There’s been a fun and interesting ‘challenge’ on Bluesky this month, revolving around movies. Each day there’s a prompt; something like ‘movie with the greatest opening scene’ or ‘best book-to-movie adaptation’ or ‘movie you love that everybody hates.’ Some folks just respond with a title of the movie and a still photo, but others offer thoughts and explanations about why they chose that particular movie. The whole thing has been entertaining.

Yesterday’s challenge was ‘a good movie in a genre you dislike.’ I generally dislike and avoid superhero movies and movies based on comic franchises. The protagonists almost always have a ‘origin story’ explaining how/why they became superheroes. This usually involves either a traumatic incident that shaped their future (parents are murdered, planet explodes, etc.) or they get caught up in some scientific or mystic mishap that somehow imbues them with superpowers. I’m actually okay with that. The problem is these superheroes tend to be rather incestuous because they share a common comic franchise, which provides the characters with arcane, massively inter-related, overly-complicated backstories and histories that only fans appreciate. The resolutions of these movies depend way too much on epic battle scenes between super-characters. I don’t mind that the outcome of those battles is predictable. I DO mind that as battle scenes go, they’re generally dull—explosions take precedence over acting. And one last thing; in superhero movies ordinary people (and the cities they live in) are usually just props and backdrops; their destruction is only used as a metric to demonstrate how important the superhero is.

None of that applied to the movie I chose: the 2017 film Wonder Woman, starring Gal Gadot as Diana. She didn’t have some sort of complex, traumatic past that caused her to take up superheroing as a career or hobby. She didn’t experience some scientific or mystical event that gave her superpowers. Her parents weren’t murdered in front of her, her planet wasn’t destroyed, she wasn’t bitten by a radioactive spider, she’s not avenging anything in particular. In most ways, she’s not really a superhero. She was born an Amazon and trained to be a warrior. The training included a philosophy that the point of being a warrior was to fight for folks who can’t fight for themselves, to fight against injustice. That’s basically it, it’s just that simple. There’s a purity and innocence to her motives. She’s doing what she was born and raised to do. She’s not there to fight super-villains; she’s there to punch Nazis.

In the movie, that eventually means fighting in World War Two. There have been other movies and television shows in which a woman leads men into battle. In every other case I can think of, that’s depicted as a woman doing something transgressive, doing something women aren’t supposed to do. In other movies, it’s usually explained as an extension of some maternal instinct. They’re momma lions fighting to protect their families and the families of their people. That’s all very commendable, but it’s also very traditional.

Again, that’s not Diana. She’s a warrior. Her motive for leading others into battle isn’t just to protect others; it’s to fight injustice. It’s a subtle but important distinction. And it works because there’s an amazing training sequence at the beginning of the film. The training involved warriors being gracefully lethal, but the gracefulness was an integral aspect of the lethality. They were being graceful because it was pretty; they were being lethal with an economy of motion.

When a squad of Nazis landed on the island, the Amazons attacked. It wasn’t women against men; it was warriors against soldiers. There was a savage beauty in that attack, not because the Amazons were beautiful but because they were well-trained and graceful. Later in the movie, Diana leads an assault against an entrenched Nazi army. The physicality of the training scene made the assault on the trenches work. All that jumping and twisting and swinging in the beautiful setting of the island was translated onto the bleak horror of No Man’s Land. Again, the fact that Diana was a woman wasn’t even an issue; there was a palpable sense that THIS was what she’d been training for.

One other thing. I very much liked the way the writers/director dealt with Gal Gadot’s appearance. They acknowledged a few times that she’s physically beautiful—then just moved on, because that was the least interesting aspect of the character. This was smart, in my opinion, because the director and writers knew they HAD to address beauty in order to get it out of the way. They did the same thing with her outfit (and c’mon, it’s a ridiculous outfit for anybody to wear in modern combat). They provided both practical and symbolic reasons for Diana to dress the way she did.

Earlier in the film, the characters spent some time in London. We saw how Diana the warrior being confined by custom to wearing restrictive clothing, being confined to silence by patriarchal convention. There was a momentary respite from that in a scene in which Diana kicks ass in the alley fight. But it’s not until she’s facing Nazis in trenches that we get to see her become Wonder Woman. She shrugs off the cloak she’s been wearing over her outfit, and it’s like she’s also shrugging off all those tiresome patriarchal conventions. When she climbs over the top of the trench, it’s a liberating moment, for the audience as well as the character.

But after that battle, the movie became disappointing. One of the Nazis is revealed to be Ares, the god of war…and what had been a smart, funny film became silly and stupid. It became another dull superhero versus super-villain flick. Gal Gadot was largely replaced with CGI, and they CGI’d the life and heart out of the character. We had the usual super-villain speech-making, the usual massively catastrophic damage to structures and regular people, the usual explosions and fireballs, and all the personality of the actors disappeared. It became a cartoon; it became everything I dislike about comic and superhero movies.

But damn…the first two-thirds of the movie was just fucking brilliant.