What Makes A Scene Perfect?

Introduction
Way back in October, 2014 I wrote a blog called "5 Perfect Moments In Modern Cinema" in which I talked about five scenes that, regardless of the quality of the rest of the movie, could not be improved on. As far as film analysis and criticism goes, it was pretty shallow. I don't mean that it was wrong or that I don't stand by that blog, but it was more about indulging my desire to rave about things I love in movies and didn't go far to explain why those scenes were perfect. Mostly, I let the scenes speak for themselves. But what makes a scene perfect is worth exploring in detail. Perfect is a big claim and like it or not, film criticism is at least partly subjective, so proving anything is perfect is, on the face of it, impossible, but that's not going to stop me from trying. To be clear: I'm going to keep the same definition of perfect that I used in 2014. A perfect moment in cinema is one in which everything happening on screen works, every choice is made purposefully, and you couldn't noticeably significantly improve on the elements.

And that definition kind of answers the title question. What makes a movie scene perfect? When you cannot significantly improve on it.

Obviously we're not stopping there. Now that definitions and simple answers are out of the way, let's take a specific scene and break down the ways in which it is so good it can't be made better. The perfect scene I've chosen comes from 2017's Wonder Woman. This is the scene when she leaves the trenches and rushes across No Man's Land.

I've chosen this scene because While superhero films are big money and popular with basically everyone, they're still largely overlooked as low art; popular with people who don't know better or without a refined taste in art. But to do so is a disservice to the artists who make them, and to deprive yourself of truly enjoying something. I want to outline how a single scene can be perfect, but also demonstrate just how good, and how intelligently made super hero films can be. And Party Jenkins proves what a great film maker cam bring to even so-called low art.

Also, I've been wanting an excuse to talk about how good this movie is for a while now. Okay, now we know why we're here and what we're doing, let's get to it. I'm going to divide my analysis of this film into 4 parts: narrative, colour and imagery, characterisation, and visual motif.

Ready? Here we go.

Wonder Woman on seeing the length of this blog.

The Self-Evident Actually, before I get into it, there's one more qualifier on this endeavour. The four elements of the scene I'm examining are not exhaustive. But it doesn't need to be because some details are self evident. You're an intelligent person who watched the scene in question. You don't need me to tell you that the sound mix is clear, the set and costuming are high quality, the dialogue is believable, well delivered, that the actors are all great, that the staging makes for clear presentation, and that Gal Gadot's performance as Wonder Woman is basically flawless. And I don't need to tell you why all those details being high quality is important and a requisite to the scene being perfect.

Like I said, you're intelligent enough on your own to understand that and to see that everything here is fine. Thus, this study is more about the fine details of a selection of elements that work largely as subtext, and how they function together in this scene and with the rest of the film to do and say more than what's on the surface. They are greater as a whole and the scene is greater because of them. They build to something.

We're looking at how attention to detail in in the film making process leads to a more detailed, interesting, and meaningful scene beyond immediate, obvious, technical accomplishment. Okay, for real this time, let's go. Narrative Just so were absolutely on the same page, we'll start with brief rundown of what happens in this scene, beat-by-beat. This is the film's surface. Everything about this film builds upwards from the narrative flow of this scene. While trekking through the trenches of the western front, somewhere in Belgium, a crying woman grabs Wonder Woman (aka Diana) and pleads for her help to save her village from invading Germans. Wonder Woman insists to Steve and her companions that they need to do something, but Steve explains it's not possible. The trench warfare here has been going on for almost a year in a stalemate because, well, that's mostly how trench warfare worked. Steve tells her that the only thing they can do is continue with their mission, which means leaving the battle to play out as it has while they focus on the big picture. But Wonder Woman ignores Steve's protests and does what she thinks is right, what she feels she has to do.

Diana doesn't need your negativity, Steve

She throws off her cloak, climbs a ladder out of the trenches, and charges across no man's land to face the mortars and machine guns of the German army, single handed if she has to. It works and her companions quickly join her, eventually followed by the English soldiers. They take the trenches and Wonder Woman continues to lead the assault into the captured village. And what could just be a mandatory action beat in a super hero film is in reality a major turning point for the characters and their relationships, and a defining moment for Wonder Woman as we understand the character, and how she relates to the people and world around her. It makes it clear that she's a Big Damn Hero.

A Big Damn Hero

The dialogue between Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor is of particular importance here. Steve Trevor acts as exposition so that, if you somehow went through life not learning what a disaster the first World War was and how awful everything about it was for everybody involved, you get the idea. This is not a battle anybody can just win, and this is not a situation you can just fight your way out of. They're seeing the truly terrible face of the war and nobody can do a damned thing about it.

Wonder Woman's response is not just heroism, it is defiance. It is defiance of Steve and his big picture view of their mission, it is defiance of the way the war is fought, and it is a defiance of any attempt to constrain her through argument or material conditions. We'll come back to this some more, later, but for now just recognise that the dialogue and the events unfolding are our foundation. What comes next is built on top of this. It's not exposition for exposition sake, it's set up, set up for what we'll talk about in characterisation in particular, but set up for, well everything I'm about to say. And it's not just the dialogue, either, even though I've focused on it. Everything from the beginning of the scene is important. Nothing is wasted. Colour and Imagery In order to understand the way this scene works, we need to go back to some earlier parts of the film, and we need to understand how Wonder Woman uses colour. Watching the film, it's immediately obvious that Wonder Woman uses a washed out colour palette even in its brightest locations. This is a consistent stylistic choice that helps set the sombre and grim tone of the film. This is true even in the most bright and colourful part of the film: the scenes on Themyscira. This part of the film uses primarily green, gold, white, and bronze. Even though things aren't especially grim here, to be too vibrant or pastel would be distracting when we move into Act 2's colour palette.

That's as colourful as it gets.

The movement into the second act of the film, when Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor leave Themyscira and arrive in London, sees the colours shift to relying more heavily on blacks and greys, with some brown, and when we do get green, it's the dirty olive green of military uniforms. This continues into the scenes on the front line and establishes a strong contrast between Themyscira and the modern world of men, one as sunny and colourful and livley, the other as dark and dirty and cold. Even Wonder Woman spends this time dressed in her dark suit or wrapped in her black cloak.

Things not pictured: the sun

And then comes our perfect scene and in an act of defiance against the modern world of men and the war around her, she dons her gold tiara. Immediately we have colour again, colour we haven't really seen since Themyscira. And it doesn't stop there. Wonder Woman throws off her cloak and reveals her classic colourful costume. Dressed in red, blue, and gold, Wonder Woman couldn't look more out of place, more different to her surroundings. She brings that contrast of Themyscira and the modern world into the moment.

A Big Damn Hero, colourised

And it's not the whole colour scheme of the movie changing, here. Everything else is still muddy and grey and terrible, but Wonder Woman is a shining beacon in all that. She is more than her surroundings, different, a literal piece of another world marching through no man's land. But the film doesn't stop at just using colour to set Wonder Woman apart, as she climbs the ladder out of the trenches - literally transcending the confines of the war that Steve Trevor just established for us - we get a close up of her shield and its sunburst design. The world of men has, until now, been entirely overcast. The skies in London and the front lines are all grey, and here comes Wonder Woman carrying a sun as she rises over the trenches and the battlefield. Wonder Woman is a new dawn for the war, a clean, colourful, transcendent dawn. The film is showing us not just through the narrative, but the visuals, that she is different, that she is more, that if she is not literally divine, she is like the divine. And from there, we can get more specific. Characterisation I've already gone over how Wonder Woman charging into no man's land is not merely heroism in the classic courageous comic book super hero sense, but defiance. Wonder Woman knows what she's about. She's a Big Damn hero and she's not going to be held back by small problems like "it's impossible" or "this isn't why we're here", she's going to go and do what a warrior does and fight, and do what Big Damn Heroes do and save the civilians. This is consistent with what we've seen earlier in the film. Wonder Woman wasn't going to be persuaded to stay home just because her mother and Queen told her to. She's not fussed that she stealing sacred and important relics of her people before she leaves. It all serves her moral compass and that sits fine with her. Defiance is nothing new, but in all the ways Wonder Woman has gone into battle before, she's never faced anything like a trench full of machine guns and mortars, a battle that has been going on almost a year with no end in sight. This is new. And what does Wonder Woman take as her weapon into this impossible to cross battle field called no man's land?

Nothing.

Just your average rising sun symbolism casually climbing unarmed onto the worst place on Earth.

She goes in empty handed. Even when she does draw something, it's not her magic rope or her god slaying sword, it's her shield, a piece of equipment designed to defend, not attack or kill. We know she has a sword, we know she can kick all kinds of arse with her magic rope, but against rifles she chooses her bare hands, against mortars and machine guns, she chooses her shield. This speaks volumes about who Wonder Woman is. She is a warrior who chooses protection before assault, whose default is non-lethal options. And why does she go into battle? It's not because she sees that the English soldiers around here are somehow on the right side of battle. In fact, she's largely silent on their role in the war or the politics of the war at all. What motivates her into defiance and Big Damn Heroics in this scene, in this moment in the film's narrative, is a civilian crying out for help from anybody who comes by, and of all the people who walk by, Wonder Woman is the only one who acts. This, again, makes her distinct from everybody around her, and it ensures that we understand her motivation. This isn't a war with an unambiguous villain like the NAZIs to punch in the face, but it is a war where innocent non-combatants are suffering, and that, not the morality of war or choosing sides, is what pushes Diana into action. And while there is brief dialogue in which she makes it clear that she needs to do something to help the people of the village, largely everything we learn about Wonder Woman in this scene is through her actions. There's no explicit dialogue where she explains "My sword is only for true villains like Ares." The film doesn't feel the need to spell that out for us because it's a visual medium and the action speaks for itself. When I say this scene is a defining moment, I mean that it reveals significant aspects of the character and sets in stone aspects that had been shown or hinted at before. A lot about this scene requires some knowledge of the rest of the film to truly appreciate, but even if this scene was all you had, you would get an immediate understanding of who Wonder Woman is what she's all about.

This is part of the different the colours and imagery were highlighting how she is special and different, this is the part of her that is different. Even her companions charging in after her come in guns blazing, weapons in hand. They are heroes, but they are not Big Damn Heroes. Visual Motif We need to go back to the start of the film again, to the story of the Amazons. Queen Hypolita tells a younger Wonder Woman about the history of the Amazons. While she narrates the story, the events play out on screen in scenes that look like slow moving, animated paintings. The aesthetic here resembles Renaissance paintings of scenes and characters from Greek myth. The Amazons rising from the water resemble Raphael's Triumph of Galatea, when Ares falls it harkens to Cossiers' 'Prometheus Carrying Fire'.

Triumph of Galatea, Raphael

Prometheus Steals Fire, Cossiers

Even before this scene, our first slow motions shots occur while Diana is watching the Amazons practice their various arts of war. Then we see slow motion used again in the battle on the beach of Themyscira. Slow motion is used in both these scenes in combination with the elaborate and impressive fight choreography and stunt work to frame the Amazons in the same mythic way. On the beach, they're almost frozen into those same Renaissance paintings of mythical creatures, as almost frozen as the scenes from the prologue.

Hmm, where have we seen staging like that before?

It'd be all to easy to write off the use of slow motion as a stylistic choice, because Snyder was still producer of the DCEU at this point and Snyder loves slow motion and has often used it as a purely stylistic choice. But the slow motion is being used deliberately here. The slow motion is almost exclusively associated with the action of Amazons and their mythic nature. They are inexorably connected. Although there are fight scenes between the beach and our perfect scene, and Wonder Woman is at the centre of them all, none of them include slow motion. But as soon as she's climbing the ladder, transcending the war, rising like a sun over man's dirty, dark, and grim world, she's moving in slow motion. She is not just a warrior, not just a hero, she is an Amazon, a living myth marching into battle. Wonder Woman is not a super soldier, not a genius billionaire philanthropist playboy, not an above average man, not a well trained human in a costume, she is more than human, she is a Big Damn Legendary Hero.

I will use this image as many times as I can

Even to this day, it is a reoccurring idea in the DC film universe that the heroes are truly super human, they are more than mere mortals can be. But rather than the obnoxious and misguided Christ symbolism we saw through Man of Steel, Wonder Woman uses a running visual motif to link Wonder Woman to her mythical origins and that is more important here, in this scene, than in any moment before it because this scene is largely about contrasting the war and the world of men with everything that Wonder Woman is.

How is she different?

She's a living myth.

You could not layer this idea in this way, through these choices, in anything but the medium of film. Oh yeah, the music. Look, I'm not at all qualified to speak about music but it needs to be said that the music does a lot to carry the emotional weight of this scene. Of course it does. A good score carries a lot of the emotional weight in any film. But what's striking about the score here and that I want to mention briefly before I go back to not talking about things I have very little business pretending I'm an expert on is that the score's pace here matches the scene with incredible precision.

It begins small and low, letting the visuals and dialogue carry the scene at first, and then as Wonder Woman rises from the trench, the music rises with her in tempo and volume. That rise continues but at a crawling pace as the visuals do the heavy lifting during those first slow motion shots, merely keeping pace with the speed of the cinematography and of Diana's movement. Even when the machine guns force her to stop running, she leans forward into the attack and the music moves with her. Then when the film has made the points it wants to make - all the stuff I've said above - and Wonder Woman charges forward full force, the music swells at last, letting out all that building tension to join Wonder Woman in her bombastic, beautiful assault on the Germans.

Diana getting impatient for a conclusion

In Conclusion In May 2015, I wrote a blog called 'Action Speaks Louder Than Action' in which I said that the best scenes do multiple things. They move the A plot forward, but also develop characters and their relationships, and build on what we know about established characters and the world. This scene is absolutely doing more than one thing. The scene does exist because this is an action movie and we should have action scenes in an action movie, but good action scenes are more than spectacle. While the actual plot is advanced only a little, it advances Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor's relationship, reveals a whole lot about the character of Wonder Woman as a person, and even more about how she relates to her environment by way of contrast. That's not just a contrast of character and world, but of the two worlds in the film, the world of men and the world of myth. And as a film, it uses all of the tools available to it: music, acting, dialogue, visual effects, colour and lighting, a range of camera angles and shots. Nothing is spared. The level of consideration is staggering. The film makers knew this was going to be a big moment, a defining moment, and they poured every drop of intelligence and creativity and artistic skill into it. It's so good, it even withstands the greater flaws of the film as a whole, it's so good that you can pull a lot of important information from it without even seeing the rest of the film. I defined a perfect scene as one that can't be significantly improved. Is there room for significant improvement here? How could there be? They've covered all their bases, used every tool, filled every moment, every lighting and costuming choice, every action, every shot with purpose, and they've done it all brilliantly. This is smart film making. Beyond that self-evident, outstanding technical proficiency of making a coherent, engaging, pleasant-to-look-at piece of cinema, they have woven a subtextual tapestry that gives more meaning to what we are seeing than "Wonder Woman does a cool exciting thing" while also still being "Wonder Woman does a cool and exciting thing." Can it be made significantly better?

No way, friend.

This scene is perfect.

One more time for good measure