Sofia Minich
Photo Courtesy of Birth.Movie.Death
Watching the first few minutes of Justice League, I was impressed. The quality, casting, sound, and script were all executed well, however, the costumes and camera angles left me disappointed, but not surprised.
In Wonder Woman, the empowering Amazons are a brave army of women ready to take on any battle. In Justice League, they are sex symbols. Gone is the protective armor that once covered their athletic build, what is left are skimpy metal bras.
It seems to be only a coincidence that the costume designer for Wonder Woman was a woman while the designer for Justice League was a man.
Along with this incident, the camera seemed focused on one thing, Wonder Woman actress Gal Gadot’s assets. The whole movie, when I was trying to focus on the plot, I instead found myself staring at Gadot’s behind. The eyes could not be averted away, as it was the only object in the frame.
“I just felt uncomfortable when I saw this, it was just weird to see,” sophomore Laurel Olson said. “As a director, he could have cut the bad camera angles out, and he didn’t. I just feel like that wasn’t a good move on this part, and as a female audience member who loves the DC comics, it was just a little oversexualized.”
Photo courtesy of Forbes
Director Zack Snyder took what was an inspiration to women internationally and manipulated it to make the women more “visually appealing” to men, objectifying the women intended to be strong warriors.
It was a poor decision on the part of both the costume designer and the director of Justice League to let this slide.
At Comic Con 2015, Gadot said, “I feel like I’ve been given such a huge opportunity to show the strong, beautiful side of women. Finally.”
Taking the women in this movie and sexualizing them the way the directors and costume designers did, devalued Gadot’s reason for starring in Wonder Woman.
Photo Courtesy of Youtube
There were also multiple scenes with a shirtless Jason Momoa (Aquaman) or Henry Cavill (Superman), that would focus only on their builds, and not on the plot itself. The audience’s attention was directed at physical features for most of the movie.
While the plot itself was adequate, the audience was almost forced to focus on other things, taking away from the experience of bringing the comics to life.
