At the end of Wonder Woman‘s first act, Gal Gadot’s superhero, Diana, is warned by Connie Nielsen’s Queen Hippolyta that the world of men is a treacherous place, and that “They don’t deserve you”. It’s not the first time that Wonder Woman hints at a world that would be much easier to live in without men in it. Director Patty Jenkins isn’t approaching the world of comic book movies meekly. Like last year’s all-female Ghostbusters film, Wonder Woman has become somewhat politicized, its female-ness being centered for discussions on whether movies in usually male-dominated genres can succeed with female protagonists. We’ve already forgotten that Ghostbusters was a box office hit, or that before that Bridesmaids was a huge success, or the other dozens of examples that prove that: no, making a movie about a woman does not jeopardize box office potential. And yet, we still get hiccups like the outrage over an all-women screening of Wonder Woman in a few select theaters. Whether or not I find this argument boring (I do), it doesn’t seem to change the fact that the argument still has to be made, and I’m happy to see that Wonder Woman is another piece of ammunition to prove that antiquated (and sexist) thinking wrong.

Now, let’s start with one thing: this film is far from perfection. It’s screenplay (by Allan Heinberg) is hilariously over-stuffed, fitting five defined acts into 141 minutes. You can almost feel it wanting to be a television series in front of you. That same screenplay is framed in a shamelessly transparent connection to the rest of the DC Universe (you know, that other comic book industry that has unsuccessfully been trying to challenge Marvel for this entire decade), which only reminds you that this film is linked to the unfortunate Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice which is a movie I didn’t even have to see to know that it is a black eye in the relentless twenty-first century Hollywood ecosystem. Or how about the fact that the film hedged its bets by casting Chris Pine alongside Gadot’s Wonder Woman, and there are more than a handful of moments where the film seems a bit confused as to who the actual star is? So yeah, you can pick this movie apart. But is it fun? Fuck yes.

The movie opens on the hidden island of Themyscira, a gorgeous paradise encased in a translucent dome that hides it from the rest of the world. The only people there are the Amazon warrior women who survived God of War Ares’ attempts to wipe them out. Queen Hippolyta molded a daughter out of clay, and Zeus gave that clay mold life, and what we were given was Diana, the princess of Themyscira. Hippolyta’s sister, Antiope (Robin Wright), is the Amazon’s General and its fiercest warrior. Though Hippolyta wishes for a peaceful life for her daughter, Antiope knows that it is crucial Diana be trained properly, lest Ares’ eventual discovery of Themyscira lead to their downfall. Diana doesn’t know of her prophecy to be the one to bring down Ares, and Hippolyta would like to keep it that way. But Antiope’s insistence and Diana’s curiosity eventually wears the queen down, and Diana spends her entire adolescence training with the Amazons, before becoming their most complete warrior.

Alas, Ares is not the first to discover Themyscira. That honor goes to Steve Trevor (Pine), an American Air Service officer working for British Intelligence as a spy within the German Army toward the end of World War I. When his ruse within the German Army is discovered, Steve steals a plane in an attempt to flee, and crash lands right in front of Diana, followed by a siege of German officers who breach Themyscira’s shores and give Diana her first real-life example of what actual combat is like. When she learns of the conflict going on outside of Themyscira, Diana knows that Ares must be behind it and sees it as her duty to travel back with Steve to stop Ares, end the war, and protect the human race as the Amazons were meant to do. This is the bulk of Wonder Woman: her emergence in the world and her constant learning, and re-learning, of the follies and virtues of the human race. As she pushes forward into war-torn Europe she finds many examples of what makes people good and bad, and its with this experience that she must learn how to help them, or if she even wants to.

Wonder Woman has its fair share of fish-out-of-water humor, where Diana has to learn how to wear a dress, or learn that she can’t walk through the streets of London with a giant, lumbering sword and shield. Along their quest to end the war, Diana and Steve are joined by a French-Moroccan con-artist named Sameer (Saïd Taghmaoui), a PTSD-afflicted sniper named Charlie (Ewen Bremner), and a Native American smuggler named Chief (Eugene Brave Rock). They also get help from Steve’s secretary Etta (Lucy Davis) and an unexpected hand from Patrick Morgan (David Thewlis), a British diplomat who preaches peace on the Imperial War Cabinet but who secretly funds Steve and Diana’s operation despite its threat to the coming peace armistice. While Diana is eager to end all war, Steve is eager to stop Erich Ludendorff (Danny Huston), the real-life German war hawk whose resistance to German surrender has him partnered with the chemist Isabel Maru (Elena Anaya), or Doctor Poison, who wishes to create a gas so deadly that it will even kill those wearing masks. Steve wants to stop Ludendorff and Maru while peace is still a viable option.

So yeah, there is a lot of plot here. Some of it ends up being a red herring, some of it ends up being deceptive. I’ll leave it up to you to figure out which is which, but I find it easy to say that not all of it is necessary. Wonder Woman falls into all the same plotholes that all these movies fall into, but it does so without feeling cheap or lazy. If anything, it just feels narratively over-ambitious. Of course, that same ambition doesn’t spill into a political agenda, which probably would have been too much to ask from this film at this time. That said, you can’t take the feminist themes out of Wonder Woman. Her simple existence is a symbol of female righteousness, sexual agency and intellectual independence from the male sex.  The only other feature film that Jenkins has made is Monster, the 2003 film which won Charlize Theron an Oscar for playing Aileen Wuornos, a damaged women driven to maniacal homicide after sexual assault. Jenkins is not shy about playing with the perils of being a woman in a man’s world, but Wonder Woman is a much shyer film than Monster.

Wonder Woman‘s special effects are not as sharp as the films in this genre tend to be, but Jenkins directs the battle scenes with great fervor. The movie’s at its best when its allowing its main character to kick ass. The film’s first battle, between the Amazons and the German soldiers, might be the film’s high point, a moment that perfectly encapsulates the story’s not-so-subtle subtext of female equality on the battlefield (if not out right superiority). When Wonder Woman gets bogged down in its tale of scrap heap soldiers and the will they/won’t they relationship between Diana and Steve, the film’s less interesting colors begin to show. But there’s an electricity that comes from this woman being this kind of badass. Gadot’s performance is painted in broad strokes, her godliness sometimes forbids her a personality, but she can portray Wonder Woman’s warrior ferocity seemingly without effort. We won’t have to wait long to see Diana again – she’ll be starring in November’s Justice League – and she’ll be back in the realm of the male-dominated DC Universe. I hadn’t seen any of the DC films before Wonder Woman and there’s a good chance I won’t see any of the following ones – my allergies with this genre has been well-documented – but this film is a terrific piece of Hollywood action filmmaking. It’s only incidental that it stars a woman.

 

Directed by Patty Jenkins