100-year-old piece of fake news may have inspired one of 'Wonder Woman's' greatest scenes
By Brian Lisi
Did this hoax inspire this hero? (Hulton Archive/Getty Images/Warner Bros.)
There might be some Lasso of Truth to this.
In the same way that "Wonder Woman" lit up the box office, the internet has been abuzz about the scene in which the titular Amazonian charges across enemy trenches during World War I.
Film blog Moviepilot is pushing the notion that this defining moment for Diana of Themyscira, who audiences worldwide have embraced to the tune of $435 million thus far, was inspired by the news story about the Angels of Mons.
In 1914, Welsh Arthur Machen unintentionally authored a piece of fake news when the "fiction" label disappeared from his story in the Evening Standard about phantoms who helped British forces win the decisive Battle of Mons against the Germans.
Regardless of where the film drew its inspiration, "Wonder Woman" is certainly inspiring audiences to come out to the theaters. (Clay Enos/Warner Bros. Pictures)
It also didn't help that the story was written in the first-person.
Over time, accounts of divine intervention multiplied, morphing from Machen's original tale of ghostly medieval longbow archers to a glowing cloud to, most popular of all, warrior angels.
Though Jenkins failed to respond to a request for comment, the parallels between the stories of the Angels of Mons and what happens in the blockbuster are undeniable, from the way that Wonder Woman can't be touched by gunfire to how she soars across bombed out wasteland and, most importantly, inspires the group of soldiers behind her to join in the charge toward their German enemies.
Interestingly, the much-debated, much-beloved moment nearly didn't make into the final cut.
Calling it her "favorite scene in the movie," director Patty Jenkins told Fandango, "When I started to really hunker in on the significance of No Man's Land, there were a couple people who were deeply confused, wondering, like, 'Well, what is she going to do? How many bullets can she fight?' And I kept saying, 'It's not about that. This is a different scene than that. This is a scene about her becoming Wonder Woman.'"
Finally, after she went ahead and illustrated the battle moment by moment by hand by herself, she got the approval and audiences will never have to imagine what this invisible airplane looks like.
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