It’s simple. Michelle MacLaren is one of the finest action directors, really one of the finest directors, working today. She’s best known for her work on on Breaking Bad, where she has demonstrated an absolutely unerring sense of the basics of cinema.
Breaking Bad was perhaps the most cinematic of television shows, using widescreen compositions, tricky angles, editing, panning, asynchronous sound, and so many other effects to move its story. MacLaren was really the show’s finest director, crafting some of its most memorable sequences.
If you want to know what we’re going to get with her directing Wonder Woman, look through her episodes. Watch the two (2) massive montages in “Gliding Over All,” the precisely timed lead-in to the shootout in “To’hajiilee,” the action sequences that conclude “Salud” and “One Minute,” and the image of pure ownage in that last episode’s final frame.
MacLaren has shown a unique sense of time in all her episodes, something so essential to film. She knows exactly how quickly she can give us information, and exactly how long to make us wait before she does. She has much of Walter Hill’s classical sense of space and time with an energy that’s absolutely contemporary. And she’s been able to do all of this on a television schedule, eight days to shoot half a movie.
If you haven’t seen her work before, get ready for something amazing.