outstanding!

Rating: 10/10 (15 June 2017)

Fighting:
This movie has some really excellent fighting. Even the training scenes are great. It was really cool to see the Amazons training and fighting, and I liked that some of them are real fighters. I liked the horse tricks, too, which reminded me of the Cossack riders of the Moscow Circus. The Amazon costumes look good while still being practical to fight in.
The horrors of WWI trench warfare are shown, including the big guns, the gas, and the wounded coming back from the front. Diana has been trying to reach the front to achieve her goal, but she doesn't stay hung ho when Chief tells her the sound she thought was thunder was the sound of the war.
There's a moment in the trench scene when Trevor tells her, "This is No Man's Land. That means no man can cross it." I was sure she was about to say "I am No Man." But she didn't say it-- she did it.
I liked that the group's sniper doesn't actually snipe. It's realistic that soldiers sometimes don't actually shoot their weapons in battle. Of course that provided an excuse for Wonder Woman to save the day, but that could have been achieved without that touch of realism.
Humor
The script didn't go overboard with the humor, but there was enough there to relieve tension in what was otherwise more of a war movie than a superhero film audience might expect. Yes, there is a penis joke, but hey, Shakespeare did penis jokes, too, right? I liked that the sword-in-the-dress scene, which I knew about from Facebook friends sharing "got your back" pics, turned out to be a moment of humor instead of a serious fight scene, because the actual fight scene that happened later was way better than it would have been in a room full of noncombatants.
Stranger in a Strange Land
This movie did the fish-out-of-water thing way better than the first Thor movie did. In part that was because Diana didn't know things, like whether men slept, that were really basic things about our world but which she genuinely had a good story reason not to know. There was the inevitable "getting local clothes" scene, but it wasn't overplayed.
The villain
At first, when the backstory of Ares was explained by the Amazons, it seemed like Ares was going to be the sort of evil villain that does evil just for the sake of evil. Of course a superhero story needs a supervillain, and given that Diana is the daughter of Zeus (which I already knew before they made this movie, but which Diana herself doesn't know until late in the movie) of course no mere human villain could be much of an obstacle to her. In the actual Greek mythology, a human/ god offspring is a demigod, and like Hercules, is expected to be better than any human being. The same goes for the story logic here. So of course only another god could be much of a challenge to her. So I saw story logic, rather than the excessive influence of Christian dualism, in turning Ares into some kind of Satan in this movie. I was prepared to accept that for the sake of the story, which is, after all, fiction. But oh, they did so much more with him by the end.
Ares turned out to be completely different than Diana had thought. Not only was he a different person, with a different name and body, than she had thought, but his motivation turned out to be exactly the same as her own: to eliminate evil by killing it. Diana went to find Ares to kill him because she thought he was evil and responsible for war and suffering, and Ares was trying to kill humankind because he thought humans were evil and responsible for war and suffering. Diana and Ares were alike, two of a kind, in a way that went far beyond being brother and sister gods. Ares only appeared to be evil if one first centers humanity and bases moral judgments off of what benefits or harms humankind. It turned out, this was not a story of dualism at all, not a story of an evil being fighting a good being, but a story of two beings that share the same motivation and dedication to eradicating evil, but differ only on their opinion of mankind. This complicated view of how one defines evil was a truly wonderful thing to find in a superhero movie.
The hero's character arc
Diana starts out as a young idealist and enthusiast of the fighting arts from a warrior culture that believes in love in the abstract, toward humanity. Along the way she loses her naivety and gains romantic, attached love. She develops as a warrior and hero the more she loses her fascination with fighting for its own sake and gives her attention to saving others, especially those she loves. That is a standard journey of maturity for a hero, and it barely references her gender except in the details. The bones of the story could have been told about any superhero; the story was fleshed out in such a way that Wonder Woman was both truly a wonder and most definitely a woman, and those two things did not conflict with each other.