Given the enduring popularity of the 1970s TV show starring Lynda Carter and the general stature of the character in popular culture, it seems quite odd that a Wonder Woman movie took as long as it did to get made. Initially starting development in 1996 with Ivan Reitman slated to direct and produce, it would be another twenty years and a completely different landscape when the Princess of Themyscira finally made her debut on the big screen. With Gadot’s appearance being one of the few bright points in Dawn of Justice, and Patty Jenkins in the director’s chair, hopes were cautiously high that perhaps this might be the movie to finally kick start some critical as well as commercial success for the DCEU. But with the poorly received (and terribly handled by the studio) Ghostbusters all-female reboot fresh in the minds of genre audiences, could a female-led superhero movie really succeed well enough not only to prove its own worth but course correct a series as critically panned as this?

When wartime spy Steve Trevor accidentally blunders into the secret island realm of Themyscira, he brings news of the war to end all wars to the Amazons who live there. Diana, daughter of the Queen, sees the hand of Ares in these events, and determines to accompany Trevor back to the war and put a stop to the errant deity using the God Breaker weapon she’s been told tales of since her youth.

First things first – Wonder Woman is not just a female-led reskin of Captain America: The First Avenger. Yes, there are (broad) parallels in terms of certain elements of the narrative, but the constant lazy assertion from certain sections of the genre fandom that the two films are one and the same story simply don’t add up on a fundamental level. One involves a human, made something more by science and discovering his own worth as much in his character and spirit as in his new physical power. The other involves a literal goddess moulded from clay and created with the sole purpose of killing an ancient deity, who starts out with every capability she requires, and, if anything, sees her innate optimism tempered by her first encounters with the very people she was created to save. Yes, both movies end with a guy named Steve sacrificing himself on a giant plane and yes both are period pieces set during a major international conflict. Other than that, chalk and cheese.

What’s perhaps most surprising about Wonder Woman is just how different it feels from the rest of the DCEU stable to that point, and how deftly it handles that most derided of things in the genre at this point – the origin story. Unlike Dawn of Justice or Suicide Squad, Wonder Woman takes the time to introduce its central protagonist, such that when the movie get to the parts of the narrative where the audience has to emotionally invest in her struggles, it can because it has been on the relevant journey with her. Unlike Man of Steel, it doesn’t have the burden of an opening hour of struggles and misery for the hero to go through, preferring instead to reverse the trope and have our hero start out with all her power, her ability and her character and then exposing these to the acid test of an outside world too cynical and full of pain and hatred to not have some sort of effect. Arguably, because in MoS Clark spends so long finding himself, and then in BvS the narrative has skipped straight to the world having ground him down, we miss out on the important part of his journey which Diana here gets to experience in full, and that’s just one of the reasons why the film is more satisfying.

It also helps that because of this framing, the film gets to have a more optimistic tine. The previous three entries in the DCEU involved characters so tortured, events so violent and destructive and settings so swathed in darkness and rain, that everything about them felt negative – even moments of lightness never lasted long enough to really have effect before the next awful thing would occur. Here, despite a large part of the film taking place in the middle of literally one of the most horrific theatres of war in European history, there’s always a sense of the potential of the human spirit, the tendency toward good.

Diana on one level is a traditional fish out of water character as she grapples with contemporary female clothing, dismissal by men because of her gender and so on, but unlike other fish out of water characters, Diana does not allow the world to bend her to its shape – rather her own indomitable will and sense of kindness begins to bend the world around her. What’s really fascinating about this is that she seldom achieves this through violence. When she is in a room full of Generals who dismiss her, she doesn’t punch anyone or even shout – she simply asserts herself with quiet authority in a way that cannot be ignored. When Steve introduces her to their comrades for the upcoming mission, she doesn’t win their respect by having an arm wrestle with one of them or drinking the most beer – she is simply herself, and each of them is charmed by some aspect of her personality – Sameer by her beauty but also by her linguistic capabilities and clear intelligence, Charlie by her genuineness and kindness towards him, and Napi by her bluntness and honesty. In turn, Diana becomes friends with all of them, despite her initial misgivings, as her own qualities bring out their better traits.

Not to say that our heroine doesn’t get to get her fisticuffs (as Etta Candy would have it) on. There’s plenty of action in Wonder Woman, and once again it couldn’t be further apart from the thudding, brutal and often messy fight choreography that had marked the DCEU to this point. The balletic grace and fighting style of the Amazons in the beach fight against German soldiers is quite something to behold, with so much going on and all being perfectly clear and easy to follow. Later scenes involving just Diana taking on rooms full of armed men at once make extensive use of slow-motion in a way that smacks of Snyder, but again the key difference is that when the fights speed up again, it’s still perfectly clear what is going on and who is doing what to whom. Partially this is because most of the fighting here occurs in the daytime, and involves only one super-powered participant, but on a more fundamental level it’s because here we have a second unit taking some clear aesthetic choices, which feel heavily influenced by the director.

Of course, the most famous scene in the movie involves No Man’s Land, and Diana’s solo walk across it, in the teeth of overwhelming firepower, inspiring the other allied soldiers to join her and take a village that has been at the mercy of the enemy for a long time. Here we see every quality of which I have already spoken writ large. Diana’s natural sense of justice is offended by the stories she hears from the feeling villagers. Steve attempts to reason with her – this is no man’s land, he tells her, explaining that it’s called that because no man can cross it. Diana is unimpressed – there is injustice happening, and she’s here to put a stop to it. She doesn’t shout at the rest of the soldiers, doesn’t try to exhort them into following her, she just steps out into that barren plain to do what she feels to be right, and her courage and simple devotion drive others to follow her.

While it feels especially cruel that the same village is destroyed and all its inhabitants killed shortly afterward, the way in which this is done, and in particular the way in which Diana ultimately responds, shows how director Patty Jenkins and writer Allan Heinberg have a fundamentally better understanding of how to tell these stories properly. One can imagine that in a Snyder/Ayer version of this film, the slaughter of the village would irreversibly damage Diana, forcing her to become a darker, more anger-driven version of herself who would kill every German she ever met and shun society forever once she had ended the war. Instead, Diana’s first thought is that she must kill Ares, because it is only his malign influence which is forcing men to do these awful things. Even with Steve (with whom she is in love) telling her constantly that the Germans are the bad guys, Diana will not be bent by the world’s view – she is unstinting in her faith in humanity, believing them merely to be under some malevolent influence which she can banish.

It takes the confrontation with Ares to really test her inherent faith in mankind, and even then her choice isn’t to side with her brother and destroy them to create a better world. Instead, in one of the more admittedly corny lines of dialogue, she tells him that ‘It’s not about deserve, it’s about what you believe. And I believe in love’. This is the point which Snyder misses in his attempt at superhero deconstruction. It’s all very well having your hero tested by the things which they face. It’s all very well having different interpretations of the characters and their archetypes, but at base level superheroes exist to be superheroes – to achieve the things which others cannot, in spite of whatever challenges/personal demons they may face. Snyder’s Superman gives into the bitterness of humanity, allowing himself to be othered, and to feel as if his power to protect humanity is somehow a burden. Diana recognises that humanity is flawed, that they are capable of terrible things. But she also recognises their potential for greatness, and more importantly, her own power to help them. It isn’t about whether they deserve her, as her mother tells her they don’t right at the start, but about her responsibility to use her own power to help them because she can. Considering her own purity, her own ideological strength and conviction, that’s a sacrifice which renders Superman’s cheap death in BvS into irrelevance.

What’s equally impressive is that the director (and the studio) had the faith to cast an established actor like Pine in the role of Trevor, and to still have his character be moulded by the female lead in a way not conventional to Hollywood at all. Consider his final conversation with Diana, in which he tells her that he has to be the one to fly the plane because ‘I can save today – you can save the world’. Trevor is a spy working in World War I – it is difficult to overstate just how much his encounter with Diana has changed him, that he is able to forego what one must imagine is a sizeable amount of ego to make such a statement. It’s a powerful moment in the film because it speaks right to its intended demographic more than any other. A powerful male character recognising that the woman opposite him is not just his equal, but is more capable than he is. A willing submission to the simple truth that whereas he is strong, intelligent and capable, she is more of all those qualities. Most vitally, the film doesn’t address this as a failing or a weakness on his part – Trevor is no less capable, brave or strong because of this realisation, he is simply able to order his priorities. I recall coming out of the cinema on my first watch of this movie with my wife and the emotion she had at having seen something in which a female hero was centred and celebrated, but it took this re-watch to really start grasping these fundamentals as to why it spoke so loudly to so many women.

Performance-wise, Gadot may be the ideal choice for the role. A combination of physical talent (she is a former physical instructor in the IDF) and screen presence and charisma (she was easily one of the stronger parts in the Fast & Furious movies in which she appeared) mean that she dominates the screen in every shot in which she appears. Her ability to switch from controlled fury to wide-eyed wonder to knowing sarcasm in the blink of an eye is testament to her prowess as an actor, and it’s genuinely difficult to think of another contemporary actress who could have done as much justice to the role. Pine has an enormous amount of fun in a role that equally gives him opportunity to explore a range from comedy to action to heartfelt emotion and it’s a performance that makes me wonder just how much better Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit might have been in different directorial hands. Clearly Jenkins was able to extract something from Pine that Branagh could not. Of the rest of the cast, all delight – Lucy Davis is her usual irascible self; Saïd Taghmaoui, Ewen Bremner and Eugene Brave Rock all bring likeable qualities to companions Sameer, Charlie and Chief Napi, treading a perfect line as loveable rogues; and Danny Huston has a blast chewing the scenery as Ludendorff with sidekick Doctor Poison played by Elena Anaya. David Thewlis perhaps doesn’t get the best of roles with his late third act reveal as Ares, but overall there’s little to complain about.

It isn’t a perfect movie – the third act does degenerate a little into a fairly standard CGI-fest as Diana and Ares battle one another, but even then the underlying emotion and themes save it from being as cliched as it otherwise might have been. What it does do is remind the DCEU what superheroes are really supposed to be about, while giving us a film that manages to put a woman front and centre and celebrate her capability and intelligence as well as her beauty without simply making her a fetishistic cypher. I for one look forward heartily to the sequel.