Zack Snyder's Justice Lube Part 5: That Leather-grained Object of Desire
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Scene 6: Wonder Woman and the Briefcase Affair (18:00-25:50)
This is it. This scene is your litmus test for Zack Snyder’s Justice League. You will be pumping your fist in triumph or howling with derisive laughter. No other response is possible if you’re going to make it all the way through this thing.
This scene introduces Wonder Woman to the world of ZSJL, aside from the brief shot of her in the credits. It has no connection to the film’s plot and could conceivably have been cut, but then you’d be deprived of watching Wonder Woman absolutely kick ass. The intent is clear: to show us a Wonder Woman who is 1,000 times faster, stronger and violent. She throws bodies into walls and turns villains into pulp.
But she’s not the focus of the scene. Instead, it’s all about a briefcase. This scene is Briefcase: The Movie.
White vans snake their way through London streets, eventually pulling up in front of a museum (the second favourite target of comic book villains after banks). Well-dressed black clad men emerge, shooting anyone they encounter. The leader is identifiable by his smart black hat and his menacing black briefcase.
For the next eight minutes or so, nearly every shot will contain this briefcase. It sets off the metal detectors, which spurs even more violence. The camera dips down and follows it up the stairs, keeping the briefcase in the extreme foreground. At one point it appears as if people are running in terror from the briefcase itself.
Up on the third floor, the black clad terrorists have corralled a group of schoolchildren. The moment we’re all waiting for arrives: he opens the briefcase to reveal a somewhat quotidian set of explosives. What, no weird green fluid that will mutate everyone into monsters? Do better, comic book movie. Anyway, the children scream, even though none of them are close enough to get a clear view of the briefcase’s contents. Maybe they believe, like everyone else in the room, that the briefcase is the protagonist of the movie and the terrorist is injuring it.
Wonder Woman breaks through the doors and it’s full-on Snyder time. Extreme slow motion moments are followed by bursts of power and speed. Black clad bodies get flung across the room at bone-shattering velocities. Wonder Woman is willing to get to the thing she loves most in this world: that damn briefcase. But as she reaches it, she realizes that teh briefcase doesn’t really belong to her it; it belongs to the world. She snaps it shut and jumps through the ceiling and into the grey London sky. She throws the briefcase high into the air, but the camera slows down, holding her and the beloved briefcase in a frieze. Goodbye briefcase, she whispers.
The briefcase releases its power and is no more. End of scene? No. Like a zombie, the scene must shamble on, disposing of its human element. Wonder Woman drops back down, saves the children, annihilates the remaining villain in a blast of force. Chunks of stone and glass and villain rain down over the police at street level. A hat floats down. A policeman reacts, slowly. The scene is not over yet.
Inside the building, Wonder Woman is reassuring the children with an “It’s all good,” which is strange choice of words for a 5,000 year old goddess, but whatever. A young girl remains kneelilng. With shining eyes she asks “Can I be like you some day?” With a smile of infinite kindness, Wonder Woman says “You can be anything you want to be”.
Shame on you, Wonder Woman, for lying to a little girl. She cannot be a goddess. And she will never be a briefcase.
Compare and contrast: This scene appears in truncated form in JWJL. It also appears much earlier in the theatrical cut, right after the credits and before the Icelandic village scene. It cuts down substantially on the violence factor. Wonder Woman punches and throws the bad guys around, but she’s not killing anyone. It’s not as visceral but not nearly as ridiculous. The scene cuts away just as she dispatches the last bad guy. The only clear loser in JWJL is the briefcase, which gets only a fraction of the screen time and an indifferent send-off.
