This article includes spoilers for the plot of the 2017 Wonder Woman movie.
Wonder Woman is quite possibly one of the most anticipated movies of this summer. And with superhuman stakes riding on its heroine’s Amazonian shoulders, the movie delivers. Patty Jenkin’s film is smart, necessary, engaged, and above all, wildly entertaining — just at a time when we need a hero like this to respond to the current political and cultural moment.
In a time of fake news and alternative facts, Wonder Woman yields a lasso of truth. Shortly after the defeat of the first female presidential candidate from a major party, this is a movie made by a woman, with a female heroine, and even a female scientist as an antagonist— whose brilliance only adds to her villainy. Premiering on the day that President Donald Trump announced the U.S. was pulling out of the Paris climate deal, Wonder Woman is even shot through with traces of environmentalism.
Situating comic book characters in the political moment isn’t a stretch. Caped crusaders have been an American touchstone for nearly a century now, and our relationship with them tends to ebb and flow based on what’s going on in the world around us.
When times are good, superheroes recede into the background or become fodder for campy sitcoms, a la the Batman of the 1980s. But their true popularity comes out when times are difficult: Superman and Batman were both born out of the last gasp of the Great Depression. When WWII broke out, its comic book heroes too sprung into action. It’s not a coincidence that superhero movies once again became go-to blockbuster fodder in the midst of the Great Recession — or that they’re still popular now.
Part of the reason superheroes are comforting is that they offer us a reminder of our collective mythologies. Superman is a godlike immigrant and also a wholesome farm boy, whose unwavering morals are an earnest paean to American values. Batman, though he has a grittier backstory, also reflects a common American fantasy: He’s an uber-rich playboy who uses his wealth, by night, to fight for those who can’t fight for themselves.
Wonder Woman, civilian alias Diana Prince, also appeared around the same time as the flagship male D.C. universe heroes. From the outset, however, she was designed to be a feminist icon: Her creator modeled her after early feminists, including Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger. She can hold her own against any villain male or female, or against any other D.C. hero or heroine. In her origin story, she literally comes from a mythic tribe of female separatist warriors to save the human race.
In any political moment, Wonder Woman’s persona and backstory would be a feminist manifesto. Now, however, is a moment when many American women (and men) are still reeling from the election of Donald Trump, who was recorded bragging about sexual assault, and the stunning defeat of the first major female candidate for president — a woman with a political resume miles long. At this political moment, Wonder Woman’s feminist undertones ring stronger than ever.
Jenkins leans heavily on this epic backstory in the new film: The Amazons, an animated sequence explains, were designed by the gods to be an example to mankind of the best way to be. After mankind enslaved them instead, they revolted and retreated to the hidden island of Themyscira, where they lived and trained until they were the best warriors the world had ever seen. Diana was born there, sculpted from clay by the Queen of the Amazons and raised by her mother and her sister Antiope, the leader of the forces.
Diana Prince is pulled from her paradise island when an WWI spy — Chris Pine, playing a charming American working for British MI6, who is undercover as a German when we meet him — crash lands with the Germans in hot pursuit. When he tells her that he’s a soldier in the war to end all wars, she hears the fulfillment of the mythic prophecy she was raised on: That one day, Ares, the God of War, would return and to cause mankind’s destruction, and that the Amazons were charged with stopping him.
Seizing heroism by the sword-handle, Diana helps him escape the island and is thrust into the last few weeks of WWI — which puts her clear understanding of morality and justice in continuous conflict with the sooty, shell-shocked, complicated world of mankind. As she battles Germans and searches for the god of war, certain that killing him will return mankind to their normal, generous nature, this philosophical conflict is the undercurrent powering the movie throughout the beautifully choreographed fight scenes.
The result is a movie that — even beyond the message imbued in Diana Prince’s gender and badass backstory — comes across as a powerful reaction to the political moment that is 2017. As a heroine, Wonder Woman’s values and powers are diametrically opposed to the man on the orange throne.
She charges through many of the issues facing us today — from alternative facts to environmental destruction— sometimes through superpowers, but more often by unthinkingly applying her ironclad values and sense of the truth, beside which spin and foolish political compromises ring false.
One of Diana Prince’s powers, for example, is her lasso of truth — which she uses both to whip enemy soldiers around and to compel people to stop spewing lies. Untruths and broken promises confuse her at first because they are so counter to her moral code.
So, too, does the destruction of the earth at the hands of mankind’s weapon and industry: London, she decrees, is hideous, and her one moment of temptation is based on disgust for the wasteland that the war and the excesses of men have made of the Earth.
When she is faced with propaganda about the glories of war, her gaze — and ours — lingers instead on the faces of shell-shocked soldiers and hacked-off limbs, and on the devastating civilian cost. She’s aghast at the politicians standing back and directing the loss of life like a chess game without deigning to serve themselves.
When these same politicians tell her to keep out of the room because she’s a woman, she ignores the restriction because it doesn’t make sense to her — after all, restrictions on where a person can go, what they can achieve, and what they can say based on gender or skin color have never made sense stripped of society’s baked-in misogyny and racism.
And, in a world where unqualified men are so often handed opportunities to fail upwards, part of her superpower comes from sheer work: Even though she was born a princess with preternatural powers, her mother instructed her to train harder than any Amazon ever before.
Wonder Woman was born a superhero, but then she spent the rest of her life working at it anyway.
Unlike other recent superhero films, however, Wonder Woman doesn’t get too tied up in messaging to forget to be a good film. This is a movie that delivers, no matter what you go to your superhero films for: The fighting is beautifully choreographed, both balletic and brutal. It’s laced through with humor and tragedy, with a doomed love story to root for thrown in for good measure. Gal Gadot and Chris Pine are marvelous.
The fact that the movie is not only smart, but also entertaining, matters more for this film than it does for most movies in the genre.
For the past 15 years, superhero movies have been one of the primary drivers of money at the box office. The public has sat through two Batmans, two Spidermans, two Supermans, and two Fantastic Four franchises. But despite a solid bench of female comic book fodder, Hollywood has served up mostly excuses when it comes to the lack of female-led films.
Chief among these excuses are disappointing responses to previous films starring women, like Catwoman and Elektra. It’s a strawman argument — even after critical disasters like Batman vs. Superman and Suicide Squad, executives are hardly likely to stop green-lighting movies featuring and directed by men — but it doesn’t change the fact that should this movie fail, it will be much harder for the next big-budget female-led film to get made.
Fortunately, however, Wonder Woman is on its way to being a critical and financial success. The film currently has a 93 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes — far and away the best of the recent DC superhero canon. On its first night, the movie raked in a strong $11 million in North America alone, and is projected to make somewhere between $65 and $90 million in its opening weekend.
And, according to Deadline, the early splits on audience attendance has been largely split between men and women — belying myths that men won’t see movies led by women, though women are expected to endure the constant stream of movies starring and aimed at men.
A Wonder Woman movie should have been made long ago, but this is one that might have been worth waiting for — and is worth seeing, not only because it was directed by a woman and stars a woman, but also because it’s far and away the best superhero film the DC universe has offered in years.