Movie Review: Wonder Woman 1984

 

I really wanted to love this movie – I really did.  I just found myself so disappointed. It could have been fantastic! Instead at best it feels too long and too dense and at worst it is insulting.

We revisit Themyscira where Diana as a child is participating in a race/obstacle course in honor of the great Amazon warrior, Asteria.  She makes a careless error and ends up cheating to try to win, but her mother and the general prevent her from finishing because a win based on a lie is no victory and truth is the only acceptable path or something like that. It’s set up to be the very important theme of the movie, but I could not figure out how or if it came back into play.

The story then jumps to Diana is doing some general superheroing around a brightly colored and campy 1984 Washington DC. The fashion and shopping mall says 1984, the music does not. She saves some folks from traffic and a couple of other random events but really shows up during a bank robbery that goes from campy to terrifying quickly as one of the robbers threatens to drop a child from a balcony in a mall.  We meet Barbara Minerva, a scientist who works with Diana at the Smithsonian and is feeling unconfident and unseen.  They both consult on the receipt of a stone that was shipped to the museum. Oil businessman who seems to be terrible at his job, Maxwell Lord, shows up and takes interest in Barbara and the stone – because it grants wishes (eyeroll).  On the way home from work, Barbara stops to give a meal to her cheery homeless friend and is assaulted by a would-be rapist, but Diana shows up to save her. The next day, as they are both reviewing the stone, Barbara wishes to be more like Diana while Diana wishes for Steve Trevor to be back – because an actual goddess superhero would never be able to get over the one dude she knew for two days 70 years ago.  This calls back to my issue with the first movie where she could not step into her godhood without acknowledging she was in love with a man. 

In any case, they both get their wishes granted with some caveats while Max Lord steals the stone and wishes on it to become it, thereby gaining the power to grant wishes and take things in return.  Barbara settles in to her new growing powers, liking the feeling of being powerful, and Max slowly gathers power and strength while Diana has an 80s fashion montage and great time out with Steve whose spirit has been dumped into the body of some random guy.

Look, it’s not good. The cast is fine, some of the action sequences are great but the story is bloated and nonsensical. Patty Jenkins once again directs, and I really wish she had done some editing because the potential was there for a fantastic movie. The bits on Themyscira were great, they looked amazing and the action was fun.  Wonder Woman fighting bad guys was great, and really fun. If they had removed the Steve Trevor nonsense – allowing Diana to be an entire person on her own without pining for some man – and removed the entire Max Lord storyline – which, and I am not kidding – attempted to introduce daddy-issue backstory in a montage in the last 10 minutes of the movie, I may have loved the movie.  

Imagine if it began with he friendship between Barbara and Diana and focused on Barbara’s story – feeling unseen and jealous of Diana’s whole vibe. She could be granted the powers by the stone (which is cursed by the gods) and slowly grows more powerful into the Cheetah we all wanted to see.  Then, Diana has to step up to defeat her as she goes power-mad, upset that her once-close friend has become a cruel villain, determined to bring pain to all those she believed slighted her – Diana more than anyone else. That would have been tighter, cleaner, and better. 

Gal Gadot is just fine as Diana and I wish she had gotten more hand to hand combat action sequences because I think she’s great in those. The swinging from cloud to lightning on her lasso (what?) and the forced invisible jet bits were forced and not great. Let her just beat up crowds of bad guys.

I was pleasantly surprised by Kristen Wiig, I thought she made a good Cheetah and did exactly what was asked of her in this role – which apparently was to mimic Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman deal.  I would have liked to have seen what she could have done with the main storyline of the movie.

Pedro Pascal is a treasure and chews all the scenery with his terrible, terrible storyline. He’s great, but I wish the character was not in this movie.

Chris Pine is again, but it is so completely unnecessary to have him in this movie. What is happening to that guy whose body he takes over? And he can fly a jet in 1984 - to say nothing of the fact that it becomes her invisible jet. And aren't they in a hurry? How long are they going to take to leisurely fly through fireworks? Ugh. 

I haven’t even mentioned the fact that once Barbara starts to get powerful, she beats up that rapist who went after her which is supposed to signal that she is turning bad? Also, I loved the Lynda Carter cameo, but wouldn’t it have been better if she had an actual role? Give us Asteria’s storyline, why has she been living in man’s world, does she want her amour back? And why was there no great 80s pop music in this movie since they were so insistent it was in 1984? And what happened to the theme of truth? Max Lord was simply granting wishes to everyone who he could come in contact with, and that didn’t really have anything to do with truth or lies.  The final Cheetah/Wonder Woman fight was all CGI, which is a shame. I wish we got stunt work in costume.

4 out of 10 – I’m sorry, I really wanted to love it, but it just kept making me more and more angry. Oh well. They’ve already greenlit another one, and I will continue to be hopeful that one will be better!

Here’s something I will say – I got HBO Max for this, and while the movie is a letdown, I have been watching Titans, which I have been enjoying – and it does have the 2009 animated Wonder Woman movie, which is fantastic. Watch that and imagine if that had simply been translated to live action.

Also - what would this Lucy Lawless version of Wonder Woman from Justice League New Frontier think about her live-action counterpart still being hung up on a dude 70 years later?