he’s traveling with); we get the destruction of a small town (like Smallville); we get a clip of our heroine walking through fire at the end (like when Clark saved the oil rig); we get an alley fight to show that Diana can still be a badass even when dressed in office clothes (ala Captain America); we get someone dying in and/or exploding in a plane (ala Captain America and Man of Steel with Meloni’s character being sucked into the phantom zone/drive thing); we get literally the same scene but in reverse in which the main villain is dressing for the final fight (in Man of Steel, Zod shakes off his spacesuit armor piece by piece to reveal an all-black under-suit, whereas in Wonder Woman Ares assembles his armor piece by piece into an all-black exo-suit); just like in Man of Steel, our hero/heroine must destroy/kill/defeat the last remaining person of their race (Zod and Kal-el are the last remaining Kryptonians; Diana and Ares are the last remaining gods, though Diana is a demi-god), and finally we get no clear definition of a code of honor or what the hero lives by. And this is still discounting the flaws that her powers, for the most part, go undefined (so, she can be cut by a regular blade but never sustains any other damage? I mean, her hair isn’t even tousled at the end); Zeus’ powers also go somewhat undefined (so, a god can just make other gods without doing the, uh... you know? Or is it only demi-gods he can create from virtually nothing?); and she essentially, has the exact opposite origin of Superman (so, where Kal-el was the only child born from natural “make-sex” ways, bucking the trend of genetic engineering, Diana is the only child engineered from clay and given life by a god. Yes, it takes a very subtle amount of massaging, but they’re virtually the antithesis of each other). But this is one of the highest-rated comic book movies of all time? Then what is Man of Steel?

What’s my grade? I give it a slightly higher grade than Batman v. Superman, a C+. Listen, there is no way that this movie is anything other than average. Was it OK? Yes, but it does not deserve to be rated as one of the top three great comic book movies of all time, and that did, unfortunately, influence my grade. If we’re even going there, the general list should start off in no particular order: Superman, Superman II, The Dark Knight, The Avengers, Batman and Iron Man. But because it’s Wonder Woman and there’s a woman lead, there’s a glossiness here. To me, the gloss is made even worse by people saying that it’s the first female-led superhero movie, forgetting about Elektra and Catwoman. Hell, that is almost as big of a slight as those Hollywood execs who, every three years or so, claim “women-led films don’t make money” forgetting about Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, What Ever Happened To Baby Jane?, Misery, Aliens, Sixteen Candles, The Hunger Games, a ba-thousand horror films in which women play both canon fodder and heroine routinely and on and on. And the worst thing is that I know this will happen just the same when Black Panther comes out. Suddenly, everyone is going to forget about Blank Man, Meteor Man, Steel and Spawn, and claim, “Oh my god, it’s the first black superhero.” No, he is not. No, she was not.

I will, however, give them some credit because they did improve on some of the humorous elements, although that boat scene between her and Trevor almost epitomized the argument that some men and boys make against rape culture claims. Dressing how you want is one thing and I wouldn’t stop you from doing that, but don’t badger a guy to sleep next to you, talk about sex in innuendo fashion or otherwise, and then expect nothing to happen or for him to not have mixed signals. It just really made me feel uncomfortable because it’s telling both young girls and boys that courting/engaging in that kind of behavior is fine when neither of you should be putting yourself in a situation where something you don’t want to happen could happen. The conversation should literally have been, “Why don’t you want to sleep right next to me?” “Because you’re a woman and I’m a man. Period.” There’s nothing to argue about there. Don’t try to test him or his manhood by challenging him to do what you want, but I digress. I thought that the CGI was adequate and the acting was OK. Yes, I do still think that Gal has a lot of room for improvement but I thought she was bolstered by the cast of bit players and middling stars. Nobody in the cast was such a huge star that they outshined her just by being on the screen, not even Chris Pine who could often melt into the background.

While I will say that it is criminal that Patty Jenkins hasn’t gotten another film to direct since Monster, after watching this, I actually thought that this was the picture Zack Snyder wanted to direct more than anything. A lot of people kept saying after Batman v. Superman that Batman was more his style because of the darkness, but Wonder Woman was definitely his thing. If you look at the film, it has literally every hallmark of a Snyder film. It had the opportunity to be as dark as it wanted to be because it was a war film; had the blood and sandals style of 300; used the same type of slow-mo shots; followed a warrior who literally could kill anyone she wanted to; had a group of people protecting themselves from the encroaching evil that lurks just beyond their borders ala Dawn of the Dead; and like that Dawn of the Dead movie, has a band of misfits that come together to survive as they also wade through dangerous territory. You look at all of his films and he’s always done better with a bigger cast, rather than focused on one star and a bunch of supporting characters, whether that be in Dawn, 300, Guardians of Ga’Hoole, Watchmen or Sucker Punch. Focusing on darker world building was always his thing. That, however, does not make me more hopeful for Justice League.

I still think that it is as I predicted when I said that Wonder Woman would be accepted by most: Justice League will return to mediocrity for critics, there will not be a Justice League part 2 (at least not for a while), there won’t be a Man of Steel 2, they’ll continue for two more sequels with Wonder Woman, and they’ll have only one other successful character, but all the other plans will languish in development hell (currently, my bet on the other character is Aquaman but I reserve the right to see Justice League before calling it). In fact, I believe that the reason why they even chose WWI was to specifically distance Wonder Woman from the rest of the shared universe. They did everything they could to make it its own film completely apart from the JL universe. Yes, some will argue that they stayed true to the roots by using one of the world wars, but they could’ve chosen any war. The world has been in wars and conflicts ever since the fall of the British empire. They could’ve chosen the Vietnam or Korean war or et cetera, but we got WWI, and I partially think another reason the film rated so high is because critics love war films. For whatever reason, war films tend to almost always rate extremely high.

Just remember, folks, that these movies are based highly on the box office and while Marvel has cranked out the billion-dollar films, DC has yet to get one. But again, take everything I’m saying with a grain of salt as I always wanted to do a Superman and Justice League trilogy which look less and less likely as they keep on this path. Still keeping hope alive to write the Captain Planet film, though. Oh, and no, WB does not get credit for giving this film to a woman to direct. No congratulations for doing what you’re supposed to do, but I’ll definitely look at you sideways if you don’t at least add a female writer to Allan Heinberg for the sequel.

Oh, and just before I get outta here, I’d like to say that I was a little disappointed in the soundtrack as it played in the movie. I expected a little more, but... I don’t know. I don’t understand why they didn’t go with Junkie XL for this. Yes, I know he is doing Justice League, but he worked on WW’s theme for Batman v. Superman, it just seemed like he’d do all of the films and take over for Zimmer. I don’t know. Haven’t listened to the soundtrack raw and on its own yet, so I’ll probably be wowed by it there but it didn’t pull me further into the movie.

What do you think? Have you seen Wonder Woman, and if so, how did you like it? Did you see some of the many similarities between it and the other movies I mentioned? Do you think it is really deserving of the title of one of the greatest comic book movies of all time? And do you think this bodes well for the rest of the DCEU? Also, do you think this iteration of Wonder Woman can fly? Because I’m really confused by that. In BvS she was about to leave the city on a plane, right? But in this film, it looked like in the final battle she might have been flying a few times, or just had some serious hang time on her jumps. Anyway, let me know in the comments below.

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Until next time, “We’re gonna solve this thing with love, damn it! And if that doesn’t work, we’ve always got fists.”

P.S. So let me get this straight, Batman’s got a gun and loves running people over; Superman enjoys snapping a neck or two; and Wonder Woman’s got a sword and shield that she totally uses to slice through necks and stab through people, yet we’re only outraged by the first two? Really? Hmph! Interesting.

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