yogysic/Getty Images
How does Wonder Woman's portrayal differ between Wonder Woman and Justice League? originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Answer by Gaurav Mokhasi, on Quora:
I hadn't seen Wonder Woman so I decided to watch it right before going in to see Justice League.
On the good side
Gal Gadot is a much better actor than she lets on*. In Wonder Woman, she appears childlike in all her interactions as she takes in a new world and processes everything through an ingenuous lens.
In Justice League, there's a maturity to her mannerisms and diction which indicates that her character has aged (albeit not physically) and become wiser and a tad skeptical. This was clearly intended by the script, and it showed.
Wonder Woman also starts to embrace her role as the leader of the pack in the second half of Justice League. This works logically in-universe — she’s quixotic and heroic at the start of Wonder Woman, disaffected with the human race and jaded when we meet her in Batman vs. Superman, and gradually being nudged towards optimism and leadership by Batman in Justice League — but there’s probably an ulterior motive at play here as well. Following the success of Wonder Woman (and the relative-panning of Man of Steel and Batman vs. Superman), it would be silly for the WB/DCEU overlords to not consider positioning Wonder Woman as the main draw in their films (as opposed to Batman and Superman). These scenes might therefore have been a way for them to gauge whether the audience is receptive to this idea, and subsequently write a more substantial/primary part for Wonder Woman in the next films (at the expense of Batman and Superman) if that’s what the crowd wants.
In the world of TV (most famously in Breaking Bad), we’ve seen instances of showrunners proactively changing their original plans to have small arcs for (or even kill) certain characters based on the audience’s positive reaction to them. Studios would be wise to replicate this feedback-loop approach to course-correct their big-budget “film-universes” in a timely manner.
On the not-so-great side
- It is laughably apparent that Justice League is helmed by male directors (who are pandering to a teenage/male audience). Almost every time Gal Gadot makes an entry, you can rest assured that the camera’s going to be behind her, moving up from her legs to her butt. I found this superfluous, and hopefully we’ll have less of this in subsequent films as there’s enough to like about Gadot/Wonder Woman as an actor/character without the creators resorting to cheap tricks.
- There's an awesome moment in Batman vs. Superman (although not perhaps in Wonder Woman) where Wonder Woman smiles naughtily right in the middle of a fight, almost as if to say “are you sure you want to mess with me?” It seems like the filmmakers found out through their research surveys that this worked for fans, as they have noticeably turned up the number of similar scenes in Justice League. While the scene was great in Batman vs. Superman because it appeared nonchalant (almost throwaway), it was conspicuous enough in Justice League to make me a tad wary.
*I had previously only seen Gadot in the Fast and Furious films and Entourage, both of which are admittedly not the best platform to showcase one’s acting range.
This question originally appeared on Quora - the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world. You can follow Quora on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+. More questions:
