Still Roaring

by Michael Isenberg

Congratulations to Wonder Woman, winner of the 2018 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, awarded last night in San Jose.

I still think, as I wrote last week, that Logan was by far the best science fiction movie of 2017, which is why I awarded it my NOT A HUGO Award. But sadly, it did not receive a nomination for the actual Hugos. Whether that was because it wasn’t sufficiently politically correct, or for some other reason, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader. In any case, of the movies that were nominated (I’ll say it one last time: The Last Jedi? Seriously?), Wonder Woman was by far my favorite, and I’m glad to see it took home the silver rocket.

Here’s what I wrote about Wonder Woman when it came out last year. On reflection, I was concerned that perhaps, in my initial shock that the movie didn’t suck, my review was more glowing than the picture deserved. But I reread it today and I think I struck the right balance between the things that were awesome about Wonder Woman, and the things that needed improvement:

She is Wonder Woman: Hear her Roar! Sorry about the title. My friend Kerey committed me to it in his Introduction to Wonder Woman here on Nerds who Read. He told the whole world that if the movie was good, that was what I was going to call my review. If it wasn’t, the title was going to be “Blunder Woman.” So obviously it was good. In fact, it was awesome. Which disproves two beliefs that I've held for some time: 1) that Hollywood can’t make a good movie with a female superhero, and 2) that DC Comics can’t make a good movie with any kind of superhero. Over the years, legions of female superhero movies have bombed at the box office. Conventional wisdom in Hollywood was that female superheroes just didn’t sell. Brainy pundits put their intellectual heft behind various theories as to why not; the theories ran the gamut from sexism to sexism. Apparently the audiences were sexist for not going to these movies. But IMHO, the reason the audiences stayed away was because these movies just weren't very good. Read more…

Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com Photo credit(s): Indian Express