It’s been a long time since a DC Comics movie looked tolerable, much less fun, so the promising Wonder Woman trailer that premiered Saturday at Comic-Con in San Diego is a big step forward. It’s set during World War I: Gal Godot’s Wonder Woman is brought to civilization after aviator Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) washes up on her shore. Soon she’s going undercover to apparently assassinate German officer Danny Huston and running cavalierly across no man’s land deflecting mortar shells with her shield. But nothing the Germans throw at her is half as deadly as Chris Pine’s unthinking sexism and condescension. He tells her, “I can’t let you do this,” and her icy reply—“What I do is not up to you,”—makes a pretty good argument that, if we must have endless superhero movies, we should at least have more with female leads. (Marvel, despite having Black Widow just sitting around, won’t have a female-led film until 2019’s Captain Marvel, 11 years after Iron Man.)
Still, all is not well in the DC Extended Universe: Wonder Woman has a pretty deep hole to climb out of after Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. And DC keeps digging it deeper all the time: The Killing Joke, with its “Batman and Batgirl have sex” subplot, comes out on Monday, and Suicide Squad is not far behind. Wonder Woman is going to have to do more than redraw the map of Europe to save the day this time: She’ll have to convince people to forget the legacy of Archduke Zack Snyder.
