Won­der Woman

A lit­tle bit of inquir­ing inno­cence can go a long way, and does so in Pat­ty Jenk­ins’ ster­ling super­hero ori­gin sto­ry, Won­der Woman. Off the bat, let us assuage your fears: yes, this is a com­ic movie ripped direct­ly from the DC uni­verse (eww!); but don’t wor­ry, this time you can actu­al­ly see the images clear­ly and hear the dia­logue being spo­ken. Gone are the mumbly, lantern-jawed alpha males curs­ing the moon like they’re in a Meat­loaf video and using sky scrap­ers as joust­ing lances. In their place is sim­ple, coher­ent sto­ry­telling and char­ac­ters you actu­al­ly care about.

Zack Snyder’s hor­ren­dous Bat­man V Super­man: Dawn of Jus­tice first intro­duced us to Gal Gadot’s Won­der Woman. The neces­si­ty of a head­lin­ing spin-off movie appeared essen­tial, main­ly because she was giv­en absolute­ly noth­ing to do in that movie, nudged to the shad­owy side­lines like she was there to ful­fil a con­trac­tu­al oblig­a­tion. In terms of char­ac­ter­i­sa­tion, the slate is wiped clean from that first film, as Gadot plays Diana, Princess of The­mysci­ra, as an earnest neo­phyte whose ulti­mate goal is to erad­i­cate the very con­cept of war from human think­ing. And you can’t get a bet­ter bad guy than that.

She is an Ama­zon, born on a seclud­ed, trop­i­cal island and taught hand-to-hand com­bat skills from an ear­ly age. Her moth­er believes she should remain pure, but oth­ers think that it’s best to know how to fight, just in case the worst hap­pens. The worst then hap­pens when a fight­er plane, pilot­ed by Chris Pine’s flop­py-fringed spy Steve Trevor, crush­es their sun­ny utopia by lead­ing a small fleet of blood­thirsty Ger­mans into their midst. Guns begin to fire and bod­ies fall. Aries, the god of war, is up to his old tricks, and Diana insists Steve lead her to him so she can bring peace to Earth once more.

On paper, it sounds like we’ve been there and done that. But Won­der Woman is a more sedate and thought­ful work that we’d per­haps expect from the con­sis­tent­ly dis­ap­point­ing DC brand imprint. And that’s down to the fact that Jenk­ins appears ded­i­cat­ed to mak­ing sure that the view­er retains a sense of space and geog­ra­phy at all times. The action is not lost between a flur­ry of scat­ter-gun edits, or slowed down at the expense of some extrav­a­gant cam­era trick­ery. There are few­er fight scenes, so the by the time the big cli­mac­tic punch up comes around, you’re not bored to tears of see­ing two scowl­ing bros land hay­mak­ers on some seem­ing­ly inde­struc­tible hell beast.

Maybe this reads like we’re only prais­ing Won­der Woman because it man­ages to swerve the pit­falls of its bloat­ed for­bears. But the film has its own mer­its, notably the husky Gadot who excels in the lead role, cre­at­ing a com­ic char­ac­ter you’d actu­al­ly like to spend a bit more time with (beyond the already gigan­tic plus two-hour run­time). Her inter­pre­ta­tion of this fan­ta­sy fig­ure tran­scends pan­tomime, and you always feel that she’s tak­ing the role very seri­ous­ly (as opposed to feign­ing seriousness).

Jenk­ins also does well in keep­ing the gen­der roles bal­anced, and the film wears its fem­i­nist cre­den­tials light­ly but proud­ly. Hav­ing Won­der Woman enter into the male-dom­i­nat­ed the­atre of war (the dying days of World War One) is in itself a state­ment of intent, and a sequence in which she sin­gle-hand­ed­ly shakes up a front line impasse makes for a rous­ing and rad­i­cal flash­point. Her rela­tion­ship with Steve, too, nev­er has her slink­ing into a sub­or­di­nate female arche­type, and despite his nat­ur­al sense of der­ring do, he’s always the one that needs sav­ing, and always the one in awe of her abilities.

Over the dura­tion of the film, she begins to com­pre­hend the dual­i­ty of man, the dif­fer­ence between aggres­sion and self preser­va­tion, and the trag­ic philo­soph­i­cal con­nec­tion between love and death. Her final bat­tle is staged less as a phys­i­cal show­down, and more an intel­lec­tu­al one, her pow­er expand­ing in tan­dem with her knowl­edge base. It’s not just good super­hero vs bad mon­ster, it’s the con­cept of com­pas­sion ver­sus the con­cept of destruction.