Even though the release of Wonder Woman is still *a year away*, healthy doses of marketing are already being sprinkled over us, the huddled masses. This shouldn’t surprise anybody by now—these vain yet necessary expressions of our entertainment industrial complex, which are subsequently exported around the world—just like months and months of he-said-she-said election coverage shouldn’t make anybody blink twice either: America is nothing if not a hype machine; it breathes on it.
Last week, the first trailer for Wonder Woman, due out in June 2017, was released at Comic-Con. It looks pretty good. Watch it.
Now, I’m sure there are fans of Wonder Woman out there who are amped to see this DC superhero romp. Likewise for fans of Chris Pine (Captain James T. Kirk for millennials), a handsome fellow whose good, full eyebrows and sense of play make the perfect warming companion to movie theater air conditioning. And I’m sure there are people who are excited about this film because they enjoyed Batman v Superman, which stars Ben Affleck as the bat man, in case you didn’t hear.
But this doesn’t matter to me. Any of it.
There are two reasons I’ll give my hard-earned money to buy a ticket to this film, and that’s saying a lot given that I live in New York City where going to the movies is not unlike riding the subway: you’ll probably touch a stranger, who may be eating, may fart, or may—in some dream world you’ve conjured up over the Manhattan Bridge—be your future lover. Oh, and you’ll see a good show.
First, I’d pay money to see Wonder Woman because that would mean getting to watch Israeli knockout Gal Gadot on a jumbo screen for two hours. I know she’s taken IRL, but these are the movies, damnit, so suspend my disbelief I will as I suck in loads of Twizzlers and Reese’s Pieces and that seltzer I snuck in and watch a superhero save the world and stuff. The awe I feel when I look at Gal Gadot is the same I feel when I see a Jon Hamm when he’s not waking up from the bottom of a Don Draper bottle: People actually look like that? Facial lines can go that way? I wonder what it would be like to…
The second reason I’d pay money to see Wonder Woman is because the legendary Hans Zimmer is, once again, composing the score. I never saw Batman v Superman, and I likely won’t until I’m felled by a head cold and just so happen to see it available on one of the Internet entertainment accounts I swindle from share with my loved ones. And I’m seldom ill.
But I have listened to the Batman v Superman soundtrack multiple times, on repeat, with headphones, on blast. It’s not great. It feels like Zimmer threw a baby tuba into a wood chipper, which sounds as humorless as the film purportedly is. The best track on there is the actual theme for Wonder Woman, which is also featured (of course) in the above trailer for Gadot’s solo turn. I’m afraid to say, however, that it sounds a lot like a tune from Mad Max: Fury Road.
In any case, Hans Zimmer, who is Jewish, has a lifetime pass from me. The 58-year-old German composer, who won an Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Lion King, has also been behind the music of an absolutely insane amount of hit films, including Thelma & Louise, Crimson Tide, The Thin Red Line, Gladiator, and The Simpsons Movie.
Admittedly, I didn’t get into Zimmer until I heard the scores for The Dark Knight, which is fantastic—dark and charging with seepages of light, like Gotham itself—and Inception, another Christopher Nolan flick whose upside-down world is accompanied well by Zimmer’s surprisingly emotional score.
But Zimmer’s most affecting work to-date, for me, is his work for Interstellar, an excellent moviegoing experience. If your writing habits are anything like my own, then you pick an album, or a song even, and listen to it on repeat as you scribe until the combined process sears itself onto your synapses. To write is to listen to Zimmer, to listen to Zimmer is to write. Upon the Interstellar soundtrack is a ride worth taking. Hopefully, the combination of Zimmer and Gadot will make Wonder Woman a worthy trip, too.
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Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.