The Professor Marston & the Wonder Women trailer gives us more questions than answers

On the heels of Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman, Annapurna unleashes the trailer for Professor Marston & the Wonder Women to dive into the heroine’s origins.

The second time I saw Wonder Woman in theaters, they played the teaser clip for Professor Marston & the Wonder Women with the trailers. Many people were confused with a handful of them all going, “Wait, another Wonder Woman movie?” Well, this is the origin for the origin film, and it looks like it’s going to confuse people even further when they see it, whether they’re huge Wonder Woman fans or not.

First and foremost, Wonder Woman does, in fact, have a “kinky origin,” as io9 puts it. The panels seen in the trailer below are real comic book panels. Like many of those early comics from the ’40s-’50s, Wonder Woman contained a lot of questionable (at best) themes early on.

Before I speak against the Wonder Women, let’s watch the trailer:

Unless you were there with William, Elizabeth and Olive in 1941 or whatever while this was happening, any depiction, especially one for the big screen, may exaggerate some specific portions or only focus on one side of things. For example, if you read The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore, she goes pretty far back in Marston’s early life and depicts a unit slightly different from this trailer. In fact, the trailer almost seems like Marston stood on the outside looking in as he heroically liberated his wife and mistress from the confines of society by creating this fictional depiction of Wonder Woman. Which I don’t think is true.

Of course, everyone always asks about Wonder Woman’s sexuality, or why she grew up on an island full of women. But I don’t think Gaston’s account (forget the timing for Warner Bros., where are people on the Luke Evans train?) is going to really clear up anything. If anything, it will only serve to confuse mainstream audiences. Or worse, make Wonder Woman seem even less accessible to people.

Obviously, that would be especially terrible considering all the progress she made at the box office this summer. They did such a good job uplifting her and cementing her origin. I wouldn’t want the weird and sensationalized sexual origins to alienate her fans. It’s almost like Hugh Jackman’s The Greatest Showman. I don’t want a glamorous retelling that departs from what really happened; so I’m very wary of this film.

Professor Marston & the Wonder Women Oct. 27, 2017.

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