You guys, Wonder Woman is so good. The hype is so goddamn warranted - it’s so fucking good.

I never thought I would be referring to a DCEU film as my favourite comic book / superhero movie of all time (especially post-Christopher Nolan) but this movie has changed me. Wonder Woman is a film that is rooted in rich mythology and history but avoids the tropes and trappings of “throwback” films that rely solely upon nostalgia, and it’s a film that demonstrates how femininity is not the antithesis of physical (and emotional) strength but never resorts to cheap gimmicks to empower its female characters.

And this film does have many female characters, although sadly almost none of them appear again after the film’s first act, which takes place on beautiful Themyscira. Chief among them is of course our heroine, played with great gusto by Gal Gadot. She was probably my favourite thing about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and her portrayal of Diana Prince here should certainly put many of the criticisms about her acting skills (or lack thereof) to rest. Gadot brilliantly captures Diana’s idealistic, wide-eyed earnestness here as she refuses to let the British government, trench warfare, or evil Germans deter her from stopping war (yes, Wonder Woman wants to stop all war entirely) in its tracks. The film isn’t afraid to jump between Diana in adorable fish-out-of-water situations and Diana kicking a ton of ass on the battlefield, and it does so without inducing too much mood whiplash. It’s a tricky balancing act that we’ve seen be done badly in many a superhero origin movie but Patty Jenkins pulls it off masterfully here.

Gadot is incredibly endearing and highly watchable as the protagonist, but the film is really elevated by her chemistry with Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor. It’s a little funny to me that the last time we had a halfway-decent romantic pairing in a comic book movie was probably in Captain America: The First Avenger, which also featured a Steve played by an actor named Chris and also took place during a World War, but in my opinion Gadot and Pine have even better chemistry together than Chris Evans and Hayley Atwell did. The time from when they meet (after Trevor’s plane crashes into the ocean off Themyscira) to when the film ends can’t be more than a couple of weeks and may even be as short as a few days, but it feels like watching an epic romance unfold. Pine is perfect in a supporting role that never overshadows Gadot’s but never seems like one that was written to be purposefully inferior to hers either; they just complement each other so well, and I challenge anyone to watch this movie and not ship the fuck out of these two afterwards.

A common complaint among the reviews of this film on the Internet that I have read seems to reside primarily with the third act, and I will concede that the third act is somewhat weaker - but only because I found the first two-thirds of the film to be unbelievably awesome. As with all comic book movies the third act is dedicated primarily to Diana confronting the villain, and I think that the third act’s (minor) problems lie in the film’s fairly generic villains. Danny Huston plays a rogue German general named Ludendorff who with his mad scientist/henchwoman Isabel Maru (Elena Anaya, from my favourite Almodovar film The Skin I Live in) tries to prolong World War I by dropping poison gas bombs along the Western Front. Diana is convinced Ludendorff is Ares, the god of war, and spends most of the film trying to find and kill him. Neither of those characters are offensively terrible villains, but they’re not ones for the history books either; they’re just serviceable comic book villains, and I honestly wasn’t really bothered by them because the protagonists were so compelling and the action and exposition was perfectly paced so as not to keep the film from dragging. The third act, which is really just Wonder Woman and the villain throwing giant heavy objects like the sides of buildings and tanks at each other using telekinesis, might have been more compelling if the villains had been more compelling - but that final fight is very quick and the film at least has the foresight to juxtapose it alongside what Steve Trevor is doing (which is more interesting).

In any case my “complaints” with this film are more like minor nitpicks. I think it’s a fucking incredible movie and it’s the first time in a long time that I left the cinema wanting to watch the entire movie (not just a handful of fun scenes) again, and go on that emotional journey with the characters again. That’s more than I can say for the average summer blockbuster, and if nothing else Wonder Woman is above average.