Wonder Woman: Bloodlines (2019)

Wonder Woman: Bloodlines arrives as the thirty-ninth entry in the DC animated home-video line, a provenance that promises competence and delivers precisely that. Diana leaves a matriarchal island, defies a queen, and spends five years in man's world before a consortium of female antagonists (Cheetah, Giganta, Doctor Poison, Doctor Cyber, and the transformed Silver Swan) converges on Themyscira. The architecture is female from top to bottom, hero and villain alike, and the film never pauses to congratulate itself for it. Inherited iconography, worn lightly.

The voice cast is unusually varied for the format, with Rosario Dawson, Kimberly Brooks, Cree Summer, Mozhan Marnò, and Adrienne C. Moore filling roles that were never written as statements. The diversity registers as good casting, not as argument. A faint anti-corporate note surfaces late: Veronica Cale, the pharmaceutical executive, is revealed as the true architect of Villainy Inc., scheming to strip Themyscira of its technology for profit. The critique of greed is present but thin, a garnish on a story that wants to get to the next fight.

The film's moral instruction is mild and mostly confined to its final act. Vanessa's turn from grievance to sacrifice, and Hippolyta's decision to open the island to outsiders, amount to a gentle lesson about reconciliation. No sermon follows. Elsewhere the ledger is bare. There is no queer content, no body politics, no climate anxiety, no neurodivergent character, no engagement with race despite the cast, and no revision of real history, only Greek myth and comic-book continuity. The remainder is a serviceable action picture with a sword, a lasso, and a self-blinding that lands harder than it should. A restrained vintage. Decent body. Little aftertaste.