Wonder Woman is as hard as nails – and she moved me to tears | Emma Brockes

For weeks I have been gearing up to be disappointed by Wonder Woman. I thought The Handmaid’s Tale was overrated; the new Netflix show Girlboss is a disaster of fake feminism. And I’d assumed Wonder Woman, in spite of the accounts I’ve read of women seeing the movie and being taken aback by their own emotional reaction, would be a let down, too, in the mould of all those terrible Kate Beckinsale movies in which she flies through the air with a gun in each hand while apparently communicating female empowerment.

In fact, this is precisely the kind of film Wonder Woman isn’t. It was instructive, before the movie started, to see the trailer for something called Atomic Blonde (seriously, guys, “Atomic Blonde”?!), in which Charlize Theron is a cold war spy who does lots of killing and which, despite its feminist window dressing, looks like just another way to titillate men.

Wonder Woman is a different beast altogether.

Not a single man appears on screen for the first 20 minutes, which is very odd. Odder still is the origin story, which the writers locate in Greek myth and illustrate with a montage of classic warrior-in-training scenes of the kind that the male hero movie relies on, and which, with women in every principal role, gave me the out-of-body feeling of seeing something I’d never seen on screen before.

And whereas in most female-led Hollywood movies – from Working Girl to Million Dollar Baby to Cars 3, the Pixar movie released this month in which a girl car beats the odds to conquer the boys – the heroine’s triumph is a question of weakness overcome, in Wonder Woman, the heroine’s triumph is one of strength pure and simple, no condition, no caveat. Wonder Woman doesn’t overcome the odds, she blasts through them and it’s the assumptions of the modern world that look ludicrous.

Everything is held up to ridicule – fashion (“how do women fight in these?” she says, of the Edwardian dress she is asked to try on), men-only clubs, and Chris Pine’s courtly “stay here”, an invitation to sit out a fight for which she is supremely better qualified than he.

And the effect is very weird. It brought home the extent to which disparity in physical strength is the basis of so much inequality. And it was bizarrely moving, too, a cornball Hollywood movie over which, for the sheer novelty of the action on screen, I found myself welling up. Afterwards, I walked out into the bright New York sunshine ready to defeat the God of War, or at the very least, take a spin class.

The Queen and I

First it was Helen Mirren in The Queen. Then it was the sympathetic depiction of Elizabeth R in The Crown. Finally, I suppose, it has been year after year of disastrous prime ministers, against whom the monarch looks increasingly dignified and stable. My mother couldn’t stand the Queen, and for many years that was my feeling too. So cold, so inflexible, such an embodiment of everything people hate about the English. Then, somewhat to my horror, I clocked my own reaction to the Queen’s speech this week, and while it wasn’t quite “God bless you, ma’am”, it was along the lines of “Bravo, oh she really does do a good job doesn’t she, so dignified, so consistent, such sterling public service after so many years … ” It’s the beginning of the end.

Call that a heatwave?

All the noise about the heatwave in Britain is baffling to Americans, for whom a puny 31C barely registers as hot. In Arizona at the moment, people are experiencing temperatures of 48C, at which point simply touching the pavement will give you a burn and you can cook frozen pizza on the hood of your car. Flights into Phoenix have been cancelled and drivers have been spotting wearing oven gloves because the steering wheel is so hot. In New York, meanwhile, it is 28C and sunny. I stepped into a subway car where the air conditioning wasn’t working yesterday, and rode for two stops, enjoying the spectacle of successive waves of New Yorkers entering the carriage, registering the sheer absurdity of un-temperature controlled air, and stepping heroically back on to the platform to join the next car.