The decision to write this review was purely on the spur of the moment, and it was a bit of a mess; there would be a lot of spoilers and personal analysis of the story.
This may not be a work that the public can applaud. It doesn't have the blockbuster fights you can watch, and it's not even smart and inefficient enough to make me cry a few times. One is for the character, and the other is for the DCEU that I had almost completely said goodbye to; there will be a momentary awakening during the viewing process: Ah, the original taste.
So let's start with the characters.
At the opening Amazon Games, Diana, who was still young, took shortcuts and threw a "lie" in order to win. Antiope stopped her and missed the champion. This is a punishment for her and a warning. From this, the core of the whole film has also emerged clearly: what is the price of truth based on lies?
As a representative of exploring the core, the film derives the dilemma of how three distinct roles (positions) correspond: Diana's desire for love, Leopard Girl's desire for recognition and attention from others, and Max Lord's desire for success. eager.
When the Wishing Stone is thrown as MacGuffin, seducing and fulfilling their wish, they make their own choices.
I'm glad that DC still hasn't given up on the digging of the humanity in the character's divinity, the divinity in the human nature (although we have already experienced a lot of bad work before this). If the focus is only on this work, the dog food is splashed with big ink but little exploration of the male protagonist makes it difficult for the audience to understand why Diana and Steve have such a deep bond, and naturally they can't when they part. Emotional resonance. But if you look back on Steve's positioning of Diana in the first film, it is not difficult to find that he was the first ordinary person from outside the Amazon that Diana met, when Diana's belief collapsed and she was desperate for mankind. The person who reawakens her inner faith at the expense of her own life is the externalization of the purest "goodness" in human quality, the goal that Diana has always pursued and the light that guides her.
In this work, Steve returns to Diana's side as a deceased person "borrowing the dead". The "goodness" she thought she had lost came back to her side, and while Diana tried to keep it, she was getting farther and farther from the "goodness" she was seeking, and was lost in the sweet sugar-coated trap - she gradually lost her supernatural power.
Regarding the "goodness" that Diana chased, the dialogue between the two in the cabin can also be glimpsed:
"You're very good at flying, it's a gift you were born with, and I can't always be as good as you are."
In addition, whether it is Cairo and Diana working together to save children, or fighting bullets with pallets in the White House to protect each other, you can see Steve's bravery and tenacity as an ordinary person, and his unfailing love for Diana. become concerned.
So when Diana found out that everything was nothing but a castle in the air, and was forced to face the fact that her lover and the "goodness" she was pursuing would dissipate again, she was still in a dilemma and still couldn't let go of her feelings for Steve. Things to blame. But even so, she still decides to face the lie and stop Max's actions. Here, for the first time, the actions of Diana and Leopard Girl have a substantial difference.
If the object Diana has been chasing is Steve, then most of the time, the object of the Leopard Girl is Diana; she lives in a social environment where countless male gazes and disrespectful, envious of Diana's Self-confidence, freedom and perfection, longing to be Diana but quite low self-esteem, do not believe in being able to make changes on their own, and attribute all the changes to the Wishing Stone.
So when Diana decided to fight Max, she tasted the sweetness of the wishing stone and was afraid of losing the ability to change herself, so she chose to obstruct Diana; and in the process of fighting Diana, she realized that the two were far apart. Later, he completely stifled his longing and worship for Diana, and completed the transformation from becoming someone else to becoming himself. Since then, the Leopard Woman has chosen to embrace the lie, standing on the opposite of Diana (and also forming a very clever contrast with Diana's growth arc).
Diana, whose strength is declining day by day, is supported by Steve to witness the tragedy and trauma caused by Max, forcing her to face up to the fact that Steve has passed away, and make a choice between personal sacrifice and the future of the world. So the two kissed goodbye, and Diana left without looking back, with a sense of fate and sadness that mythical characters could not break.
Max Lord, played by Pascal, is also a very charismatic villain, craving fame and dignity to the point of madness; to quote a friend who accompanies him: "This is a character with identity disorder, domestic violence, and Spanish immigration to the United States. The resulting cultural barriers and social bullying forced him to try to be a true 'American,' and having a son who looks like Asian should reflect that."
But such a character still has his own weakness, which makes him also contain sadness and helplessness as a villain.
The final climax of the story did not focus on "saving the earth with one's own power", but "only human beings can save mankind" is the biggest surprise brought to me by the director, and the lectures that countless people complained about were exactly when Dai Anna really faced the lie and realized the truth at the cost of losing Steve again: self-reconciliation cannot be achieved by outside forces, and the dissolution of conflicts between people cannot be solved by any outsider, only to find what belongs to us. Only by saying goodbye to the past can we better bid farewell to the past and face the future.
In some details other than the characters, this film is also full of Easter eggs; the many echoes and connections in the lines with "Wonder Woman" and "Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice" made me elated. In addition to paying tribute to the comics of the 1960s, the contradiction between the United States and the Soviet Union in the film is also a revelation and a wake-up call to the present.
And stealth planes! I was about to jump out of my chair when I saw that part!
And when Max stood on the stage and deceived all beings with lies, the well-known Beautiful lie sounded, and the two films were intertwined with the core of "lie" over four years. An extremely subtle emotion was so fierce The ground slammed into the chest, and all the restraint collapsed like the earth wall of Cairo on the screen. And I curled up in my seat, sobbing.
This is the best gift from the pie director to DC fans.
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A second brush with friends, add some thoughts.
When Diana and her party found out the truth about the Wishing Stone, Steve offered Diana two options: one was to kill Max, and the other was to give up his wish; Diana didn't choose the latter at first, but in the end she It was a little surprising that the former was not chosen.
She hates guns as much as Batman because it brings death; she has compassion for all enemies who try to harm her, including Leopard. In essence, she is still the first innocent girl who stubbornly believes that the human heart is always good. She is the embodiment of the great love, and this kind of love is also guided by Steve throughout the two works.
Diana in the first part doesn't know the fireworks in the world, and she doesn't know her sadness and ups and downs, so she must not be able to love and save people in the right way. Steve led her through innocence, through despair, and groping for hope; for the first time, she walked from God to man, and since then Diana has the same selfish desire as ordinary people - love.
In the second part, Steve's passing was the most insurmountable knot in Diana's heart. She knows how to love someone, but she doesn't know how to let go. The power she lost is the externalized manifestation of "losing the ability to fall in love with others again in her heart"; the more she can't get out of the shadow of losing her love, the less able she is to save others, because she can't even save herself. So Steve returned, and his mission changed: to guide Diana from man to God, to love and save the world.
This kind of awareness that letting go is almost to be put to death and then born again requires forcing oneself to face the pain, embrace it, and reconcile with all kinds of imperfections in oneself to break the stagnation. That's what Diana, the "ordinary" person, has to face in the second installment: acknowledging the fact that Steve is dead and accepting her own imperfections. When she really let go, she regained her lover's ability to restore her divine power.
In the comic "Deadly Joke", the clown destroys Sheriff Gordon in every possible way just to practice that sentence: "I have proved that I am no different from other people, and it only takes a bad day to pull the most sensible person alive to lunatic. level. That's how close I am to the normal world. Only a bad day."
Similarly, in Nolan's "The Dark Knight" the Joker once said: "All I need to do is a nudge."
This is almost the direction that most of DC's works have been exploring for a long time, and in the DC movies of the past few years, the super villains are often lost to their own "bad day"; "Thunder Shazam! ", Dr. Shivana lost to the denial of his childhood parents; in this one, Barbara lost to low self-esteem, and Max lost to the "trash father". They are also just ordinary people who have fallen on the journey of life, the only difference is that no one has given them a helping hand to get back on their feet.
I have to sigh how lucky Diana was to meet Steve.
We may be attracted to superheroes because they have cool superpowers in the first place, but what really makes you fall in love with them must be the ravages of being imperfect ordinary people full of emotions, with their own weaknesses and troubles Even after setbacks, he still possesses extraordinary tenacity and love for the world. Become a man first, then become a great man.
After losing Steve twice, Diana understands human emotions, the grief of losing a lover, and transcends it; she finally understands true love and finds a way to love and save people. Likewise, she must have understood the pain of Barbara and Max, and sincerely offered them forgiveness.
Because she also loves them.
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