Despite DC’s recent track record with their superhero movies, I’ve remained optimistic towards the upcoming Wonder Woman. Gal Gadot was easily the best part about the otherwise atrocious Batman vs Superman. Her character was better developed, her costume better designed and her place in the world better established than either of her floundering male counterparts. What’s more, her movie’s trailers have all been fantastic, suggesting that DC might finally get one of these things right.
This last week, DC released a new trailer for the movie that might just be the best-looking one yet. The world seems vibrant and colorful. The characters seem lived-in and relatable. The dialog seems quippy. The action seems like a lot of fun.
The problem is that DC’s trailers have lied to me before. Remember when the Dawn of Justice trailers spliced footage of a dystopian, futuristic dream sequence of fascist Superman taking over the world between shots of him saving stranded civilians and trading blows with Batman, suggesting that they were events that actually took place within the narrative of movie? Remember when Suicide Squad doctored its trailer with non-theatrical footage to make it look like DC-branded Guardians of the Galaxy?
The company has an extensive and very recent tendency of releasing grossly misleading trailers that show us what they think we want to see while the movie itself is anything but that. Right now, Wonder Woman looks like it might buck the trend of tired, grimdark and ultimately forgettable DC movies, but I only really have the trailers to go off of. If DC has taught me anything over the course of the last four years, is that they are poor indicators of what we can expect out of the film.
Trust me when I say that lambasting DC movies is the very last thing that I want to do. I grew up watching the Burton movies and the 90’s cartoon. Despite everything Marvel has done in the last decade, they have yet to produce a movie as exceptional as Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. If the live-action division of the company can produce movies as consistently excellent as Assault on Arkham and Justice League Dark, I’ll happily line up opening night to shell out my hard-earned money for a front row seat to the action.
The problem is that they haven’t. For whatever reason, each recent DC movie has been considerably worse than the last. Despite excellent casting, singularly talented directors and exorbitant budgets to work with, none of that has come together to anything even remotely resembling a good movie: not even Man of Steel, which I still like better than most other people.
Wonder Woman is DC’s last chance to change their fortunes in the movie game. It is far enough removed from DC’s other failed projects that it might just pull it off, too. Patty Jenkins’ Monster is a vastly superior film to anything made by either Snyder or Ayer, which will hopefully translate to an elevated end-product hitting theaters this summer. Being set in World War II — so far removed from the dreadful present that has bogged down the recent films — might also give it the tonal and canonical distance it needs to break apart from the rest of the pack.
It might be enough. I hope it is. The last thing that anybody wants to do is sit through another Batman vs Superman.
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