Well, I went to see the movie I had been quite apprehensive about given its setting and it turns out…it’s one of the better superhero movies of the past twenty years, and so far above the rest of the DCEU that it kind of retroactively breaks MoS and BvSDoJ. 

More spoilery thoughts below the cut.

Diana

Before they can do anything else, an actor playing a superhero has to sell you the physical plausibility of them being super-human (even the ones without powers still do stuff that’s super-human – there’s a reason Christopher Nolan filmed Batman like a monster in a horror movie). Gal Gadot did that in spades, delivering an astonishing physical performance that really made you believe she was a demigod.

Equally importantly, the script delivered a Diana that audience can like – she’s idealistic to a fault, she sees the best in people, she’s compassionate and brave and her basic instinct is heroic. And her flaws – she’s incredibly naive (although you definitely chalk that up to being raised in a utopia by a mother who shielded her from the truth about everything), her idealism often results in her seeing what she wants to see rather than what’s there, and as a warrior she often tries to brute-force the world into seeing it her way – are both non-dealbreakers and fit the story really well. Diana tries to save the world without understanding it, learns the truth about the world and herself, and ends up saving the world by understanding it. 

And I’m very happy that for once, the fundamental lesson wasn’t a misanthropic one: Diana doesn’t conclude that humanity sucks and that superheroism is either futile or fascist, she sees the good and the bad in humanity and believes that love can redeem us. For a film that posits the literal existence of the Greek gods, it’s one of the most Protestant films ever: humans are inherently sinful despite our best efforts, and only by the grace of Diana are we saved. 

As for the non-physical performance: I thought Gal Gadot did very well at all the comedic scenes, and had a nice rapport with the ensemble, and was quite convincing in scenes in which she was angry or determined. I didn’t buy her as much when she was supposed to be grieving or despairing – the scene in the gassed town for example fell flat. 

Themyscira

I really liked this sequence – it was colorful, strange, the combat choreography was incredibly balletic and dynamic, I thought the way they dealt with Diana’s origin stories and the gradual reveal of her burgeoning powers was quite good. 

In fact, I wanted to spend more time on the island and wish we could have seen Chris Pine – who did a great turn as Steve Trevor and really should be allowed to play more comedic roles than somewhat wooden leading man roles – interact with the broader Amazonian culture in the same way that Diana does with London. As it is, he really only experiences it through Diana. 

London

I was less fond of this section. Visually, it’s incredibly monotone grey – how does the home front look less visually appealing than the trenches? – and outside of the shopping sequence it was generally rather exposition-heavy in a way that really didn’t illuminate very much. I have a sad feeling that if you polled people who watched the movie and asked them what an armistice was or why Ares was pushing for it rather than against it, most of them would be very confused indeed. 

The Front

This is the part that I was the most apprehensive about, both because I was worried that the visuals of Diana going over the top and saving the day kind of re-writes the essential insanity of the Western Front – my great-grandfather fought at Ypres and no one there was passing around bullet-deflecting bracers or mortar-proof shields – and because making Ze Germans the baddies in WWI potentially re-writes the essential insanity of the alliance-builders and the war planners on all sides. 

Thankfully, my fears were completely allayed. On one level, the action is just too well done – whatever intellectual position one holds, when Wonder Woman starts throwing tanks and knocking down sniper towers bodily, the adrenaline surge just overpowers that. But on another level, I felt that the filmmakers avoided the worst: they pointed to the shortcomings of the Entente through Sameer’s struggles with racial discrimination, Etta’s motioning towards the suffragette movement, and Chief’s pointed gestures to the history of American wars against Native Americans. Diana’s mistake wrt to Ludendorff and Ares and Trevor’s speech about how people cause wars due to having badness in them also points away from having one side be the Baddies. 

And the final scene where we see young Germans cheering or sobbing in relief when they realize the war’s finally over was really important – I just kind of wish it was more consistent whereas 90% of the Germans we see before that were pretty stock faceless Baddies in stahlhelms. 

But as far as individual Germans went, even Doctor Poison got humanized and who gives a damn if Ludendorff is slightly slandered? The man was a warmongering bastard proto-Nazi and both Germany and the world would have been better off if he’d died in 1918. 

Ares

While the English side of his plan makes no sense, I actually liked David Thewlis’ bureaucratized, modern, seductive Ares – a god who changes with the times, like Vulcan on last week’s episode of American Gods – way more than when he started putting on pseudo-Greek armor. 

The DCEU

Here’s where I think Wonder Woman kind of breaks Man of Steel and BvSDoJ: a big part of the premise of those two movies is that superpowered beings were completely new and literally alien and thus caused great fear and suspicion, requiring Superman to spend his life in hiding lest humanity something something. 

But in this movie, hundreds of people saw a demigoddess in action a hundred years ago – and yes, the civilians in that one village got gassed, but there was a whole battalion of British soldiers who saw her deflecting machine guns and mortars and a whole base of German soldiers who saw her fly and hurl lightning bolts and pick up tanks. That’s not something that can be easily covered up.  

And this is the problem that comes with trying to all of the sudden reverse-engineer a cinematic universe. Man of Steel makes sense in a world in which Superman is the only superhuman; the original idea of Batman fighting Superman in the wake of Man of Steel makes a certain amount of sense as well – but they don’t make sense in the context of a world in which Wonder Woman is a historical fact, and where superpowers are so common that Suicide Squad is a thing that can happen (thinking of Sorceress and Diablo here).