To say 2020 has been an interesting year would be an understatement. A global pandemic ravaged the world, forcing most people to stay inside their homes and the closure of many businesses. As a result, the movie industry has had to redefine the way they deliver entertainment to the masses. This led Warner Brothers to release its latest superhero movie, Wonder Woman 1984, direct to streaming via HBOMax (as well as in theaters in areas where it was safe to do so). Having nothing else to do on Christmas Day, being forced to stay home and all, I gave Wonder Woman 1984 a watch.
Set nearly 70 years after the events of Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman 1984 finds Diana Prince as an anthropologist for the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC. She dons the suit when circumstances require, but Wonder Woman is little more than a myth in the public’s eye. During the course of her day job, Diana meets Barbara Minerva, a dowdy, nerdy gemologist who is asked to authenticate a stolen artifact for the FBI. The artifact is our film’s Macguffin, a “Dreamstone” that grants the holder their deepest wish. Naturally, both Barbara and Diana make wishes with the stone, not truly realizing its full power, which eventually come true.
Fast forward to our other film’s antagonist, Max Lord. A low-level con-man, Lord understands the stone’s true power and wants it for himself. His true wish is to become the stone itself, and it imbues him with the power to grant wishes for others. Lord uses this power to exchange his services for whatever he wants from the wisher, amalgamating his own riches and bolstering his power.
Gal Gadot is always wonderful as Wonder Woman. She carries herself regally in the role and has a presence that fans would expect from Diana. She handles the emotionality in heavier scenes with aplomb and really adds gravitas to the character. At this point, Gadot has become synonymous with Wonder Woman, and it’s a fine legacy. I honestly couldn’t imagine anyone else in the role.
Chris Pine returns as Steve Trevor despite the character being killed off in the first film. Being 70 years removed from his own time period, Trevor spends some of his screen time marveling at the wonders of the “modern” world. It mimics Diana’s own fish-out-of-water scenes from the previous film and is one of the highlights of Wonder Woman 1984. Though short and subdued, it’s very enjoyable. His return makes sense as far as the plot goes and, I have to say, it was good to have him back.
I was most surprised by the performance of Kristen Wiig as Barbara Minerva. She handles the turn from mousy intellectual to feral predator well. Though the movie never really dives into the character’s psyche, it gives us enough of a glimpse to see what a woman like Barbara has put up with most of her life and makes her transformation more believable.
Unfortunately, I was less impressed with Pedro Pascal as Max Lord. The character was the driving force behind the movie, the true antagonist despite what the trailers would have viewers believe, and he was a low point to me. Lord was a caricature of the megalomaniacal supervillain, the power-hungry despot whose only drive is power. His performance was over-the-top schlock, and the film doesn’t really give me any reason to care about him. We do get a glimpse into his past, to see where he came from and how he became the person he is, but if the purpose of those scenes was to make us understand his motives, they really fell short for me. Lord was fine for what he was, but I would have preferred a villain with a little more nuance.
Wonder Woman 1984’s biggest problem seems to be its own identity crisis. It wants to be a fun, colorful superhero romp full of lively characters and action scenes, and for the most part, it manages that. But it also gets mixed up in international occupational issues and the threat of nuclear war. Even its themes have trouble understanding what they want to be. While the prologue hits the audience clear in the face with the idea that “no true hero is born of lies, the actual text of the film runs more akin to a message that “power corrupts.”
The length doesn’t do it any favors, either. The film clocks in at 2 hours and 31 minutes, which felt way longer than it needed to be. The amount of time spent developing two antagonists and reintroducing audiences to Steve Trevor makes up most of the run time, but it’s also bloated with unnecessary scenes. I felt that the 10-minute opening sequence from Diana’s past was a directorial indulgence the audience could have done without. And while I liked the fan-service of introducing the invisible jet, a staple in the Wonder Woman mythos, it was an unnecessary contrivance that ignores the movie’s own rules in order to fulfill.
I know I’m being kind of hard on the film but there were many things about Wonder Woman 1984 that I enjoyed. The climax was a fresh change of pace from most superhero movies. Instead of devolving into a super-powered fistfight like other films would have, Wonder Woman 1984 puts Diana’s inner strength on display. She becomes a paragon of goodness and an inspiration to the regular folk, an ideal that many of DC’s heroes encompass but has been ignored for the big-screen adaptations *coughSupermancough*. Sure, Wonder Woman can fight, but she also needs to be the epitome of ethical decisions and to do the right thing even when it hurts.
As a follow up to a film that’s touted as one of the best from DC Entertainment, Wonder Woman 1984 is a dramatic disappointment. The muddled message is only made tolerable through fine acting, and even then, just barely. There are a few enjoyable action set-pieces, but most of the film is just exposition. I think the biggest disappointment of Wonder Woman 1984 is that it features a character with close ties to an entire pantheon of ancient gods and the filmmakers didn’t bother to use a single one on screen. That just seems like a waste of effort to me. I’d recommend Wonder Woman 1984 to the superhero completionist, but otherwise, you won’t miss much if you decide to skip this one.
