8 / 10
Paradise Island
Diana grows up on Themyscira, a hidden island of warrior women, the Amazons, sheltered from the outside world. She’s the only child on the island, a determined little girl who wants to fight, and her aunt, the general Antiope, trains her in secret until she’s the greatest warrior of them all.
The Themyscira scenes are gorgeous: sunlit cliffs, turquoise sea and women on horseback charging across the beach. Connie Nielsen plays Queen Hippolyta, Diana’s protective mother, and Robin Wright is terrific as Antiope, tough, proud and fierce. The first battle on the beach, when German soldiers arrive and the Amazons meet guns with arrows and swords, is spectacular.
Then a pilot crashes his plane into the sea, and Diana learns that the world beyond the island is at war.
For Writers
The Themyscira scenes establish Diana’s world, her values and her innocence before she leaves. The contrast with the war-torn outside world drives everything that follows.
A protagonist who comes from a very different world can see the story’s setting with fresh eyes. Their surprise, confusion and moral clarity expose the flaws of the world the reader thinks they know.
Spend time establishing where your outsider comes from, so the reader understands the values they bring. Then let those values collide with the new world, and let both sides be changed by it. Diana’s sheltered goodness is what lets her see the war clearly, where the soldiers have long since gone numb.
Steve Trevor
Chris Pine plays Steve Trevor, an American spy working for British intelligence, who crashes near Themyscira and tells the Amazons about the Great War. Diana decides that the war must be the work of Ares, the god of war. If she kills him, she thinks, the fighting will stop. She leaves with Steve for London.
Pine is wonderful. He’s charming, funny and self-deprecating, and he plays a very specific kind of hero: a man who’s brave and decent, and who knows he’s outclassed by the woman beside him. He never tries to upstage her, and the film’s romance works because he’s so clearly delighted by her.
Their banter, especially the fish-out-of-water scenes in London, where Diana encounters corsets, revolving doors and ice cream, is light and charming.
Gal Gadot
Gal Gadot is Wonder Woman. She has the physical presence for the fights, the warmth for the romance and, above all, the innocence the role needs. Diana believes in goodness, in heroism and in the simple idea that people are worth saving, and Gadot plays it with a sincerity that never tips into naivety.
It’s a very different kind of superhero from the brooding men of the DC films around it. Diana has no torture in her past and no cynicism in her. She’s kind, curious and furious at injustice, and the film is built around her optimism. That was refreshing in 2017, and it still is.
No Man’s Land
The film’s greatest scene takes place in the trenches of the Western Front. Diana, Steve and a band of misfit soldiers reach a line where the troops have been stuck for a year, unable to advance across No Man’s Land toward the German guns. A village beyond it is starving. Steve tells her nobody can cross. It’s not possible.
Diana climbs out of the trench anyway. She walks into No Man’s Land, alone, in her armour for the first time, with the bullets bouncing off her bracers and shield. Her electric-cello theme, first heard in Batman v Superman, swells, and the soldiers behind her, one by one, climb out and follow.
It’s thrilling, and it’s deeply moving, the moment a superhero film earns its mythology. Patty Jenkins stages it with total conviction, and it remains the best scene in any DC film of its era.
For Writers
Diana climbs out of the trench and walks into No Man’s Land alone, and the soldiers follow her. The film’s defining moment is an act of courage. Nobody throws a punch.
The most memorable heroic moments are often about choice. Power comes second. A hero deciding to act when nobody else will can be more thrilling than any battle, because the reader sees the character’s values made visible.
Jenkins lets the scene breathe, with a long walk, the rising music and the other soldiers deciding to follow. If you’re writing your hero’s defining moment, give it room. Don’t rush to the action. The decision is the scene. Everything after it, however spectacular, is just the consequence.
The Team
Steve assembles a small band of rogues to help Diana: Sameer, a Moroccan actor-turned-con man played by Saïd Taghmaoui; Charlie, a Scottish sniper with shell shock played by Ewen Bremner; and the Chief, a Native American smuggler played by Eugene Brave Rock. Lucy Davis is a delight as Etta, Steve’s secretary, who’s baffled and charmed by Diana.
The film gives these characters small, sad moments that show what the war has done to them, and it doesn’t make them cartoons. Charlie’s trauma, especially, is handled with real sympathy: a sniper who can no longer bring himself to shoot. They’re a lovely supporting cast.
A First World War Film
In the comics, Wonder Woman first arrived during the Second World War. The film moves her to the First, and it’s a smart change. The Great War was a slaughter without heroes or clear villains, fought by men dying in the mud for a few yards of ground, and that’s exactly the world a naive, idealistic warrior would find incomprehensible.
Jenkins takes the setting seriously. The trenches are cold, filthy and full of broken men. A village is gassed. The soldiers Diana meets are exhausted and hollow. Against that grim backdrop, her refusal to accept that nothing can be done feels radical, and her rage when she sees what the war does to civilians feels real.
The setting also gives the film its central question. Diana believes one evil god causes war, and killing him will end it. The war keeps suggesting a much harder truth: that people do this to each other on their own.
London
The London scenes give the film its lightest touch. Diana arrives in a grey, smoky city of 1918, and she’s baffled by everything: the clothes, the crowds, the idea that women can’t attend the war council, and why anybody would want to spend a day shopping. She tries on outfits and complains they’re impossible to fight in.
It’s gentle comedy, and it also makes a point about the world Diana has walked into, one where British women had only just won a limited right to vote, and old men made decisions about wars they’d never have to fight themselves. Lucy Davis’s Etta, cheerfully explaining her job as a secretary to a baffled Amazon, is a highlight.
Ares
The villains are the weak link. Danny Huston plays General Ludendorff, a German commander, and Elena Anaya plays Doctor Poison, a scarred scientist developing a deadly gas. Both are thin, and Huston in particular plays a moustache-twirling cartoon.
The film’s twist is that Ares has been hiding in plain sight all along, disguised as Sir Patrick Morgan, a British politician played by David Thewlis. It’s a good idea, and Thewlis is a fine actor, but when Ares reveals himself, he turns into a CGI armoured figure with a moustache, and the film collapses into a noisy, fiery battle.
The Finale
The final battle is the film’s biggest problem. After two hours of character, charm and a grounded First World War setting, it becomes a generic superhero slugfest, with two godlike beings throwing tanks and lightning at each other amid computer-generated explosions. It’s loud, long and weightless.
The one thing that saves it is Steve’s sacrifice. He flies a plane full of poison gas high into the sky and blows it up, and Diana’s grief gives her the strength to defeat Ares. The emotional beat lands, even if the fireworks around it don’t.
For Writers
After two hours of character and grounded drama, the film ends in a CGI slugfest. The finale abandons the qualities that made the film special.
A climax should be the story’s most concentrated expression of what it’s about. If your story is about courage, compassion or sacrifice, the climax should test those things. A generic battle, however spectacular, can feel like a betrayal of everything the reader came for.
Look at your climax and ask whether it could be swapped into another story. If it could, rebuild it around your protagonist’s specific values and relationships. The most satisfying finales could only happen in their own story, with these people and these stakes.
Patty Jenkins
Patty Jenkins, who’d made Monster with Charlize Theron, became the first woman to direct a big-budget superhero film, and she brought a sincerity and warmth the genre badly needed. The film was a huge hit, earning more than eight hundred million dollars worldwide, and it proved that a female-led superhero film could be a blockbuster.
The sequel, Wonder Woman 1984, was a mess, and the planned third film was cancelled. That makes this one all the more precious: a superhero film that believes in heroism without irony.
The Verdict in Short
For about two hours, Wonder Woman is one of the best superhero films ever made. The Themyscira scenes, the London comedy, the romance and the No Man’s Land sequence are all excellent, and Gadot and Pine are a joy together.
The villains are thin and the finale is a dud, and they cost the film a couple of points.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Wonder Woman builds its hero around sincerity and optimism, and it earns its emotional peak by showing her refuse to accept the world’s cynicism. The film is at its best when it trusts that sincerity, and weakest when it abandons it for spectacle.
An idealistic hero works when the story tests her ideals against a harsh world, and lets them survive. The reader believes in her because she’s been tested.
If your protagonist is an idealist, put their ideals under real pressure, and let the climax prove them through character. Fireworks can’t do that job.
Diana Crosses No Man’s Land
Wonder Woman is an 8: a warm, sincere and genuinely stirring superhero film, with Gal Gadot’s luminous Diana, a charming Chris Pine and a No Man’s Land scene that stands among the genre’s best, let down by thin villains and a noisy, generic finale. It’s the best of the DC films of its era.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on 2 of my film lists