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Reviews39
ajrcvr's rating
Well, I read the reviews of this and I have to come down on the side of the positive ones. The person offering the negative one doesn't seem to understand this is not "War & Peace," this is a CARTOON: anime created for the sake of tickling your fancy with fantastic fantasy and giving you a light and interesting story, which it surely does. Sure, the young teen girls have DD boobs and more with incredible hourglass figures, but that's part of the charming fantasy. The animation itself is very smooth, exceptionally colorful, more so than most animes, and the characters and backgrounds visually captivating to look at. The story is fine: hero guy, heroine girl with helpful associates and bad guys, and that's pretty much true of most stories. It's how they do all this that is important, and they do it well enough to provide interest and a generally good time watching it.
The story is okay, and I suppose that's what counts, but since the movie is all about Wonder Woman, you need a fairly awesome female to play her, and, although Gal Gadot has a cutsy-pie face sure enough, realistically she comes up short in the body department - not even close to Lynda Carter's awesome curves and bod, and that is really the story here. She also lacks in the musculature department, also not close to Sofia Boutella (Jayla in Star Wars Beyond), who has a magnificently athletic and muscular body and yet is still feminine and sexy. A cute face is not enough to be Wonder Woman; that mythical Amazon is a lot more than that. I notice, too, that when you compare Gadot's bikini pics with her in her Wonder Woman outfit, they pulled in her waist and pumped up her boobs to give her a sexier appearance, which she doesn't actually have. Body-wise, she's actually quite ordinary; there are many better built models & actresses than her around. Always makes me wonder how they pick these people, and what criterion they use. They're supposed to be getting a muscular, athletic person for this part, and they just got some ordinary model with a cute face - which strains the credibility of the character and therefore the believability of the character and the story. A similar mistake was made with ScarJo for the Major in GITS: beautiful girl, decent actress, physically terrific, but wrong for the part of Motoko because she's not Asian! In fact, she's as far away from Asia as you could get. It's like using Jackie Chan or Jet Li to play Robin Hood - both great physical characters, athletic, good actors, wrong for the part for obvious reasons. They could have done a better job for Wonder Woman than this Israeli actress;; for instance, check out Israeli model Bar Refaeli - much better in every category, physically; at least as beautiful, maybe more so, and a much better body. Don't know if she can act, but you get my point as to what Wonder Woman should look like. How the character physically appears is everything in this story; and Gal Gadot just doesn't measure up, and it's a shame that they have to doctor her physical appearance in the Wonder Woman outfit to give her credibility.
Not only does the story not follow the original, but the attempt at presenting Motuku Kosanagi is even poorer. Forget that ScarJo in as far from anything Asian as you can get, or that she is beautiful and a decent actress; she is simply wrong for the part. That the producers/directors couldn't see this pretty much tells the whole story. Why is she wrong? I'll illustrate. Say you want to make Robin Hood. You need a good actor, popular, one that do great action and draw in crowds. You select Jackie Chan or Jet Li, both popular, excellent actors, action people, good looking, well able to do the job. Unless it is a comic film, no one would take it seriously. That's what they did with GITS & ScarJo. Beyond that, their other errors are even worse, since whatever they did to the presentation of ScarJo doesn't make her as interesting or visually sexy and powerful a figure as the animated versions of her previously; they actually made her less sexy! Which is hard to do with a beauty like her. You don't quite get that Major Kusanagi is a real person, a mind and a soul in a robotic shell, but still a person, which provides the essential duality of her character. It's like asking Shemp Moe and Larry to play the Three Musketeers - won't work as anything serious, which GITS is. Very! The story itself is a substantially different story than Masamune originally wrote, which I suppose would be okay if it were anything near as good, which it isn't. They lost, or totally ignored, the whole Asian-Japanese influence throughout the entire movie - it has a different feel entirely, and it is an essentially dumbed down version of the questions that the original story asks. They had a chance to present a popular Japanese story, revered around the world for almost 30 years, and then made something different which is only a shadow of the original. They'd have been much better off making another anime, in 3D cgi, and sticking closer to the story and Asian feel that was in the original.