Okay, this is was a swings and roundabouts sort of a deal for me. They got a lot of stuff right, but I still think they have a way to go before they match the sheer awesomeness of Guardians of the Galaxy or The Age Of Ultron.
Okay, so what did they get right. Well, first off: Gal Gadot. This was a courageous and inspired piece of casting. I can imagine the punch-ups around the water cooler when someone suggested putting a near-unknown in the armoured corset, rather than someone with a more Johanssenesque quality. Well, the gamble paid off; Gadot brings a sort of naive, willful determination to the role, which was a welcome relief from the square-jawed stoicism we saw in Man of Steel and Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice.
The plot wasn’t anything to write home about, but the acting from all concerned was more than passable; unusually for a DC movie, the actors appeared to want to be there. Have to say though, I wasn’t really sure about the casting of Ares: he didn’t really scream ‘God’ to me.
The cinematography was excellent, the film sets magnificent. The action sequences were okay, but again, Marvel Comics have been doing this for much longer, and it shows. Everything was in the right place, but I felt there was a lack of urgency; it could be a case of making everything just a little too polished. Still, it had Iron Fist licked, which it shouldn’t have.
If I had one complaint it was that the film was too long; I did find myself drifting off in places, and I found the ending a little bit of an anticlimax (though I did think it was very courageous). It’s great that film makers want to explore the characters in a superhero movie, but Wonder Woman had a tendency to pause everything while it was going on. If this were a book then it would be stopping everything for a few pages to describe what your character is feeling, rather than weaving it into the narrative. And if you’re going to do this in a movie, then you really need to make your secondary players a bit more interesting.
But I think that was a relatvely small thing, given the scope the director was trying to cover. My second favourite DC outing to date (Suicide Squad being my first), and I think we’ll see great things in the sequel.
Six and a half out of ten.