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Wonder Woman review: a tremendous win for a franchise that desperately needed one

Wonder Woman review: a tremendous win for a franchise that desperately needed one

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The DC Extended Universe finally finds its balance between troubled philosophy and thrilling action

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Image: Warner Bros.

Ever since the DC Extended Universe launched with 2013’s Man of Steel, it’s been troubled and contentious. DC Comics’ attempt at a revitalized, unified superhero film franchise has faced nonstop comparisons with Marvel’s more long-running and critically acclaimed cinematic universe, and it’s consistently come out worse in comparison. Warner Bros.’ DC films (to date: Man of Steel, Batman v Superman, and Suicide Squad) have been dour, sullen, narratively messy, and heavily criticized for their particularly fetishized and unrestrained use of violence. They’ve also been distressingly obsessed with forcing their heroes through protracted existential crises instead of letting them be heroes. (Or, in the case of Suicide Squad, reluctant anti-heroes.)

So the impressive thing about the series’s latest installment, Wonder Woman, isn’t that it abandons this approach. It’s that it embraces and redefines it, making it clear that it’s possible to wallow in the emotional troubles that have defined DCEU movies, and still have fun. Wonder Woman has a lightness and wryness that none of its DC predecessors could claim, but it’s still about philosophical crisis and a hero trying to find an identity. It’s still exploring the DCEU’s favorite themes: whether mankind truly deserves heroes, and whether it’s possible for one person to justly wield immense power. Director Patty Jenkins (Monster) and screenwriter Allan Heinberg explore those themes with a humanity that the franchise’s previous films were lacking. They take their protagonist’s natural superiority for granted, making it a joy instead of a heavy burden. In their hands, Wonder Woman questions her place in the world, but not her inherent identity. And it makes all the difference to the story.

It helps that in this revival of William Moulton Marston’s playful, bondage-obsessed heroine, Wonder Woman — or Diana, as she’s originally known — puts humanity first. Born to an all-female race of Amazons supposedly put on the Earth by Zeus to be a guiding light for humanity, Diana (Gal Gadot) knows from childhood that she wants to be a warrior, and she defies her overprotective mother Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) at every turn in order to get the training she needs. Martial leader Antiope (Robin Wright) initially tutors her in secret, but Diana becomes a powerful, confident fighter, undermined only by Antiope’s constant insistence that she’s holding back, that she’s more powerful than she realizes. 

Her crisis point comes when their magically hidden island of Themyscira is breached, first by fleeing British spy Steve Trevor (Star Trek’s Chris Pine), then by the German soldiers chasing him. Outside of Themyscira’s paradisiacal bubble of protection, World War I has been underway for four years, 25 million people have died, and an armistice is in the works. But an ambitious German general named Ludendorff (Danny Huston, playing an obscure but real historical figure) and his troubled pet scientist, Dr. Maru (The Skin I Live In’s Elena Anaya) are developing a weapon that may change the course of the war. Horrified by Steve’s reports of the war, Diana leaves the island, convinced that the combat was caused by the Amazons’ ancient enemy, Ares, the god of war. She believes if she finds and kills Ares, the Germans will suddenly “become good men again” and stand down.

Image: Warner Bros.

Wonder Woman represents a number of delicate balancing acts: between humor and gravitas; angst and adventure; full-blown, unvarnished superhero fantasy and the DCEU’s usual unpacking of what those fantasies mean. But its most impressive balancing routine may be the one that plays out between Steve and Diana over whether the Ares myth is real, and whether the histories of gods, Amazons, and magical hidden islands have any place in the modern world. The movie’s opening act on Themyscira is outsized and mythic, but once the story returns to Steve’s familiar, grubby world, Wonder Woman seems like a surreal figure, a children’s story brought to life. The people who see Diana seem to recognize that she’s larger than life, no less startling than a unicorn walking through 1918 London. “I’m both frightened and aroused,” Steve’s buddy Sameer (Saïd Taghmaoui) grumbles, watching her casually respond to a bar fight.

And yet there are no heroes yet in their world, so the characters have a strong urge to treat Diana as just another strikingly beautiful woman — in other words, to protect her, sideline her, and politely diminish her. And without making a fuss about it, she is in no way willing to be diminished. She’s a fish out of water in 1918 London, which gives Wonder Woman a fair number of comedy pegs and opportunities for banter — and also its strongest feminist leanings, as Steve tries to control and contain Diana, and she shrugs him off and does whatever makes sense to her instead. But she’s also the ultimate home-schooled kid, confidently operating under assumptions that have never come up against real-world facts. Wonder Woman gets its philosophical bent from the conflict between her pure, untested idealism and the actual gruesome realities of war, and it finds rich ground in the gap between them.

Image: Warner Bros.

It also gives the movie a fascinating yet low-key narrative tension, as Diana and Steve try to carry out a spy mission while operating under radically different worldviews: he wants to stop a German weapons program, she wants to stab a god. Wonder Woman continually finds the strain between a mundane worldview and a supernatural, superheroic one, and questions what that strain would do to the people trying to navigate it.

Jenkins has talked extensively in the media about the difficulties of directing a film with such high stakes for women filmmakers and female superheroes — Wonder Woman is being hyped as a litmus test for whether modern cinema audiences will pack theaters to watch a superhero movie with a woman protagonist, and whether a woman director can bring the blockbuster action. But while Wonder Woman is supremely calculated in its gender politics and its gender role reversals, the question of how a female hero sees the world winds up being less interesting than the question of how an entirely self-assured hero sees it. The DCEU’s Batman and Superman are both tormented by their solitude and their histories; as a one-of-a-kind being, Wonder Woman takes her solitude for granted, and her history is almost entirely of her own choosing. Her femininity is part of the story, for the way it makes even the other heroes in the movie underestimate and discount her. But her gender is never the story’s primary thrust.

Instead, Wonder Woman focuses on the horrors of war, the pleasures of camaraderie, and plain, old-fashioned superheroics. The DCEU’s Batman tortures criminals and tries to murder Superman, while Superman himself accidentally destroys cities, and is forced to murder villains. Wonder Woman simply fights injustice and saves lives. It is, frankly, a relief.

Image: Warner Bros.

Wonder Woman has its inevitable faults. The villains often seem too distant and disconnected from the action, which is ultimately more about Diana coming to terms with war than coming to terms with specific warmongers. The film spends a questionable amount of time on bringing in Steve’s old war buddies, a collection of half-realized, colorful scoundrels who don’t add much to the story except extra voices, and who come across as a weirdly watered-down version of Captain America’s already vaguely sketched Howling Commandoes. Sameer, Charlie (Trainspotting’s Ewen Bremner), and Chief (Eugene Brave Rock) are so thinly drawn, they come across as franchise cameos, being set up for their own feature outing while not having enough to do in this one. They provide some opportunities for pathos and self-examination, especially when Chief admits that he’s a war profiteer because he sees no other choice for a Native American booted from his land. But they’re billed as a collection of special talents that barely come into play.

And Jenkins falls into the same traps that have plagued superhero movies since the beginning of the new millennium: no matter how much thought and humanity went into the bulk of the film, the ending ultimately replaces most of the characters with CGI avatars, and drops the nuance in favor of sheer volume, piled-on explosions, and some particularly silly shouting about love. When a movie this carefully considered suddenly leaps into Fifth Element territory, the nosedive comes hard.

But so much of Wonder Woman finds the potential the DC movies have always had in their heroes. The action is crisp and thrilling, but more importantly, it’s meaningful. It’s carried out in support of a cause the audience can appreciate, by someone trying to protect civilians instead of ignoring them. For once, the DCEU has a hero who’s expressing an ethos instead of fuming and suffering over it. In fierceness and sheer badass fighting prowess, Wonder Woman is a match for the other heroes in her franchise. But in courage and certainty, she tops all of them. She represents the direction her cinematic series should be taking. She isn’t leaving behind existential questions. She’s just playing out a story where those questions can be meaningfully addressed, not just with rage and suffering, but with courage, conviction, and even humor. Batman, Superman, and the Suicide Squad asked the questions about what heroism means. Wonder Woman finally answers those questions definitively, and it’s a tremendous win for a franchise that desperately needed one.