Before Wonder Woman came out, I remember there
being some back-and-forth about the film’s choice to place Diana’s emergence into
Man’s World in WWI instead of WWII. I
recall reading discussions about the choice feeling uncomfortably
nationalistic. After all, Nazis would
give Diana a compelling reason to
throw her weight behind the Allied cause.
But with WWI? Why would she side
with the Allies, other than the metatextual “it’s a Hollywood movie, so Team
USA”? After seeing the film, however,
I’m 100% on board with this change and think it’s a perfect way to explore what
the movie wants to say about war (spoilers.)
When Diana
leaves Themyscira, it’s after Steve has told her about the devastating War to
End All Wars being waged in Man’s World.
Not only can she not stand by while people are suffering and dying, she
was also raised on stories of Ares returning to destroy mankind by fomenting
cataclysmic war. With the God-Killer on
display in one of Themyscira’s holy places, Diana knows the sword cannot be
left to gather dust – it must be used to stop Ares and save mankind, and since
someone must wield it, why not her?
As for why
she joins the Allies, there are a couple interconnected reasons. First, it just so happens that Steve, an
American, is the first man Diana meets.
She’s naturally fascinated to encounter a kind of being she’s never met
before, and Steve himself proves a brave and capable brother in arms; it’s only
natural that she would want to help her new friend. But more importantly, since Steve is the first man Diana meets, she is
exposed to the war through his perception of it, and he tells her about the
evil Germans wanting to tear down the world.
In light of that description, Diana makes the logical conclusion that
the Germans are under Ares’s thrall and that, if Diana defeats him, they can
lay down arms and “be good again,” and the Allies will have no more need to
fight them.
But the
situation isn’t nearly as straightforward as that, as Diana quickly
learns. She clashes with Steve over
big-picture/small-picture stuff, refusing to carry forward with the mission for
the greater good when there’s a village of strategically-irrevelant innocents
in immediate danger. In time, she comes
to believe that the Allied troops have fallen prey to Ares just as much as the
so-called enemy, and she throws all her efforts into killing him that she might
free them all. (Of course, it gets yet
more complicated after that – good and evil isn’t merely a matter of killing
the right god – which is another reason this movie is so great. The climactic final battle may let the film
down a little, but the revelations Diana comes to in the midst of it are
excellent.)
This is
why WWI makes for a perfect setting.
Diana’s true enemy is war, not the Germans, so what better choice than a
war with no moral high ground, scarcely an ostensible reason, and a
catastrophic number of young bodies piling up across multiple fronts, dying for
no greater purpose? WWI was a human
meat-grinder, pouring out life at such a waste, and that is what Diana fights against in the film, that senseless loss
of mankind giving themselves over to war.
With WWII, the Holocaust must be an enormous factor, and so it can’t
really be considered merely as war.
Diana fighting in WWII would have been Diana fighting to stop the bad
guys, the monsters, the murderers, and while I don’t doubt that it would have
been a very good story, it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well for the story
the film was trying to tell.
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