Act Four: Getting Wonder Woman 'right'

To a certain extent, Superman has the same problems. Storytellers don’t always know what to do with fundamentally good and kind characters. Do you have them corrupted by evil? Do you have their goodness win out every time and risk appearing sort of corny? What are the mechanics by which goodness operates, since goodness is more complicated to depict than a punch in the face? It’s one of the reasons Grant Morrison’s “All Star Superman” is so compelling; it’s an entire story built around the impact you can have by making people feel loved. Morrison leaned into that potential for corniness and transcended it.

One of the reasons I like She-Hulk so much is that while she embodies the same sort of strength and competence that Wonder Woman possesses, she also represents some of the complexity that comes along with exercising that strength and competence. As her human form, Jennifer Walters is sometimes overlooked, but at least she’s valued for her mind and her abilities as a trial lawyer. In She-Hulk form, she’s free to be more physically and sexually aggressive, but in some ways she’s taken less seriously. That tension is great storytelling fodder. Wonder Woman’s perfection is a pleasant fantasy, but it doesn’t generate the same dramatic friction.

But I digress. The main thing that defines Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) in “Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice” is just how little there is to her. She slinks around at parties, and she and Batman (Ben Affleck) trade aphorisms, but this doesn’t exactly generate the kind of banter that another Batman (Christian Bale) had with Selina Kyle (Anne Hathaway) in “The Dark Knight Rises.” She wears great dresses that allude to her Amazonian origins. And when she joins the battle in the movie’s climax, there’s a fun, wicked smile on her lips. There’s a picture that hints at other things that may play out in a more promising fashion in Patty Jenkins’s stand-alone Wonder Woman movie. But for now, she remains a cipher.