About half way through Wonder Woman I was extremely disappointed to discover I was watching a superhero film. Initially, I was touched by its inspirational message for young girls, convincing them they can go around lifting tanks and punching gods out of existence, but then I realised those are the sort of things superheroes do, which meant, regardless of its uplifting feminist theme, I was obviously watching some form of nonsensical arse purée.
In fairness, Wonder Woman is a lot better than its DCEU counterparts Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, in the same way that meningitis is less shit than cholera. It benefits from the bar being set so low that it only has to be reasonably watchable before people start suggesting it’s revolutionary, like women gaining the right to vote or sanitary towels. But before judging the film on its social statement alone, it’s important to realise you’ve just watched a half-naked woman punch the steeple off a church in a story that was written with crayons.
It starts on the Amazonian island of Themyscira, the home of hundreds of female warriors and the place that delivers DVDs to your house. Princess Diana (not the dead one), played by a frustratingly flawless Gal Gadot, is training to fight Ares, the god of war, when she’s interrupted by a fucking man who has a penis and everything. Chris Pine crashes his plane in the sea and needs saving, which prompts an inspiring shot of Diana looking down at him as he blissfully drowns. Seeing her heroically lug his body to shore is a high point of the film, but then more men turn up and completely ruin everything, dragging her into a plot involving WW1 Germans with farts so toxic they can melt gas masks.
It’s a shame because I was quite enjoying Wonder Woman up until this point; it delivering a strong female character who refuses to make the teas, but has even higher ambitions, like being able to appear on panel shows without having some diminutive bald man talk over the top of her. In her pursuit to end a world war and eliminate the source of all evil itself, Gadot’s Diana is determined and morally robust. It almost made the men in my screening feel ashamed to be masturbating over her.
But there’s no escaping the monotonous mashing sequences, which look like they were animated on a Commodore Amiga 1000. Her CGI-riddled body twists and bends into an incomprehensible mass of irrelevant arm and leg movements, something that only gets worse as the film heads towards a typical, superhero denouement with a villain made out of polygons and executive shrugs. Once it’s finished telling you women can actually do things, all that’s left is Captain America: The First Avenger. With tits.