Avis des critiques

I have no qualms about the gaudy (if slightly Trumpian) excess of the production design, which would have even sent the late Gianni Versace running for the hills. This would normally have been welcome in a superhero comic book universe, but the elaborate set is muddied by poor photography and flat lighting, and is bolstered by didactic voiceover narration and a desperate orgy of slow-motion CGI that give the scenes a cheap velvet painting diorama effect.

I love all the movies on my list, but more than any other this year, "Wonder Woman" reminded me that we bring our entire histories when we watch a movie — our childhood reveries, our adolescent yearnings and adult reservations. I've always loved Wonder Woman in all her imperfection, including in the old TV show, and I loved her here because all my adult reservations were no match for this movie.

The best modern superhero film by a substantial margin, in large part because it shrugs off the supposed common wisdom that's become encrusted around the genre and dares to be straightforwardly idealistic, giving its title character strongly held values and testing them and forcing her to adjust or re-frame them without losing them—a deeper struggle that's more resonant than the physical struggles she faces in the course of the story, which are impressive in their own right.

If a verdict is what you're looking for, I can say with certainty that it's totally fine... It's the sort of adventure high on slo-mo fights and fleshed out by stock characters who shout exposition they couldn't possibly know so that the audience doesn't fall behind. It doesn't really try for any surprising turns until late in the game. And if the idea of an explicitly anti-war action flick that racks up a bloodless bodycount of anonymous henchmen sounds contradictory to you, you're right.

Gadot has real presence and charm as an actress—one longs to see her in something worthier of her talent. But the imperative to eradicate any hint of bossiness or anger from her character weighs heavily on the film, threatening to turn it into one long, dispiriting exercise in allaying male fears about powerful women.

As happy as I am to see a woman director behind a major action film, come on, Wonder Woman! A warrior genius with a child's brain in a sex goddess body? Can't we just have one complex female character leading an action movie? Didn't one woman read that script and say, "Hey, this is an offensively overused male fantasy …"?

It's a deeply sincere superhero film, but not in a self-important way. The dull pomposity of, for instance, Zack Snyder's Man of Steel, is nowhere in evidence. This time, Snyder and the other writers could also have gone down the Deadpool or Guardians of the Galaxy route, with a world-weary, snarky protagonist. What they in fact did was a bigger risk. But as with all bigger risks, it came with a better pay off: a fresh and original vision of a decades old character.

Wonder Woman is never bound in the new movie; in fact the great irony, given the male backlash that preceded the release, is that it's so innocuous. Promoting the movie, director Patty Jenkins (Monster) and star Gal Gadot have described it and themselves as "feminist," and indeed the movie upholds the principles laid out more explicitly in the comics.

Of course, "Wonder Woman" is a superhero movie, and it fulfills the heroic and mythic demands of that genre, but it's also an entry in the genre of wisdom literature that shares hard-won insights and long-pondered paradoxes of the past with a sincere intimacy. That tone of modest and restrained clarity is, above all, what distinguishes "Wonder Woman" from the run of thudding, drubbing, thrashing action scenes in other, male-centered superhero movies.

The masterstroke of this origins story, ably directed by Patty Jenkins, who previously made the Aileen Wuornos film, Monster, is that it accentuates and celebrates Diana's feminine traits. Her secret weapon is not the bullet-repelling jewellery; not her swordplay; not her ability to fire shockwaves from her wrists. It's not even her luxuriant, swooshing hair. It is her empathy.

Wonder Woman's structural obligations could have gotten in the way of a a compelling, brisk, oftentimes moving first two acts, but in the final third when Diana confronts Ares and begins deliberating on the questions of war, humanity & her place as a demi-goddess within it the films virtues only deepen.

The film seems eager not to offend. (Who can be opposed to opposing war?) But it's also remarkably sly, a superhero movie that raises an eyebrow at superhero movies, so bloody and brutal, so senseless and dreadful. "Wonder Woman" is smart, charming, playful, and glamorous—things not often said of superhero movies. It is also long overdue. And it has a strained relationship with the character's origins.