Quite a few decades late

Rating: 5/10 (21 November 2017)

I reviewed this previously and think I was overly harsh. If this movie had been made at the time of the first Superman movie, it'd possibly be amongst my favorite old movies. If this was actually a long unpublished script, it's pretty neat. However, in light of what we've learned in the past several decades, there are significant issues I can't overlook.
The depiction of Themascara is essentially canon, but canon was altered enough in other instances that this could've been upgraded too. The action shots were great, but actually framing why they train, why they fight, what it means to be a general...it was all sort of glossed over in montage. What it means to build an all female society is also rather glossed over, which gives the impression "don't look too closely, it's fragile". Then another montage to set up and kill the Greek gods, save for one (maybe two), and not really define what it means to be a god, or how the world works, or...do I really need to pause the movie to brush up on my Greek mythology?
In classic superhero tales, the villains play a significant part in defining the heroes. Take Batman and the Joker for instance. Both are intensely dissatisfied with the way the world works, have altered their appearances accordingly, have taken drastic elaborate actions to change the world, and behave according to a set of principles. What sets Batman apart is that he wants to correct the system to its ideal state, and the Joker just wants it all to burn. You could make similar analogies for Superman or Spiderman or the Flash or...but when we look at Wonder Woman and Ares, we barely see Ares' personality, and Wonder Woman's actions are only figuratively godlike in most instances. Why build up the wrong bad guy? It's clever to begin with, but the chain isn't really completed, and we don't really have closure at the end.
Then there were micro-annoyances, like how she knew 100 languages, but hadn't studied anything relevant to the small talk of our group of heroes, nor the conduct and procedures of heads of state. For being "so well read", we could've got more than a few cheap allusions. Or how she let a bullet whiz right past her into a fellow Amazon, but in the very next action scene she's instinctively blocking all bullets in 360 degrees with her bracelets. And the lasso shots were great, but really felt like the special effects guy didn't work with the one from Batman vs Superman, where the lasso was used in a more intuitive manner. Also, more proficiency (lasso) without any shown training in her time as an Amazon.
Lastly, why is the chain of dialogue for her personal development centered on the importance of "belief". What are those beliefs and why are we empowering a generation of young girls with such a generic moral imperative? Do we really want the rhetoric of Wonder Woman to be re-purposed by each girl's respective religious leader?