DC couldn’t have gone about this more ass backwards. First movie: a Superman reboot, less than a decade after the last Superman reboot – which flopped because 1) the only Superman you need was made in 1978 and 2) Superman is the least interesting character to tell a story about. Okay. Second movie: Superman again, plus Batman but a different Batman than the one who had three movies in the last decade or the one who had four between 1989 and 1997 or the one from the TV show. And he’s fighting Superman for some reason. And let’s throw in Wonder Woman, and a bunch of hooks for the team-up movie with a bunch of heroes we haven’t met yet. Third movie: let’s forget the first two movies happened and remake the Dirty Dozen with a bunch of villains no one has heard of (except the Joker) and not really hook it into anything we’ve seen thus far other than the idea that the Joker and Batman have a past, which anyone could have told you already. And then…the Zack Snyder Grimdark Murderverse is a critical disaster area and an emerging box of flop? Send the girl.
At least Marvel waited to put identifiable characters in its studio ident until they had some. (Green Lantern? That was on purpose?) If there’s a criticism to make of DC, it’s impatience and incoherence. Marvel took four years and five movies to get to Avengers, they eschewed Yet Another Origin Story for the Hulk (the only MCU character who any person on the street could have named in 2007), and every leading character – Iron Man, Hulk, Thor and Captain America – was introduced and on the radar with their own picture before Avengers. Even Nick Fury and Phil Coulson had three or more appearances to build things out. Yes, Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman need no introduction – which is why they should go last, not first. But if you’re going to go first, why wouldn’t you start on the lowest difficulty setting?
I mean, count it up. Four Superman movies between 1978 and 1987, plus reboots in 2006 and 2013. Seven Batman movies with four different actors from 1989 to 2012, including a major thematic reboot halfway through. We know the deal with Superman and Batman. Wonder Woman was an unbelievable opportunity: THE female superhero, a character that everyone knows, but whose origin story is nebulous and malleable and whose only mass-media portrayal was an admittedly-iconic TV show in the late 70s. You simultaneously get an A-list character and a tablua rasa. It should be the easiest kind of movie to make – all the pop-culture recognition of Star Wars or Superman and none of the existing continuity baggage to weight it down. So…
Wonder Woman was – and this sounds like damning with faint praise and it sincerely is not meant to be – a perfectly good superhero movie. It’s hands-down the best DCEU movie yet and there is not a second place finisher; it’s literally the only one worth paying to see. But you can see it struggling against the freight of the ZSGDMV – the fight choreography and color correction just suggest 300 or Watchmen way too much, especially once you put the Mediterranean armor on everyone. I half expected Princess Buttercup to shout “AMAZONS, WHAT IS YOUR PROFESSION” at one point. And it doesn’t help that some of the WWI elements came across as a Captain America: The First Avenger pastiche, with the kinda sorta Howling Commandos and the heroic self sacrifice of Steve to prevent a plane full of doomsday weapons destroying a major world city. I realize that Wonder Woman’s canonical origins involved meeting an American man who brought her into a World War, and that’s as may be, but nothing required the second and third act to be quite that on-the-nose. And the pre-existing storyline means we’ve basically put her character on ice for a hundred years, so all those supporting characters (including a criminally underused Lucy Davis as Etta Candy) get wasted on a one-and-done. (In fact, Patty Jenkins got handed Gal Gadot rather than doing casting herself – and it works out splendidly, even Lynda Carter says so, but it does feed the “backward in heels” aspect of having to make this picture fourth.)
But it was World War I, not II, and that was a very good decision to make with the whole Ares angle. The war to end wars and the debut of industrialized warfare on a continental scale, aerial bombing and gas attacks and machine guns and the endless murderous stalemate that traumatized a generation and set the stage for everything after? It gives Diana both a reason to show up and a reason for her to give up for a hundred years after. (That 100 years is a convenient way of pointing up the whole “immortal daughter of Zeus” thing and also making it a bigger deal that now the stakes are high enough for her to come out of hiding in a way that even freakin’ Nazis apparently weren’t.) Which is good, because DC/Warner/Snyder/Johns have done absolutely naff all to set up the villain of Justice League – I assume it’s Darkseid, but one painting that’s supposed to be suggestive of a character no one has heard of is fan service, not exposition.
It’s a good movie. Possibly a great one. But it makes you wonder what Patty Jenkins could have done if she hadn’t been painted into a corner. I think if this had been the first DCEU movie, rather than the fourth, and not had to service the storyline of the first three, you could have gotten a masterpiece and a solid foundation from which to build the DCEU. Instead you merely get a first-rate summer blockbuster that makes you ask “was that so hard, guys?” And while it’s probably too late for Justice League to go to school on it, maybe it’s not too late for the GrimDark MurderVerse brain trust to say “more like Wonder Woman next time.” Which would be a win all around.