***WARNING: MAJOR SPOILERS AHEAD. IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN WONDER WOMAN AND WISH TO AVOID SPOILERS THEN PLEASE READ NO FURTHER.***
For it’s overt simplicity Wonder Woman is a ridiculously complex movie, full of big ideas stashed away in the dialog and cinematography that leap out at you like angry bears. Yes, bears, because if the idea of Woman as God Killer isn’t enough raging cerebral intellectualism to get you going, how about this? No God made us the way we are, and no God will save us from ourselves; we are on our own.
While I don’t want to lay this all at the feet of Director Patty Jenkins, I must, and it’s brilliant. This very secular humanist idea isn’t just a theme to be discovered here, it is the central thesis driving the entire story that in my opinion even overshadows the blazing feminist critiques of patriarchal culture that abound from the start.
It begins with Diana (Wonder Woman) as a child learning the mythological underpinnings of Amazon culture and their role in the cosmos as harbingers of peace. She learns that their old enemy is Aries, the God of War, who corrupted humanity in an effort to destroy the creation of the Gods. This forms one of the pillars of Diana’s belief system, that her people are there to thwart the divine intervention of a God. But, who can challenge a God? What weapon could possibly throw down Aries? In their wisdom the Gods gifted the Amazons with a weapon Diana calls The God Killer. It’s a simple looking sword, one of the many tools that mark her as an epic hero, the others being her tiara, the Lasso of Truth, her indestructible bracers, and her indestructible shield, weapons to be brought to bear against the God of War himself.
Diana grows up with this belief on an island cloaked with invisibility, training at first in secret and then openly in hand-to-hand combat. It is the catastrophe of the First World War that breaks the idyllic peace when an airplane penetrates the island’s cloak and crashes into the surrounding ocean. Diana rescues the pilot who is a British spy being pursued by German sailors who attack the island, forcing the Amazons to defend themselves at great cost. For all their immortality, their weapons prove less than effective against German rifles, which should have been the first red flag for Diana that something is missing from the story. When the attack is finally repelled by virtue of their superior fighting skills it’s then Diana and the Amazons learn about “The war to end all wars,” which sets her off on her quest to finally destroy the God of War.
It is at this point you meet General Ludendorf, a real piece of work. He’s ruthless, remorseless, cunning, and inescapably German. You are given every reason to believe this man is the physical manifestation of Aries. Not only does he want the war to continue without end, he wants to accomplish this with ever more sophisticated poison gasses and other new weapons. While the German High Command and the Kaiser himself wish for peace, he intends to murder them all and turn his new weapons on the Allies. Aside the dramatic system making his identity as Aries obviously too good to be true, never the less drama compels Diana to zero in on him immediately, and it isn’t until she plunges the God Killer through his heart that she realizes General Ludendorf is just a crazy old man.
How could she have been wrong? That’s when Aries appears to help us out with the details just as Diana thrusts at him with the God Killer. It crumbles into dust! Aries is revealed to be the personage of one Sir Patrick, a seemingly minor player in British Parliament who just minutes before was seen pleading for peace! Yes! Aries wants to end the war! He wants this experiment to be concluded! But no, the stupid humans won’t stop fighting even when he presents them with weapons obviously strong enough to completely destroy themselves. He didn’t corrupt humanity, humanity was already corrupt, all he’s done is prove it. And what about the God Killer? She is the God Killer! Diana tangles him with the Lasso of Truth and demands he tell it, and his answer is fatal to her innocence:
“I am.”
In the end she kills Aries, and we may assume she succeeded. Yet, despite his demise we know that a still larger war looms on the horizon because Aries was telling the truth: We are our own worst enemy, and also our own strongest ally; strength comes from within, not from any God; we are the reason the human species is so screwed up, and we are the only ones who can fix it. In this way the message of self-reliance found in Wonder Woman stands in stark contrast to Man of Steel. We don’t need a savior.