Gal Gadot IS Wonder Woman

Rating: 8/10 (1 June 2017)

I got somewhat emotional as I drove home from the theater because I know that Zack Snyder, who is going through a family crisis with the suicide of his daughter and who suffered a lot of criticism for casting Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, absolutely nailed it.
He knew what he was doing when he cast a stunningly gorgeous woman who was in the Israeli army. Who else who looks like Gadot could pull off the battle sequences so convincingly? It would seem absolutely moronic if he cast a sheltered beauty queen from America-- before this movie was released, many of his critics wanted him to use a busty, curvy American model instead of her.
Gal IS Wonder Woman. With all due respect (and the respect is well deserved) to Lynda Carter, she owns that tiara now. I can't imagine that they will ever find a more perfect actress for the part when Gal hangs it up.
Other than my adulation for Gal, I want to state as a World War I buff that director Patty Jenkins and her crew arranged the period pieces and the CG period pieces perfectly. I didn't see anything that struck me as out of place-- among the inanimate objects, anyway.
Maybe it would seem odd at the time that an American (Chris Pine's character) was working solely with British intelligence as a spy or-- especially more confounding-- that a native American just randomly joined the battle in Europe as some sort of rogue agent for hire. But we must use the same suspension of disbelief that we use when we accept that Wonder Woman is a princess from an enchanted island who must fulfill her prophecy of destroying a god of war.
Gadot's sensuous and intense facial expressions, her sweetness, her awesomeness in the role-- that's what I took from this movie even when the story went off the rails sometimes.
Henry Cavill is probably the worst Superman ever in film or TV, Ben Affleck makes for a great Batman, and Gadot is incomparable as Wonder Woman. I'm looking forward to seeing how The Flash and Aquaman will play.