Wonder Woman: reviews, news, and analysis

Wonder Woman 1984 is a mess. Caught between a whole bunch of masters, the movie ends up serving none of them, as it awkwardly lurches from one plot point to another. The protagonist ends up in a narrative dead end with her ex, the main plot (involving a wishing stone) takes all of 10 minutes to examine the many ramifications of having wishes granted, and the arc of villain Cheetah (Kristen Wiig) is horribly truncated.

Yet I kind of liked the movie, in spite of myself. It’s so gloriously messy and weird that I couldn’t help but be fascinated by its choices, even as I found myself actively rejecting them. Watching the film, I even had an unusual thought, the opposite of one I’ve had often while watching sprawling, bloated TV shows: I wish Wonder Woman 1984 had more time to tell its story. If something like The Queen’s Gambit is a seven-hour movie, then Wonder Woman 1984 is a two-and-a-half-hour television season. The movie even breaks down into episodic chunks.

Wonder Woman challenges much of what is supposed to make this blockbuster movie era of superheroes cool. She doesn’t have Batman’s dark vengeance, Iron Man’s sardonic edge, or Thor’s party boy vibe, nor does she possess Captain America’s charming self-awareness.

Instead, Amazonian princess Diana Prince (née Diana of Themyscira) is a goddess who saves humanity. She talks about the beauty of the world and learning all of its languages, relishes her sacred duty to protect the innocent and fight for those who cannot fight themselves, and dreams of making the world better, one good deed at a time.

Four years ago, lots of people engaged in some pretty idiotic conversations about bringing Wonder Woman to the big screen. The character, one of DC Comics’ most popular and most recognized heroes of all time, was deemed by many — without any real evidence — to be too “tricky” or “challenging” to get her own movie.

But what everything really came down to was that studio executives weren’t convinced that a Wonder Woman film could make enough money to be a worthwhile investment. They thought audiences might not believe the character’s origin story (she’s an Amazonian princess from a mystical island), or would write off her trademark weapons — a magical golden lasso and bulletproof gauntlets — as too silly.

Patty Jenkins, who directed this summer’s breakout hit Wonder Woman, has officially signed on to direct the sequel, according to Variety.

Signing Jenkins to oversee the sequel would seem to be a no-brainer, since Wonder Woman defied expectations and hauled in more than $816 million worldwide, making Jenkins the highest-grossing female director of a live-action movie ever, and brought in the most money domestically ($410 million) of all the films in DC’s Extended Cinematic Universe, a quartet of movies that includes Wonder Woman, Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, Suicide Squad, and Man of Steel. But finalizing Jenkins as Wonder Woman 2’s director took a surprisingly long time given those numbers.

Wonder Woman had a big weekend at San Diego Comic-Con: Wonder Woman 2 was officially announced, and the newly unfurled Justice League trailer also heavily featured the character. But the DC hero had an even bigger weekend at the box office, where she claimed a big new sales record — and continues to rewrite common knowledge about what audiences want from their movies.

After smashing opening-weekend box office records in June, beating Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Suicide Squad in second-weekend sales and becoming the biggest live-action film directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins’s Wonder Woman took another title this weekend: It surpassed Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 to become the highest-grossing movie of the summer at the domestic box office, taking in almost $390 million in ticket sales domestically.

Wonder Woman made an estimated $25 million at the US box office this weekend, and in doing so set a new record: The movie is now the biggest live-action movie in Hollywood history directed by a woman.

According to Box Office Mojo, Wonder Woman has made $652 million worldwide and $318 million domestically since its release on June 2. The previous record holder was the Abba-inspired musical Mamma Mia, which was directed by Phyllida Lloyd and made $609 million worldwide ($144 million domestic) in 2008.

Thanks to a poorly sourced news story, the power of Twitter to make something go viral, and the erotic allure of online outrage, an urban legend was born on Tuesday morning: that the $300,000 Gal Gadot was paid for her starring role in Wonder Woman was pennies compared with Henry Cavill’s alleged payment of $14 million for 2013’s Man of Steel.

It all began when Lauren Duca, a columnist at Teen Vogue, tweeted the following (now deleted) sentiment:

Wonder Woman beat the boys’ club at the box office.

This weekend, Patty Jenkins’s new entry in Warner Bros.’ DC movie universe took in an estimated $57 million, according to Box Office Mojo — around a 45 percent drop from its opening weekend. And while drawing just over half the number of opening-weekend viewers may not sound impressive on the surface, that figure is actually really great news for Warner Bros. and the team that put the film together.

One of the biggest revelations in Wonder Woman is tucked into the end of the film. Diana confronts Ares, the god of war, about the nature of man and mankind’s goodness. The two mythic beings have the character-defining philosophical battle of the movie, and then he slips in a declaration that makes Diana question everything she was ever taught: She is the daughter of Zeus, the king of the gods.

Up until this point, Diana believed what her mother had told her — that she was made out of clay and Zeus had given her life. By way of magic and myth, Zeus has symbolically been a father to her. But Ares implies something a bit more sordid: that Zeus had a relationship with her mother, Hippolyta, and created a child. And if that’s the case, then it’s not clear what else the Amazons lied to Diana about.

As I watched Wonder Woman and shoveled buckets of popcorn into my grinning mouth, I found myself inspired by Diana’s journey, delighted by her curiosity with the world, and completely thrilled by the sweep of director Patty Jenkins’s dizzying action sequences.

But if I’m being honest, more than anything, I was just relieved.

According to Wonder Woman director Patty Jenkins, some of the suits at Warner Bros., the studio that made the film, wanted to cut the single best sequence from her world-beating smash hit.

In a recent interview with the site Fandango, Jenkins said that she had to fight hard to keep the sequence in which Diana, an Amazon cast into the world of us mere mortals, fights her way through No Man’s Land — the bombed-out area separating enemy trenches — during World War I, that she might restore a supply chain to a little town that’s starving to death. The sequence is thrilling and moving, and when I saw the film, people cheered at the mere sight of Diana striding into battle in Wonder Woman’s iconic costume. But it’s also easy to see why a studio might suggest cutting the sequence.

In Wonder Woman, we’re introduced to a superhero story unlike the ones that came before it.

Diana Prince, a.k.a. Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), is as powerful as any onscreen hero Marvel and DC Comics/Warner Bros. have introduced, but she’s also joyful, loving, and caring in a way many of her cohorts aren’t. She’s also, as we’re constantly reminded by the genre’s dearth of female superheroes, a woman in a man’s world. Both Diana’s story in the film and the film itself — the first studio superhero movie directed by a woman, Patty Jenkins — challenge how we think about superhero stories in general, and superhero stories about girls and women in particular.

There’s a lot to love about the new Wonder Woman: It features a pair of leads with genuine chemistry who feel like real adults rather than adolescent fantasies. It manages to be serious and sometimes even dark without ever being grim or brooding. It has a functioning sense of humor. It is the first film in the DC Comics extended universe that does not come across as actively hostile toward its hero. All in all, it’s a refreshing change of pace from the conventions that have come to define the superhero movie generally — and a major improvement on the heavy-metal dirge that has so far defined the DCEU under Zack Snyder.

But there’s one super-movie trope that Wonder Woman doesn’t quite overcome: the noisy, bloated third act overstuffed with expensive but poorly rendered computer-generated special effects.

Whether or not Wonder Woman smashed the patriarchy this weekend, it certainly smashed records at the American box office, raking in a whopping $100.5 million in ticket sales.

That huge pile of receipts busted the record for the highest-grossing opening weekend for a film directed by a woman. (The previous record was held by Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey, which made $85 million in its 2015 opening weekend.) It also debuted in the top spot in many countries, including China, where it made $38 million.

Wonder Woman is currently Warner Bros.’ best-reviewed superhero movie since 2008’s The Dark Knight. And if its early critical reception holds as more reviews are published and the movie hits theaters this week, the film has the chance of surpassing The Dark Knight altogether.

On Rotten Tomatoes, Wonder Woman has a 93 percent rating as of Friday morning — a hugely positive number that easily surpasses Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice’s 28 percent, Suicide Squad’s 25 percent, and Man of Steel’s 55 percent. It also ranks just below Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which sits at 94 percent, and beats every film in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe except for the first Iron Man movie.

The internet is an increasingly hyper, increasingly instantaneous, and increasingly politicized place, and nowhere have we seen these trends converge as neatly as they did this week around the massive hilarity surrounding President Donald Trump’s apparent typo in a now-deleted tweet.

But if you thought #covfefe was the only thing happening on the web this week, think again. While you were off covfefe-ing, here’s what else you may have missed. — including a few covfefe-related covfallouts.

The team behind Wonder Woman learned a crucial lesson from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice: Don’t be afraid of color. You can see it in how Wonder Woman’s costume has progressed from her original appearance in BvS to the marketing materials and stills for the character’s solo movie.

Since Wonder Woman’s first appearance in the promotional materials for the 2016 blockbuster, which introduced her to the DC movie universe, her costume has evolved from grayed-out battle armor to something a bit brighter and braver, with ruby, blue, and golden accents. The design and cut of the costume is the same, but now its colors pop, instead of blending into a murky background.

Making a superhero film isn’t as easy as Marvel usually makes it look. Just ask Warner Bros.

For the past few years, Warner Bros. has largely squandered its DC Comics opportunities, under the creative supervision of Zack Snyder. Man of Steel (2013) was so intent on giving us a stern Superman that it became a dour chore. Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (2015) aimed to ask questions about authoritarianism and superheroism, but was bogged down by messy storytelling and a lack of common sense. Suicide Squad (2016) was an anti-superhero flick that the studio and all the actors involved would probably like to forget. The last time Warner Bros. put out a good/great superhero film was five years ago, with 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, the last chapter in Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy.

Warner Bros.’ Wonder Woman is already raking in rave reviews, including from Vox’s own Alex Abad-Santos. But before you heap any praise on director Patty Jenkins’s new take on the DC superhero, played by Gal Gadot, you should probably make sure you know one important detail: how to correctly pronounce Gadot’s name.

As Slate cheekily points out, if you’re like most Americans, you’ve probably been saying the actress’s name similarly to “Godot” in Samuel Beckett’s famous play Waiting for Godot — with a long O and a silent T (read: “guh-doh”), as if Gadot’s surname were French.

Wonder Woman has arrived.

On Saturday at San Diego Comic-Con, Warner Bros. revealed the first trailer for Wonder Woman, the superhero origin film for the first lady of DC Comics and arguably the most recognizable female hero in all of comic books.