Wonder Woman (2017)

There's a moment in the first act of Wonder Woman where Diana charges across a beach, shield raised, a battalion of Amazonian warriors thundering behind her, and it genuinely thrills. That sequence, set on Themyscira, is the film at its best: visually bold, mythically charged, full of a kind of primal energy that makes you lean forward in your seat. Then the story shifts to the Western Front, and something deflates. Almost immediately. And it never really recovers.

I wanted this to work. I really did. The idea of anchoring a superhero origin story in the mud and moral horror of the First World War is genuinely interesting, and the early promise of that Themyscira section suggests the film knows what it wants to be. Strong world-building, dynamic action, a heroine who feels genuinely otherworldly. It had me. But the moment Diana steps off that boat and into the grey drizzle of wartime Europe, Wonder Woman starts trading its mythic ambitions for the most predictable superhero formula imaginable.

Gal Gadot looks the part, I'll give her that. She carries herself with grace and physical conviction, and you believe her as an immortal warrior on a purely visual level. But the performance underneath that physicality is paper thin. Line readings land flat, dramatic beats arrive and leave without registering, and the character's inner life stays so underdeveloped that when the film asks you to feel something for Diana, you're left grasping at nothing. Chris Pine works hard as the love interest and brings genuine warmth and charm to a fairly thankless role, but the romance between the two is rushed and unconvincing, which is a serious problem when it's supposed to be the emotional spine of the whole story.

The writing doesn't help either of them. The dialogue has that scrubbed, functional quality of a script that has been through too many rewrites and lost its personality somewhere along the way. Characters say what they need to say to move the plot forward and very little else. For a film that's supposedly grappling with questions about human nature and idealism, it has surprisingly little to actually say about either.

And then there's the final act. I've sat through a lot of CGI light-beam showdowns in my time, and this one adds nothing new to that exhausting tradition. Whatever thematic weight the film had been building collapses into weightless, noisy spectacle. It's the exact kind of ending that makes you feel like the people making the film stopped trusting it. I kept thinking about how differently something like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon handles its action sequences, how grounded and emotionally legible they feel even at their most stylised. Wonder Woman is going for something similar with its slow-motion combat sequences, but the comparison is not kind.

None of this makes Wonder Woman a disaster. The Themyscira section genuinely works, there are individual shots that are beautiful, and the film's intentions are clearly good. But good intentions don't make a good film, and too much of what surrounds those early highlights is formulaic, emotionally hollow, and depressingly safe. For a character this iconic, for a film carrying this much cultural expectation, safe is the worst thing it could be.

A missed opportunity, plain and simple. Two stars.

Rating: ★★  | Year: 2017  | Watched: 2026-04-22

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Where to watch

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