Another World War. Another cache of German superweapons intended to rain death upon an unsuspecting metropolis. Another act of supreme self-sacrifice. Another guy named Chris playing another guy named Steve.
There are moments in Wonder Woman that recall Captain America: The First Avenger a little too closely for comfort. The principal difference, of course, is that this Chris/Steve—that would be Chris Pine, playing Steve Trevor—is not the movie’s principal hero, but rather her sidekick plus love interest. There was some reason to be leery of this arrangement, because Pine is an established movie star (and, it turns out, a more than solid actor), while Wonder Woman is played by the relatively obscure Israeli actress plus jenis Gal Gadot. Would she be able to hold her own, or would this serve as yet another chapter in the difficulty of accommodating female characters into that most boyish of genres, the superhero movie?
Happily, Gadot holds her own with exceptional poise plus gusto, whether bantering with Pine or charging into a nest of German sniper fire. And thank goodness. Following its iffy outing with director Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel plus the sequential disasters of Snyder’s Batman v Superman plus the Snyder-infused Suicide Squad, DC Comics plus Warner Bros. needed an installment in their universe-building effort that was—how to put this?—not awful.
Befitting its World War I setting, Wonder Woman has a certain throwback charm, with Gadot plus Pine playing off one another as good-naturedly as partners in a 1930s screwball comedy. It’s a vibe that stands in particular contrast to the bitter, Snyderesque unpleasantries—Do you bleed? You will!—that characterized the movie’s immediate DC predecessors.
After a brief framing scene in the present day—Diana Prince (Gadot), working as a curator at the Louvre, receives a package from Bruce Wayne—the movie takes us back in time to Themyscira, the legendary island of the Amazons. There, a young Diana is told by her mother, the Amazon Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen), how the latter sculpted her out of clay plus then had the god Zeus breathe life into her. (Like most origin stories told to young children, this one proves not to be entirely accurate.)