From the moment Patty Jenkins signed on to direct Wonder Woman, the world could have breathed a sigh of relief.
But instead, in that moment and in the weeks before the film’s release, much of the focus was on Warner Bros.
“gamble” on her as a director, with skeptics pointing to her decade-plus feature-directing hiatus, and questioning why a helmer of only one feature — a low-budget indie serial-killer film, Monster — was qualified to direct a $150 million superhero tentpole.A few days before the premiere of Wonder Woman, one could almost feel the collectively bated breath of the DC superhero’s fans and of Hollywood, all wondering if this movie would be the savior of its genre, or a dead-on-arrival disaster. The suspense was understandable.
With its $103 million opening weekend ($228 million worldwide) and rapturous reviews, everyone finally exhaled. But they should have been breathing easy all along, because, years after her debut with a very different film, it was the same Patty Jenkins who brought the same talent, passion, optimism, vision and confidence to the table. As someone who collaborated with her on Monster, I saw those traits in action years ago, and I experienced them all again as I watched Wonder Woman.
The two films are worlds apart, yet they share Jenkins’ creative DNA. What could the story of a real-life serial killer possibly share with the story of a superheroine created in the 1940s?
A lot, when Jenkins is the storyteller.For starters, while Monster’s Aileen Wuornos is an antihero to Diana Prince’s superhero, Jenkins found authentic humanity in these characters, and grounded each woman’s story in that humanity. If…
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