Superhero movies and history epics don't often meet in the same movie, and after watching the new "Wonder Woman," it's easy to see why.

Fans of the comic book genre will likely enjoy the film, which is essentially an exhilarating romp through time and metaphysics that sees Gal Gadot, as Diana, realizing the true extent of her power and adopting the identity of Wonder Woman. But fans of historically accurate war films should probably steer well clear. At best, this interpretation of World War I could be described as cartoonish, and at worst, downright insulting.

The problem is you can't glamorize trench warfare or dress it up to pretend that even though a peace agreement was reached, anyone came out of WWI winning. The Western Front was a horror show -- this much the film acknowledges -- that gave rise to modern warfare.

In the film, Diana rescues from the sea a fallen pilot and American spy, Steve Trevor, and leaves Themyscira, the women-only island haven where she grew up, to accompany him back to Europe. There she hopes to bring about the end of World War I by finding and defeating Ares, the God of War.

It goes without saying there was no warrior princess in real life who arrived to save the day, but it's the attempt to find glory in a situation where there was none that is most troubling about the DC version of events. Sorry to bum you out, but the reality was there was just death, disease and more needless death. There were no heroes, at least as we understand them in Hollywood terms, which is why it feels off to just parachute a superhero into the madness at this stage in history.

That complaint aside -- and it's a big one -- the film has many redeeming features.

The fantasy WWI setting mixes all the gas-mask gore of the real thing with a sepia-toned hue that at least attempts to make Diana look vaguely plausible -- as much as Wonder Woman could in this setting. She is down in the trenches with the men one minute and "over the top" in stylized one-woman offensive the next.

Gadot's performance shines as tender, warm and holy-hellfire powerful. When we see Diana as a child, it's touching to see her determination to be like the Amazonian women she lived among. Later, it's thrilling to see her as a fish out of water in early 20th-century England, railing against the male warmongers and peace brokers alike and refusing to accept she had no place at the table.

Gadot's good looks are handled deftly, with no unnecessary lingering shots. I love Etta Candy -- another satisfyingly fully formed female character, played gloriously by Lucy Davis -- candidly pointing out that no matter what clothes Diana's dressed in, it will be impossible to pretend "she's not the most beautiful woman you've ever seen." I love that when Steve insists on trying by putting her in glasses -- a common trope used to signal an attractive woman attempting to play down her beauty -- she pretty much breaks her specs immediately in a fight.

On the feminism scorecard, there's even a nod to the suffragette movement. If I was being kind I could even attempt to extract from the otherwise mangled Greek mythology an interpretation of Ares as a metaphor for the patriarchy -- powerful white men who sit behind closed doors playing war games. But by the time Ares shows his face, I'd given up hoping the war thing would ever be properly justified.

The film really hammers home that riffing on the first World War is not the same as riffing on WWII, which often feels like fair game because Nazis are easy to demonize and chasing them feels like vengeance. It's something game developers have struggled with for a long time. When EA finally did release a WWI first-person shooter game in the form of Battlefield 1, it got hit with backlash.