Wonder Woman actually is the good step forward we've been waiting for in DC movies. It's a nice change of pace, but there's still kinks that need working out. Spoilers below the cut.
Wonder Woman is the first DC movie since Man of Steel that isn't such a train wreck it makes you regret ever being a fan of the characters and hoping they'd get a chance to be on the big screen. It's a definite improvement over previous efforts, but there are still bumps along the way.
The film's opening moments on Themyscrya are weighed down by clunky dialogue that's either slogging it's way through exposition or being so vague and "mysterious" that the actors have to deliver the lines in that breathy tone that they hope can make things meaningful. Sadly, it does not. And then, Steve Trevor shows up with ze Germans in hot pursuit and, one dead mentor later, Diana's call to action is sounded.
Things do pick up when the movie heads back into man's world, in no small part because Wonder Woman is the first DC movie to know what a joke is and why they're good things to have in a movie. Diana and Steve have one of the most awkward and uncomfortable conversations about sex ever put on film and it's glorious. The whole London sequence of trying to get Diana into a "His Girl Friday" costume exercises every single trope associated with the endeavor while wringing as many punchlines as they can out of it. It's the first real moment of personality and wit in a DC movie, which, sadly, almost immediately gets snuffed out.
Diana's whole line of thinking in this movie is that if she kills The God of War, then the land will Fisher King itself back into harmony and this whole Great War thing will just get written off as a lark of evil influence. In what should be a rather fraught piece of storytelling, Steve Trevor tries multiple times to low key get the point across that no, men are quite capable of turning the world into a charnel house all on their own. It should be a serious point of tension that his efforts become increasingly desperate as Diana's romantic sense of duty, glory, and heroism gets shattered by the piles of men dead in the mud or cowering alive in the trenches.
But the film never fully commits to it's horror. We spend all of two minutes in the trenches with scared, huddled faceless men before Diana makes her charge through No Man's Land, and when the village she rescued is killed to the last by a poison gas attack, the most we see is one body in a haze of smoke and then we are off to the final fight with no time to process what just happened. The film makes a rather large play at telling everyone about the carnage awaiting the characters at the front, but when it comes time to actually deliver, the film rushes past through it so all the mayhem and despair stays just out of focus.
This hesitancy to set the stage in fuller detail undermines every aspect of stakes the movie is trying to establish. Every member of Diana's mod squad is obviously suffering the effects of being in the war for so long, but without a more graphic depiction of what these men have experienced for years on end, their suffering and fatigue just aren't as impactful as they should be. Warner Brothers, and DC have repeatedly said that they want their comic book movies to be a darker, more somber alternative to Marvel movies, but the reluctance to get too far into the details of the most nihilistic and soul- crushing wars in human history just shows that the DC creative team has upgraded from the self-parody incompetence of latter day Frank Miller to good old-fashioned movie executive squeamishness. It's a step in the right direction at least, but they've still got a long way to go before they count as "the grown ups" in the conversation.
The lack of stakes also completely neuters and wastes Danny Huston as Erich Ludendorff, the German General hell-bent on turning the losing tide at any cost. Diana spends most of the movie thinking he's Ares come back to corrupt the souls of men but in a lazy Twilight Zone twist it turns out that he's just the personification of man's inherent nature taken to the extreme. Again, though, since we don't have to actually see or experience first-hand any of the carnage he so desperately wants to perpetuate, instead of getting an avatar of the destruction and futility of war, we just get an over-the-top representation of the real dude. The decision to give him gaseous steroids for super strength so he can put up a plot-stalling fight against Diana in the end is another mistake that actually undercuts the message the movie is trying to use him for. If he was just an old, tired man who just got the living shit beat out of him by Wonder Woman before getting stabbed to death in an ultimately pointless death, it would've actually made Diana experience how easy it is to wrap yourself up in the righteous certainty of your own personal cause, and how it's even easier to take a life without question to fulfill that cause. Confronting that darkness inside herself but moving past it, realizing that it isn't a stain on her or anyone else but merely a shade of who they are, would make her final heroic resolve against Ares and in general resonate even more; she wouldn't be above the lost, broken souls of humanity, she'd be one of them, trying to show them a better way forward.
What's frustrating about all of this is that the tools are there for the movie to be what it's reaching for. Patty Jenkins is no stranger to dealing with a woman delving into her dark side and coming out the other side changed, and Gal Gadot and Chris Pine give elevate the often ham-handed material to more respectable ground than it has any right to stand on. It's nice that they could overcome the flaws of the script and project the best version of the movie, but it would've been nice if, you know, they had actually had the script to fully realize that movie.
All that said though, if the price we have to pay to get more movies with women protagonists helmed by talented women directors who'd be collecting dust otherwise is people thinking Wonder Woman is an instant classic instead of a quality step forward with it's own problems, I don't really see how that's a bad thing.
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