Anyone who tells you that blockbusters can’t be important should take five seconds to remember
Wonder Woman. DC’s 2017 headliner for the Amazonian hero gave women a superhero on their terms. Director Patty Jenkins seems to understand what made Wonder Woman important and powerful, and audiences responded with rapturous cheers. So it’s beyond disappointing that the follow-up, again directed by Jenkins but this time written by her and DC mainstay Geoff Johns, has sacrificed all that charm and heart.
Having ended World War I in the first film, apparently Themyscira’s finest has been working at the Smithsonian while occasionally fighting crime and mooning over her only love, Steve Trevor, who has been dead for 66 years at this point. As played by Gadot, this 1984 version of Wonder Woman is a knock-’em-dead fashion plate but also terribly alone, as clumsily noted when a waiter takes away the other setting at her table for two. No wonder she’s shocked when Steve (Pine) suddenly appears out of nowhere, as baffled about his spontaneous resurrection as she is. However, the mechanism also allows the bloated story to cram in two members of