The movie for sure has some good historical scenes and does seem like a warranted story. I largely watched it because the director also made DEBS which is hysterically funny. A movie about schoolgirl superspies who are expert liars. The evil antagonist falls in love with the leader of the girls and turns her lesbian. Meanwhile the leader is writing a feminist paper about the evil woman and psychology. I mean, I get why the director got to direct this movie. But it's just not even in the same category. It's way, way worse.
The invention of the lie detector is nice. The comic book being created is interesting. But 90% of the time is spent on the love triangle with the 2 women and the professor. And they seduce this engaged 22 year old student. Honestly no matter how you show this it looks wrong. They are teaching and grading her. Of course they should not sleep with her. I get this is college, but it never looks fine or acceptable in the movie. Which is either because the story is not quite good enough or because the directing is off. Most of these love scenes stretch way too long. Scenes that should be 1 min long go on forever. Several hanky panky scenes, many kissing scenes, and an endless array of slow declarations of love. All set in boring sets either in a small room of on some random street with no cars or people around. There are no great historical sets here at all. It all looks like a stage play.
For men of course the lie detector and comic book stuff is engaging in theory. But the professor just visits the comic book company and talks about feminism then a few scenes later he's rich. That's it. We don't see how they print the comic, how they ship them, how they create a story, how they color them, how they sell them, how they expand stories. Zero of this is shown. The comic is just being made and is there and we continue on towards relationship melodrama again. Man... what a miss. I don't mind some relationship drama, but the movie is basically all relationship drama with very slow scenes. I don't regret watching it, but it's impossible to recommend unless it's to women who like this sort of hanky panky stuff or feminists who need to know that the guy behind Wonder Woman totally was controlled by 2 women and that they actually kinda created the lie detector and Wonder Woman not him. Stuff that's quite pointless to debate anyhow and is not that interesting unless you make it into a conflict like Big Eyes (2014) did. That was an amazing movie with many historical sets and clear drama about the products and who invented them. Here they try to tie work and relationship together, but it never works.
I don't think plastering the words feminism and activism into a movie should make critics love it and fans adore it. We should be more critical than this no matter how we think or who we support. DEBS used the word feminism many times over yet it never relied on it to make the movie work. It was just one of the many themes there. Here it's the whole point. This movie is made for the political message and unfortunately overlooks viewers who kinda were looking for history and biography. This is melodrama only and very slow one at that. Should have been way better.
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