good, misses great

Rating: 7/10 (4 June 2017)

Wonder Woman (Minor obvious spoilers) Everyone will know the outlines at this point – American spy Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) stumbles into the hidden Amazon island of Themyscira, and Diana accompanies him back into the world to put an end to not just WW1, but presumably all war forever. This she will do by smiting Ares with the god-killer sword. Ares in this version is not just another god with the regrettable portfolio of war, but the originator of humankind's fall, the Greek mythological equivalent of the biblical serpent who corrupts humankind. Once she does that, evil will end and humans will return to their primal innocence.
Well, they didn't write the outcome that way, that would have been really silly (but see below). We follow Steve and Diana as she carries her naïve belief through nine-tenths of the action, even as she is confronted by the vast, senseless misery and human butchery that is war. She's convinced that Ares has taken the form of German general Erich Ludendorff, and offing him will put an end to his evil influence and the war will simply stop, collapsing like a balloon with the air let out. (I make for a poor historian, but I take it the story stays within the actual historical development that an armistice was about to end the war anyway, out of sheer exhaustion on all sides, and the movie adds a bit of alternative history in a ghastly war gas that alt-Ludendorff was about to unleash to keep it going.) Inevitably, Diana catches up to Ludendorff and slams the god-killer through his chest. Then she looks around expecting to see everyone dropping their weapons and hugging one another, and is aghast to realize that nothing has changed. (Well, in Steve Trevor's world killing a senior general is an important strategic achievement, but she thought she was in a different sort of world.) For me this is the key moment in the movie – at this point the story is flirting with a big theme: where does evil come from? Diana has run splat into the realization that, whatever the myths of our misty origins: fear and hate and greed and stupidity are part of the world and part of us. It's an are-you-people-worth-saving moment, and Gadot delivers Diana's reaction with fierce passion.
I don't mind that it's a movie about a comic book character, I like big themes, and if they'd been steering the story to put a sharper point on it, I think it would have been a very fine movie, maybe even a great one. It wouldn't have needed any solemn beard-stroking, Steve Trevor isn't your philosophical dialectician, but I think they could have found just a few more well-written lines for them to put the point in high relief. I think they just missed the bullseye.
Of course she decides to deal with humankind as it is, not as she thought it should be.
At the end, they decided this must be a standard superhero movie, so there has to be a grand blow 'em up finale when Ares shows up in person, and there's the requisite array of explosions and lightning bolts. Ares goes nyahaha, surrender to the darkside, and she discovers her full powers and blasts him into a smoking crater. And then! – the handful of soldiers in the area who have survived the blast wave stand up, look around in a daze and start hugging each other. Argh. Thereby trivializing the lesson we've just gone to a deal of trouble to learn. Fortunately that moment passes quickly.
The story is leavened with some nice fish-out-of-water moments as she adjusts to 1918 London, and her charge across the lethal no-man's land between the trenches will be the iconic moment from this movie. Accepting for the moment that even movies about comic superheroes have a place, we can take satisfaction that a female superhero has joined the A-list. I enjoyed it. It almost made it to the top rung.