I promised a post about Wonder Woman and the way it portrayed love, so here it is! The idea of unconditional love has a hold on our imaginations, and most of us would say it’s a wonderful ideal to strive for. Practically, most of us love conditionally most of the time. There are lines people in our lives can cross that might make us stop loving them.

This is an issue Wonder Woman confronts when Ares tries to convince her to destroy humankind. She’s worked so hard to stop Ludendorff from killing millions of people. But to her surprise, that doesn’t stop the war. The real reason for war and violence, at least according to Ares, is that people are inherently corrupted. They kill because that’s their nature. Wonder Woman wants to save humanity because she loves all of them in theory, but finds many aren’t lovable in practice. This is truest of Maru, who’s been helping Ludendorff develop the gas Wonder Woman has worked so hard to stop. Maru arguably doesn’t deserve to live, and she certainly doesn’t seem to deserve love.

But at the end, Wonder Woman spares her. Maru and many people might not deserve love, but Wonder Woman chooses to love anyway. One of the reasons most of us want so badly to be loved, I think, is what it says about us. It means someone has looked into our soul and liked what they saw. What makes Wonder Woman’s act so meaningful to me is that she looked into Maru’s soul, saw everything there was to dislike, and chose love anyway. That may be the highest form of love there is—choosing to act sacrificially for someone who doesn’t deserve it.

Perhaps Wonder Woman’s greatest superpower is her ability to love.

Wonder Woman is one of my favorite movies this year. The action was great, and there were some hilarious lines. But probably the biggest reason I enjoyed it was that it was deceptively deep. It explored interesting ideas about love (which I’ll talk about in my next post), and why there’s evil, which I’ll talk about here.

One idea developed is that Ares (the god of war) uses his spiritual influence to corrupt people’s hearts, leading to evil. We see this when he talks about giving ideas to prolong wars over the years, including to Doctor Poison. Though Wonder Woman took its characters from Greco-Roman mythology, it reminded me of the story of man’s fall in the Bible. Satan, using a snake, sneaks into the Garden of Eden and helps convince Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge, leading God to exile man from Eden. The beginning of evil has spiritual beginnings that predate man’s existence. Same thing in Wonder Woman. The gods are involved in a struggle of their own that leads Ares, the one who fell out of favor with Zeus, to be sent away from Mount Olympus. His spiritual evil later infects mankind.

But the movie develops another idea. Ares says, yes I’ve given people ideas, but in the end it’s their choice to fight and kill each other. He hints that people don’t really need his influence to become embroiled in wars. There’s something inherently corrupt in their nature. That suggests they were created with the instinct to commit evil, and that all Ares did was tap into it.

We never get an answer as to what the true cause of evil is. That’s probably because there is no obvious answer. Neither the first nor second idea about why evil exists is comforting. If there are supernatural forces at work doing their utmost to get us to wrong each other, that suggests that we are powerless to resist. If instead there’s something evil at humanity’s core, the outcome might be the same: we are powerless to resist our impulse to do evil. I liked that Wonder Woman presented this tension without feeling a need to resolve it.

And it gave us reason to take heart. Steve chose to willingly sacrifice himself to destroy the gas that would have taken millions of lives. There are some people who will fight against their worst instincts to do good, even at great cost to themselves. Can humanity really be corrupt if there are people like that?