Ah, dancing in the middle of World War I; how romantic.
Okay, okay fine, then how do the Amazons dance?
No-one was asking you Steve. She just said that this wasn't dancing.
Why would you teach her how to dance? Doesn't she want to show us what dancing is?
Right y'already said that like five lines ago, so what is it then? What is dancing? No! No! Stop! Ugh!
Stop kissing!
You've evolved past it; you already said that in the boat scene.
Come on Wonder Woman script, you used the rule of threes:
1. You set it up.
Diana: These people are just swaying.
2. You reinforced it.
Diana: They don't know how to dance.
And then what? There's no payoff? Has no one in this movie ever written a joke before?
It's one of the oldest tricks in the book!
That trick is so old...
[audience booing]
[intro theme]
Hello Internet, welcome to Film Theory, where I like to say we're equal opportunity movie ruiners.
And on that note, today we're talking Wonder Woman,
the highest-grossing DC movie to date and the one that everyone is saying is the best one ever.
Huzzah!
But hold on to your invisible airplane there, Diana. I've got a few knits to pick with your movie.
And don't get me wrong.
A comic book superhero movie directed by a woman, starring a woman, is awesome and long overdue.
I don't have any issue with any of that. My issue is actually with the man of the movie,
good old Zack Snyder aka,
who, I'm taking to task today.
Zack, Zack, I'm gonna level with you now, I'm not getting paid millions to write movies,
but I do know a couple of things from watching 'em.
Like starting a movie with a flashback into a photo,
followed by a flashback into a history book does not make the movie the next Inception.
It makes it pretty heavy on exposition. Or how about introducing the marksman and then having him do...
nothing! I mean seriously, nothing!
He's given multiple opportunities to shoot or learn how to shoot
or show that he has any sort of character arc in any fashion and then just, nothing!
Even the moral of the movie!
Diana: It's not about the truth, it's about what you believe.
"The truth is what you believe?"
What does that even mean? Straight talk Wonder Woman,
you're gonna have some trouble defending that philosophy when Hitler rolls into town in like 15 years.
I don't think many people want the truth to be what he believes.
Long story short, watching this movie for as much as I enjoyed it,
just made me want to run a channel like CinemaSins every once in a while.
[CinemaSins Ding] But what I'm getting at today isn't about the philosophy of Wonder Woman,
or how vague her power set is,
or even how a blue silk dress is able to support a full-on sword,
let alone Wonder Woman walking with it. No, internet,
my issue today is one that is far worse than any of that, because it is so basic that it's
Unforgivable even in a totally fictional movie. According to the way
this movie is written, Diana and Steve would never have participated in World War I,
they wouldn't have saved armistice deal,
and they wouldn't have saved
thousands of lives from Doctor poison. In fact, Wonder Woman would have never even made it into the war in the first place.
And I know you're thinking it's because of some magical physics thing or some existential conflict, or it's something
I've completely manufactured for the purposes of clickbait, but it is literally because their boat was too slow.
That's right the entire payoff of this movie.
Everything after they leave the island would have never happened because this would have never made it from here to
London in time.
Don't believe me well stick around because we're about to unravel the entire logic of Wonder Woman because Zack flippin' Snyder failed fourth grade
geography.
Let's do this! As a quick recap, Steve Trevor crash lands off the coast of the Amazon island of Themyscira and gets saved by
Diana, a.k.a. Wonder Woman. Then the two of them set sail for England to deliver Dr.
Poison's secret notebook back to the British, and thus end World War I. Huzzah! They get on a sailboat,
they have a super awkward
conversation about sleeping together because apparently any humor that revolves around a man and a woman always has to be about sex, and then they
fall asleep. After that we have a different scene that isn't them, and then poof(!), they're pulling right up to London the next day. They
have no extra food or water that we see, you never see a sailing montage, and Diana wakes up in the same position you see
her fall asleep
in so we know based on movie logic that this is supposed to be the next day and that they made this whole trip overnight.
But just where did they come from?
Themyscira is unsurprisingly, not a real place,
but we do have plenty of clues about where it might be. The architecture on the island looks like ancient Greece,
which isn't all that surprising. Wonder Woman's whole origin is based on Greek mythology.
We hear about characters like Zeus and Ares all the time throughout the movie, her whole frame of
reference is built on Greek myths, and even her real-world name Diana is a reference to one of the most famous Greek goddesses.
So off the bat, we know we're in the general Greece-y area,
but that doesn't help out as much as you might think.
Ancient Greece wasn't just the Greece we see today.
At its peak, Greek territory extended through the Middle East all the way to India
and south into northern Africa. So at first, it seems like Themyscira would be impossible to pinpoint,
but lucky for us, there's something else that narrows the location way down: Steve's plane.
Remember, Steve is in Turkey when he steals the plane that eventually crashes off the coast of Themyscira.
Now you might think that planes can fly anywhere, but that definitely wasn't the case in World War I.
Remember, this is 1918.
The Wright brothers flew the first plane ever in 1903,
just 15 years earlier.
And they flew it for literally a hundred and twenty feet and they were basically hovering ten feet off the ground
That's not even an exaggeration.That's pretty accurate
So flying in a plane from World War one was
Basically like getting into a kite with an engine and hoping that it wouldn't fall out of the sky
Long story short these things weren't going too far too fast in this photo from the movie
We can confirm that Steve is flying in a Fokker E.Ⅲ.
(Sorry.. Uh.. mature episode)
A plane from Germany specifically supplied to Turkey in World War 1 starting in 1915
And that's a pretty important detail because that type of plane had a flight range of a little over a hundred mile
Which isn't gonna be getting him anywhere close to boating range for London
Ahh Mother "Fokker"!
Even the best planes from World War one couldn't stay in the air on a single tank of gas for more than three hours
at a time
They also didn't fly over 90 miles per hour
Which means that at best at ABSOLUTE best when Steve hits the drink he is
Absolutely under 300 miles from where he took off so that begs the question where's takeoff? Again,
We're not told exactly where in Turkey the base is.
But the two most plausible sites for the weapons facility would be
Istanbul or Izmir. Now Steve's not an idiot well
That's kind of up for debate, but let's say that he's not an idiot
He knew he wasn't making it all the way to London on a tank of gas
But he would have known that he could get to the Allied ships in the Mediterranean in a couple hundred miles so best-case scenario again
Best-case scenario he's flying out of Izmir and can make it to about Crete
270 miles away the absolute maximum range that we just calculated for a plane in World War 1.
Now Crete obviously isn't Themyscira because it was on the map and definitely occupied by not Amazon's back in
1918 but lucky for us there are literally
hundreds of other tiny islands in and around that area and the ones that weren't already owned by movie stars could easily have
Substituted for Themyscira. So to make it easy on ourselves
We'll use this
General zone as Steve's crash point and say well now he has to go from here to get to London all right Zach
I know it's been tough for you to keep up with all this geography so far
So here's a nice picture of a duck keep you interested, and here's that duck in a washed-out color palette
And hey let's add in some explosions
Here's a sky beam am I connecting with you now?? Good! because now we get to the good part
Or I should say the part that completely invalidates
Literally the rest of the movie because you can't sail from here all the way around to here over
3000 and 300 miles in one night in 1918.
Let me show you what I mean now, I'm no Jack Sparrow savvy
But I do know that the boat
You're in has a lot to do with how fast you sail the boat that Diana and Steve take is an ancient Greek
Sailing vessel, but that's bad news right off the bat for one ancient Greek boats were
Ridiculously slow. The fastest Greek ship is the trireme which went 80 to a hundred kilometers per day!
And it was a huge ship!
And it had 180 men rowing it if that weren't
Ridiculous enough Greek boats weren't even capable of changing the direction of the sails
Which means they had almost no control over their direction if the wind was blowing the wrong way
Which by the way in the Mediterranean it does all the time
This map shows you that the wind in the Mediterranean basically just goes around in little circles
Which means in all likelihood Steve and Diana would have washed up in Italy or
Literally just gone around in circles between Egypt and Greece over and over again because their freakin boat can't make a right turn
You know how there are all these stories about Odysseus
And all those other ancient Greeks sailing around for weeks and washing up on random islands. Yeah, it's because their boats were basically glorified
Driftwood if you keep this really accurate based on the boat they're using, getting to London would take a whopping
TWO MONTHS
Let me say that again
TWO MONTHS
And we have given this thing the best-case scenario
Based on all the factors that we've considered thus far this means that the rest of the movie would have been over for almost six
Weeks by the time they just showed up in the harbor in that circumstance. They might as well
Just have stayed home
And had Steve discusses above-average specimen some more with Amazons. If I want to get really generous about this
We could say that somehow
They have a more modern sail and can travel up to the speeds of America's Cup racers
Which is the oldest international sailing competition in history.
These boats can go up to 34 miles an hour.
Though the fastest one on record went 55 miles per hour
Oooh Hoo boy! Slow down!
They're almost hitting the speed limit of a two lane state highway,
if they're traveling at the speed of a sailboat in the America's Cup they'll fare a lot better finishing the trip in just about
Four days being still missing the vast majority of their own movie and showing up just in time for dr.
poisons plan to gas London to take effect
But! Even if we give them the fastest sailboat in recorded history, the Vestas SailRocket 2 at
75 miles an hour
They'd still need about two full days to go from Crete to that port of London. And that is giving them advantages that are
COMPLETELY impossible. So is that it? Have we disproved this movie yet?
No! of course not. If the comments section has shown me anything is that it is literally impossible
For me to do enough research and approach these topics from enough angles where all of you are convinced that I actually do research on
these things
But I've already beaten you to the punch if you're one of the better
Commenters who actually do leave thoughtful evidence against my theory well you would say
Hey, when they arrived in London Steve mentions
that they got lucky and hitched a ride from a friendly tugboat. We got lucky. We caught a ride
We made some good time. Oh happy day their travel problems are solved except
Not so fast there Steve and Zack and comment section not even your magical
TUGBOAT OF IMPOSSIBLE TRAVEL
Will save you here.
First off tugboats in World War one were scarcer than you'd think at the beginning of the war the
British Royal Navy only had seven which they mostly bought from private tug boaters.
Private tuggers..?
Oh, that's dirty...
Professional Tuggies!
Oh, that's worse!
TUG - BOATERS IT IS
However you want to say it the British Navy did build a couple dozen more tugboats before the end of the war
but the majority of them were harbor tugboat
Meaning that they didn't go out into the high seas the bigger deep ocean tugboats weren't even finished until 1919,
and the farthest they went from London was this area here between England and France
That means at the very most the tugboat could have pulled them the last 200 miles of their
3,300 miles sail at about 14 knots. 14 knots is about 16 miles per hour or about the speed of an aggressive
Twelve-year-old on a bicycle.
Needless to say Steve may be getting lucky after that dancing scene
But the tugboat ain't doing nothing for him
trust me Zack,I tried!
I tried to figure out a way for this one to work for ya.
Through river systems
Through alternate pathways
Through canals that weren't even built yet
Through faster boats
but it is time to face the truth
The way the movie is written Diana and Steve would literally miss the whole rest of their own
Plotline, as well as the entire rest of World War 1! Armistice happens while they're still sailing around dr.
poisons gas reignites tensions and kills
Thousands wonder woman doesn't lead a one-woman charge in a bikini over the open trenches of Europe or survive a literal
Firestorm without singeing a single hair.
Ares ultimately wins as the war continues indefinitely and forever changes the course of history
And no matter how strong and independent Diana may be not even she can change real world geography
And now you know the real ending to Wonder Woman
Steve and Diana run out of food and water after three days because they didn't pack enough and are forced to land their boat in
Italy after traveling a solid 60 miles,
and then they spend the rest of 1918 eating pasta and trying to figure out
what the heck Amazonian dancing is.
bUT HEY! That's just a theory
A FILM THEORY!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAND
CUT.