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Superman: Dawn of Justice, and Suicide Squad). “The Amazons wouldn’t be reveling in or taking glory in the brutality. They would just be getting things done,” Jenkins says. “Any move that felt gratuitous, like punching someone in the face to best them, just didn’t feel authentic to me.”

The comic-book and television industries have made enormous strides in breathing life into authentically female superheroes in recent years— Marvel’s first Muslim girl superhero, Ms. Marvel; Netflix’s Jessica Jones; The CW’s Supergirl—but lack the blunt cultural impact of an epic big-screen extravaganza. To be the touchstone of a Batman, a Superman, an Iron Man, we need a superwoman with a movie. Enter Wonder Woman.

Back on set, Gadot is now charging down that grass strip between the barbed-wire fences. Her face is intense. A pickup truck holding a camera is speeding in front of her. When the actress reaches the end of the path, she turns to her left and swings her sword-wielding arm down. Then she stops abruptly and smiles.

“Should I charge the sword as if I’m going to slash the guard?”

Gadot asks Jenkins a minute later, when the two watch the replay on the monitor, analyzing her every move. Gadot is back in her coat as two young female production assistants, whose job it is to keep the star warm, direct heaters on her. A script supervisor, another young woman, is taking notes behind them. “Yeah, yeah, do that,” Jenkins tells Gadot. So she does—another five times, with minor adjustments.

The set is huge, and there are hundreds of people ready to be called upon if needed. It’s 6 p.m. by the way, and the production

is serving breakfast (French fries, sausage and beans, and grilled tomatoes), a sign of the crew’s off-kilter internal clocks. (They won’t wrap until 4 a.m.)

Action movies are shot in hundreds of remarkably short fragments. And while, no doubt, these snippets will amount to a thrilling moment of the Wonder Woman movie, without the music, special effects, or sound, it all looks a little silly. Even Wonder Woman’s sword is just a half-sword with green dots on the end, marked for special effects later.

This appears to be weird even to Gadot. After one take where she thrusts two German guards to the side, each actor seems to walk slowly out of the frame. It doesn’t look at all forceful or dramatic, which Gadot points out as she watches herself on the screen. “Why is he walking?” she asks. A crew member tells her: “He won’t be. He’s going to fly back into the fence.” This will all be fixed in special effects, he explains.

You can forgive Gadot for not knowing exactly how it all will work. This is the first lead role for the 31-year-old former Israeli Defense Forces combat instructor. She was a model and actress best known for her recurring part in the Fast & Furious movies when she was cast as Wonder Woman. “We did castings for months and months,” says Snyder. “There were two things that were important to us: Obviously, we needed an amazing actor. But we also wanted an amazing person. A lot of kids can’t distinguish between actor and character, and we wanted to make sure that whoever we chose would be the perfect representation. Gal actually did the test with Ben [Affleck, who played Batman in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice], and she went toe to toe—she was tough and feisty. There was just something about her, this inexplicable magical quality that everybody saw.” There was immediate chemistry between star and director, too. “We had so many creative conversations about the characters and the relationship between the characters, and how the story should evolve,” says Gadot a few months after filming has wrapped. “Patty and I truly became BFFs on this project—and for life.”
The fans don’t really need any winning over at this point. When the Batman v Superman movie was released to terrible reviews last year, critics recognized Wonder Woman as the movie’s only redeeming part. “Ben Affleck’s Got the Cool Car, But Wonder Woman Steals the Show” declared TheWrap; “How Wonder Woman Steals the Spotlight in Batman v Superman” was a headline in Time. She’s already saved the day, and we’re still months away from Wonder Woman hitting the box office.

Wonder Woman is a 75-year-old icon, but most of us know very little about her history or her as a character. The most famous depiction is the campy mid-’70s television series starring Lynda Carter clad in a bright red, white, and blue strapless bathing suit.

But the story of the original Wonder Woman stretches back to 1941, when psychologist and lie-detector pioneer William Moulton Marston created the heroine, basing her in part on a combination of two different women: his wife and his lover, both of whom he lived with in a polyamorous relationship. In the beginning, the visual of a woman warrior fighting bad guys was radical enough, and by the 1970s, feminists saw Wonder Woman as their hero. In the mid-’70s, we got the TV show. It wasn’t until nearly four decades later, in 2013, that Warner Bros.,

which owns the rights to the character owned by DC Comics, was ready to reintroduce Wonder Woman.

Much has changed in Hollywood, as Jenkins points out: The success of billion-dollar blockbusters like The Hunger Games and Frozen challenges the conventional wisdom that only young men go to the movies. In the year leading up to the release, trailers have depicted Amazons gliding into battle, Wonder Woman hurling men across the screen, German soldiers running through the woods, and poignant moments between our hero and her mother. They promise thrilling action, beautifully shot landscapes, even humor and romance. And they have drummed up epic excitement.

The movie looks good. Heart-racingly, fist-pumpingly, this-is-going-to-be-f*cking-awesome good.

And it comes at a time when many women are redrawing the battle lines in the wake of last year’s election, when Americans handed the presidency to a man who bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy” rather than elect the country’s first female commander in chief. Other than the fun, cathartic escapism that comes with watching a woman kick some serious ass, there are still fundamental questions about how women will reach the highest corridors of power and what it will look like once we get there. Wonder Woman, we’re waiting for you. mt
"THE AMAZONS WOULDN'T BE REVELING IN OR TAKING GLORY IN THE BRUTALITY.

THEY WOULD JUST BE GETTING THINGS DONE."

-PATTY JENKINS, DIRECTOR