Not even the MCU big-screen version of Captain America—easily the most Reeve-as-Superman-like superhero prior to "Wonder Woman"—is allowed to exemplify basic, positive human values so openly. Even in Marvel films, the other characters, and the movies themselves, are allowed to snicker at Cap a little, as if admitting that the films are taking their behavioral cues from our time rather than from his. "Wonder Woman" is radical because it presents the heroine's values in a straightforward, uninflected way, then calibrates the entire movie around them. It trades the traditional raised eyebrow for a poker face, and is much stronger for having done so. (The film is helped tremendously by perfect casting in the leads. Gadot gives the best fish-out-of-water performance since Q'orianka Kilcher's Pocahontas went to England at the end of "The New World," while Pine manages to thread the needle between making Steve evolved and sensitive enough to treat a woman as an equal while also making him credible as a fellow who was probably born around 1880 and is more comfortable on a horse than in a car.)

A big part of the movie's unprecedented box office success (it's the top-grossing superhero origin story of all time) comes from the novelty of seeing a woman very belatedly placed at the center of a narrative of super-human adventure, a space nearly always occupied by muscled men. The mere existence of this film allows for moments we haven't seen before. It is impossible to imagine almost any male superhero of recent years lighting up with joy at the sight of a baby, as Diana does on a street in smoggy London, or proclaiming, during the final showdown, "I believe in love" and not being laughed at by the movie, or by another character in the movie. Diana gets to have many such moments, as well as marvelous bits of throwaway humor (like telling an ice cream cone vendor "You should be very proud") and some interludes that could be described as a lament for the species (as when she and Steve and the team are headed toward The Front and she wants to stop to help civilians in distress).



Jenkins and screenwriters Alan Heinberg treat her story as a pretext to look at the standard superhero elements again, through a woman's eyes. "Wonder Woman" isn't the first fantasy movie to insist that there's a huge difference between expressing personal honor and physical skill in one-to-one combat, and deriving pleasure from dominating other people or destroying large numbers of enemies and great swaths of machinery or structures; but it's the first one to articulate that difference through a female character and situate its observations within (and I'm surprised to be using the phrase here) a history lesson. A lot of kids and maybe some adults are going to learn a lot from "Wonder Woman" about how the world, war in particular, changed during the second decade of the 20th century, once humanity figured out how to use technology to give one person the power to kill dozens or hundreds by squeezing a trigger or tossing a canister of gas. Much of Diana's distress in "Wonder Woman" comes from realizing that once she's off the island (i.e., once she's left her bubble of antiquity and joined the modern world) honor and prowess mean little. If she weren't a god with superhuman reflexes, she'd be as helpless before machine guns, grenades, artillery shells and poison gas as the draftees and civilians whose deaths horrify her. She has a big heart, and the film never implies that she's a sucker for caring as much as she does. If anything it encourages everyone watching the film to ask if they're as empathetic as she is, and if not, why not.

