Wonder Woman Review

You’ve probably gathered by now that I think Wonder Woman is awesome. One of the very first posts on this blog was about the Lynda Carter Wonder Woman TV Series! So it’s probably not a surprise that I went into seeing Wonder Woman with high excitement but also with quite a lot of apprehension.

Wonder Woman is the origin story movie for Wonder Woman. Given this is the first ever Wonder Woman movie it makes sense that they chose to tell the story of Steve Trevor crashing on Themyscira and Diana Prince leaving with him to go out into the outside world and become Wonder Woman.

In my opinion this movie got Diana’s character spot on. She’s one of the toughest most badass superheroes around but also one of her greatest strengths is her compassion. The final battle perfectly showed both sides of the character. Definitely during her fight scenes Diana is the strong and brave warrior princess. But many times throughout the movie we see the desire to save people from Diana that becomes a big part of why she becomes a superhero. Her compassion and love is one of her strengths in the comics and it’s also one of her strengths in the movie. One thing that’s always potentially risky when doing the Wonder Woman origin story is how far to go with showing her discovering new things after leaving Themyscira. On the one hand it’s only natural that she should be surprised by the social and technological changes in the outside world but on the other hand if it gets pushed too far then Diana can seem infantilised and unintelligent. I think this movie got just the right balance. She is surprised by things but that never gets in the way of her competence.

Diana wasn’t the only strong character in this movie, part of how Wonder Woman works so well as a movie is the strong cast of supporting characters. Steve Trevor was actually pretty competent in this movie which is a significant change from the 70s TV Series, I don’t mind this as he’s played by Chris Pine who I had a massive crush on back in 2013. Etta Candy was a fun character to watch who had some very enjoyable scenes with Diana. The Amazonians and the soldiers that Diana befriends whilst fighting in the war were also well developed believable characters. This is undoubtably Wonder Woman’s movie but I think it was a stronger movie because of the supporting characters.

This movie chose to set this story during World War One which is not a time period that we usually see Wonder Woman in but it definitely proved to be an effective setting. The setting of World War One was partially so effective because of the way that the movie portrayed war. It certainly did not glorify war and in some emotional scenes showed the human cost of war. I’ve noticed that increasingly it’s becoming a trend for superhero movies and TV shows to place the emotional story on par with the action. I’m all for this sort of emotional storytelling becoming a part of superhero narratives.

This is a more or less completely standalone movie. I know that superhero movies are often criticised for being overly reliant on other films and shared universes, Wonder Woman breaks that as a movie that can definitely stand on its own. Whilst you’ll probably get more out of this movie if you’re already familiar with the character there’s no prior knowledge required. Literally the only reference to any other movies in the DC Cinematic Universe is a little scene at the end where Diana is emailing Bruce Wayne.

Whilst DC is often criticised for being humourless (clearly people who say that didn’t go and see The Lego Batman Movie!) Wonder Woman has some great one liners in it which actually genuinely made me laugh out loud in the cinema. I am a little disappointed that we didn’t get to see the Invisible Jet but it probably would have felt out of place in the movie. Hopefully in a future DC movie we can get to see Diana flying to the rescue in the Invisible Jet.

In conclusion I loved Wonder Woman. This was exactly the movie that the character needed and deserved. I mentioned in my review of the Lois Lane Novels that DC is good at portraying their female characters. Wonder Woman just further proves that DC are good at giving us female heroes. I loved this movie and I’m looking forward to seeing the Batgirl movie that is currently in development.