WONDER WOMAN
Amazon Grace
RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A | 141 minutes Director Patty Jenkins Cast Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Robin Wright, Danny Huston
“All the world is waiting for you”, as the theme song to Lynda Carter’s kitsch ’70s TV show hymned its heroine. Forty years on the crush of expectation is considerably higher.
Hollywood’s first female-fronted, female-driven blockbuster, Wonder Woman arrives as an acid test for empowerment. It’s also a film tasked with making an almighty course correction for the DCU, a box office brand stained by the toxically joyless Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice.
The Amazon’s big-screen solo debut delivers on both counts. Not only is it a win for helmer Patty Jenkins and validation that Gal Gadot can balance an entire movie on her lean, muscular, all-but-unknown shoulders, it’s also a triumphant restatement of core superheroic principles, resetting the DCU to unabashed idealism mode. Reconstruction, not deconstruction. Granny’s Peach Tea is no longer being served.
Bookended by a brief, modernday coda to BVS – remember that sepia-tinted photograph? – the film stays relatively faithful to Wonder Woman’s comic book origins (WW2 is swapped for WW1, stripping the character of her patriotic ’40s context but offering a fresh battlescape for the action sequences). We meet Diana as a young girl and are given hints that her creation myth – shaped from clay, given life by Zeus – may not be all it seems.
There’s a weight of exposition in the opening scenes – at one point a painting comes alive to walk us through the mythological heavy-lifting – but it’s balanced by the breathtaking vistas of sun-bleached Themyscira, an island idyll populated exclusively by brawny, badass women who never just fall from a horse when there’s an opportunity for a three-point pirouette.
Into this oestrogen-fuelled Brigadoon comes Chris Pine as spy Steve Trevor, bringing the real world with him in the form of the German navy. Cue the film’s first knock-out action scene as Jenkins unleashes the Amazons in a riot of balletic carnage that recalls such Zhang Yimou fare as Hero or House Of Flying Daggers.
There’s instant, potent chemistry between Gadot and Pine, a touch of old-time Hollywood in their chaste, bantering romance. They’re also well-matched in their perfectly pitched sincerity, their mutual resolution to end “the war to end all wars”. Gadot’s convincingly fierce in combat but there’s a winning innocence to her – she’s closer to the impish, curious child we meet at the start of this movie than the world-weary enigma of BVS. Pine, too, shows us a noble heart behind the wolfish grin.
Relocating to a grey, post-Edwardian London the film detours into fish-out-of-water
One scene unleashes the Amazons in a riot of balletic carnage
comedy before heading to the trenches. If the London scenes conjure the old-school charm of Superman The Movie – Diana’s glasses disguise earns a knowing wink – then there’s a distinct Hellboy vibe to the villains, Nazis in all but name and timeframe. They’re boo-hiss sketches rather than fully fleshed antagonists but Elena Anaya’s Doctor Poison (an authentic Wonder Woman foe) makes for a great, pulp-gothic visual, her ruined face hidden behind a jigsaw of prosthetics.
Yes, the climax lapses into boilerplate blockbuster showdown where J enkins channels Zack Snyder. But elsewhere the movie truly sings, and never more so than when Wonder Woman has a chance to be a pure, unsullied force of heroism, soaring above the adolescent moral conflicts we’ve seen in previous DCU movies.
The film’s most stirring scene finds her emerging from the trenches like some red-blue-and-gold Angel of Mons. Bullets shatter on her bracelets and she presses her shield against the German guns, unstoppable as she strides through the mud and the wire and the horror. Refreshingly, she’s fired by compassion, not aggression. This is No Man’s Land. “No man can cross it,” we’re told. The unspoken point, of course, is that this woman can. It’s the core essence of the character brought beautifully to the screen.
Heartfelt but never earnest, bright-eyed but never cornball, Wonder Woman feels like a movie out of time. Maybe we’re the ones who need to catch up with her.
“Now the world is ready for you…”
The team behind the ’60s Batman show shot five minutes of a sitcom-flavoured Wonder Woman TV pilot in 1967.