Some belated thoughts on Wonder Woman, which we saw before the boycott conversation had really materialized, with a few spoilers:

1. It's certainly better than the other three DC films of this cycle.  This isn't saying much.  Man of Steel was a neo-Malthusian, protofascist mess, Batman v. Superman was this, but exponentially moreso and without much of the para-feminist take on The Any Adams Lois Lane which made the first film occasionally watchable.  Suicide Squad is just bad.  Wonder Woman is often a more light and comedic film, sometimes in ways that work, sometimes in ways that do not work, but it's certainly easier to watch because of this, less ponderous and pretentious.

2.  It deliberately parallels the first Captain America film, but substitutes the first world War for the second (despite the fact that, like Captain America, the character's origins are in WWII -- Wonder Woman first appeared in 1941, about 6 months after Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's Captain America debuted by punching Hitler on the cover of a comic that was released 9 months prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

3. Screenwriter Allan Heinberg's WWIIification of The Great War is problematic.  As untenable as the exceptionalist narratives around the Second World War may be, the centrality of Empire to both sides in the First World War receives no mention here.  There is a mild indictment of US colonial genocide from a native character named Chief, but otherwise the differences between the war that Wilfred Owen condemned and the one that an entire apparatus of bad historians and hacky journalists celebrate still is entirely collapsed.

4. One could argue that plot developments late in the film render an implicit critique of England's involvement in the war, but this is not explored and largely gives way instead to a bunch of special effects and explosions.  A scene is set in the Ottoman Empire with no awareness of what that might mean for the narrative.

5.  Spoilers in this one:  The most common criticism of Man of Steel involved Superman's decision to murder General Zod at the film's climax.  A similar event occurs in Wonder Woman.  There is far less ambivalence on the part of the titular character.  Indeed, she announces her intentions at multiple points throughout the film.  Yet there has been little discussion of this in the reviews of the film that I have read or the podcast discussions that have popped up in my feed.  I find that curious.  Is this because Wonder Woman is, here and elsewhere, a more martial character, more of a "warrior" than Superman, whose immigrant narrative is much more deeply linked to the ideological project of American exceptionalism?  The film wants to also present Wonder Woman as dedicated to peace, to ending war.  It's a contradiction which calls to mind the entire archive of ideological underpinnings for contemporary humanitarian imperialisms.

6. Gadot's casting illuminates the film's own Zionism.  Her performance is embedded in the logics of IDF militarist/imperialist feminisms, of exceptionalist representations of Israeli womanhood, such that Robin Wright and Connie Nielsen adopt Israeli accents.  The film imagines Themiscyra as Israel.  In this sense I don't think the criticisms of Gadot's support for genocidal IDF attacks on Palestinian civilians can be separated from the film itself.

I think that's all I have for now, but I may add more if it pops into my head.