Wonder Woman: Bloodlines (2019)

(On TV, April 2020) While I’ve got quite a bit of respect for the DC Animated Movie Universe (DCAMU), there’s always a risk that it will be redundant to the more popular live-action films, even when it does things better than the box-office behemoths. While Wonder Woman: Bloodlines is not a bad origin story for the character and would have been a significant Wonder Woman film had it been made ten years earlier, it does feel a bit redundant after the 2017 Patty Jenkins live-action film. [December 2021: …and even more redundant after the 2020 sequel steals even more of the subplots.] Laboriously going over Wonder Woman’s origin story once again (if brought to the twenty-first century), it compounds the origin story problem by overstuffing the narrative with six villains, all jockeying for time, attention and importance. While the Steve Rogers romance is fine, quite a bit of the dialogue is slap-dash material that could have used a rewrite or two. It’s also substantially glummer than expected, which may be dramatically respectable but doesn’t do much for the entertainment factor. But most of all is the feeling that Wonder Woman: Bloodlines is too late and too redundant to be interesting to anyone but the most dedicated (or least-informed) Wonder Woman fan.