Gal Gadot | A Screenwriters Perspective: Current and Past Movies.

The Rotten Tomatoes ratings for the new Netflix movie “Heart of Stone”, starring Gal Gadot are a very low 29%. The reason for this is that this film is nothing more than an another reverse engineered action movie. No story, no explanations as to how, or why anything is happening. Just a chain of action scenes that are used in movie trailers to get people to watch the film- only to see the action, because once again, there is no real screenplay and no real story.

There are many fight scenes, some parachuting scenes, a scene where the main character Rachel Stone, played by Gal Gadot runs for her life with a massive fire following her on a huge Dirigible, but not much more. The other known actor in this film is Jamie Dornan, known for the very bad 50 Shades of Grey franchise. While some of the fight scenes were very impressive, they were not nearly enough for this movie to move into recommend status. The IMDB ratings for this film are also a very low and correct 5.1.

This is a movie only for fans of Gal Gadot and those who are only interested in the action scenes that they can see by fast-forward through the great majority of this movie, and missing the rest of this film which was nothing more of a bad retread of a many spy movies and nothing new.

As the movie industry continues to try and adjust to the new ways of providing entertainment to the masses, the release of the new movie “Wonder Woman 1984” – in theaters a few weeks ago, and today on HBO Max is something that has never been done before. Perhaps this will be one of the many new ways we will be seeing movies from now on, even after this horrendous Pandemic of 2020 is finally over. Many believe that eventually all movie theaters will go away for good and I for one will miss seeing a great movie on a big screen if that ever happens.
 
One thing has been obvious with action movies for many years is that it is always easier to create special effects than it is to create a great story and screenplay. Screenplays require months or even over a year of hard work and re-writes. Special effects involve advanced computer graphics that can be created in a relatively short period of time. Wonder Woman 1984 is the sequel to the original “Wonder Woman”, released in 2017 and unfortunately has a story that is all over the place, convoluted and in some areas even boring. This movie involves the discovery of an ancient stone that can provide any person anything they want in the world, just by wishing for it. A failing oil executive Maxwell Lord, played by Pedro Pascal uses this stone to try and take over the world, Barbara Minerva, played by Kristine Witt uses the stone to gain the super powers of Wonder Woman, played by Gal Gadot, and Wonder Woman uses the stone to bring back her boyfriend Steve Trevor, played once again by Chris Pine. In the case of Wonder Woman, her wish causes her to lose some of her power, which is one of the many areas of this story that was not defined nearly enough.
 
The messages of this film are good ones, “power corrupts absolutely”, “There is a price for everything” and even “be careful what you wish for”. However, good messages are not nearly adequate enough to save this mostly bad movie, that is even lacks enough special effects within an overly long 2 1/2 hours.
 
The Rotten Tomatoes rating for this movie are a below average 70%. My rating is about 55%, only for some good acting and some special effects. I do not recommend Wonder Woman 1984.