Wonder Woman

Wonder Woman is the most popular female comic-book superhero of all time. Aside from Superman and Batman, no other comic-book character has lasted as long. Generations of girls have carried their sandwiches to school in Wonder Woman lunchboxes. Like every other superhero, Wonder Woman has a secret identity. Unlike every other superhero, she also has a secret history.

Wonder Woman has some really great moments in the film, like when Diana first steps into no man’s land, or the signature battle scene with the reimagined theme music — which oddly only played once. 

Wonder Woman Battle Scene

Casting superheroes isn’t as much of a layup as one might think, but Gal Gadot is sort of perfect for the role, and athletic enough that the stunt sequences all seem very natural and believable. The main reason this film isn’t higher on the list is the lackluster villain and final battle scene. 

I love David Thewlis. He’s a great actor, but you need to cast someone with some serious mobility to facilitate a great final battle scene, otherwise, you’ll be stuck using a CG villain for your climax.

In one episode, a newspaper editor named Brown, desperate to discover Wonder Woman’s past, assigns a team of reporters to chase her down; she easily escapes them. Brown, gone half mad, is committed to a hospital. Wonder Woman disguises herself as a nurse and brings him a scroll. “This parchment seems to be the history of that girl you call ‘Wonder Woman’!” she tells him. “A strange, veiled woman left it with me.” Brown leaps out of bed and races back to the city desk, where he cries out, parchment in hand, “Stop the presses! I’ve got the history of Wonder Woman!” But Wonder Woman’s secret history isn’t written on parchment. Instead, it lies buried in boxes and cabinets and drawers, in thousands of documents, housed in libraries, archives and collections spread all over the United States, including the private papers of creator Marston—papers that, before I saw them, had never before been seen by anyone outside of Marston’s family.

The veil that has shrouded Wonder Woman’s past for seven decades hides beneath it a crucial story about comic books and superheroes and censorship and feminism. As Marston once put it, “Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who, I believe, should rule the world.”