Originally written December 1, 2017

I haven’t been so excited for a non-franchise movie as I was with Wonder in a while. See, my favorite book/movie of all time is The Perks of Being A Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky. I loved the book a ton, and so I was really excited when Chbosky himself was directing the movie adaptation for his own book. I’ve always wanted something new from Chbosky though, since the Perks book is the only one he’s ever written, and the movie is the only one he’s ever directed. So, I got really freaking excited when I heard that Stephen Chbosky would be directing Wonder. This movie is also based on a book (not by Chbosky though), so it’s not like it’s Chbosky’s own original material, but nonetheless I was really excited to see a movie with his touch.

Wonder is about a boy named Auggie Pullman. After some birth complications, Auggie came out as a seriously deformed baby. Many operations needed to be done to even get him to be able to see and hear properly, but not a ton could be done to make his face look normal. Because of this, Auggie has always been home schooled, but now that he’s entering the fifth grade, his parents aren’t able to educate him further, so he’s put into a public school. Needless to say, Auggie winds up facing some extreme hardships from other kids because of how he looks, and so the movie is about his journey of adjusting to a life where he has to interact with people that aren’t going to accept him because of how he looks, and to try to start loving himself for who he is. It’s a touching story, to say the least.

I’m impressed with how good Wonder actually is, because it would be very easy for a movie like this to fall into standard cliches and abuse its premise to get cheap tears from its audience. However, while it might teeter close to those places at some points, I felt like Wonder really made very good use of its concept in order to deliver a script that’s actually really fresh. I think the thing that impressed me the most about Wonder is that it winds up playing with the idea that there is always more than one perspective of looking at things, because people are complicated individuals with different stories and emotions. For a movie about a kid that has a messed up face, it’s surprising then that at different points it chooses to shift the focus to other characters. I thought that this was a really smart choice, because the movie has a solid cast of characters, and so it was interesting seeing things from other people’s points of view at times. This really helped for characters that are initially presented as mean-spirited, because it allows us to see that sometimes people have their reasons for acting a certain way, and we don’t always know the full story of it. In fact, the only thing that I was kind of disappointed in with the movie is that at a certain point it seems to abandon this multi-perspective technique and shift the focus almost entirely to Auggie for the rest of the movie. And don’t get me wrong, I loved seeing Auggie’s story, but I was also really invested in the stories of the other characters, so I was sad when we lost that a bit. I especially have to give a shoutout to Auggie’s sister Via, who was my favorite character since she had so many layers to her.

For the most part though, Wonder is…well, wonderful (sorry for the cheap pun). It could have been very easy for a movie like this to just be nonstop sad, but considering its concept it’s actually a pretty lighthearted movie. There are, of course, times where it gets sad, but it never overdoes it. Aside from a few places where I had some minor complaints, I think the movie is just very solid all around. It has an awesome script, great direction, a cast of characters with a lot of depth, an awesome cast of actors playing the roles, and a lot of heartfelt moments that never feel cheap, but rather earned. I would definitely recommend this one.

4.5/5