FILM REVIEW
WONDER WOMAN 1984
Dir: Patty Jenkins
Wonder Woman 1984 shares more than a little in common with Gal Gadot's infamous celebrity rendition of 'Imagine': both well-intentioned, yet tone deaf and hopelessly misjudged in every conceivable way. WW84 brings to light how much of its predecessor's success was rooted in its setting. The horrors of WW1's trenches and war-torn landscapes gave the original Wonder Woman an emotional and thematic heft which its sequel's lazy pastiche of Eighties fashions and hues, unsurprisingly, cannot come close to matching.
Wonder Woman emphasized the values and value of its heroine by transporting her - a sheltered, yet powerful and intensely compassionate woman - into one of the most apocalyptic periods of human history and letting the audience experience it with her first as despair, then as hope as she used her power to do something about it. WW84's setting, by contrast, evokes nothing about its heroine and forces the film to resort to meaningless bromides, whose espoused values it itself does not even stick to.
The movie kicks off during the Amazonian equivalent of the Olympic Games, in which a young Wonder Woman, aka Diana Prince (how I'll refer to her henceforth), is participating. This sequence is intended to lay the thematic groundwork for the rest of the film, though unintentionally foreshadows it in other ways as well. Specifically, as will be true of the film to follow, the sequence is an absolute mess of weightless CGI and with little thought evident in its presentation. These Olympics have every event occurring simultaneously, before it all stops for the main event, a Ninja Warrior-esque obstacle course where each contestant seems to complete the first part in a completely different manner. This early visual showcase is let down not only by unconvincing CGI, but
having its credibility as a believeable event ruined by how cluttered
it is. If this sounds like pendanticism, it's relevant because of how much the movie will go on to rely on visual and thematic noise rather than focus and substance.
It demonstrates the ongoing issue of the movie outwardly stating its central theme while either missing the mark or directly contradicting it in its representation on-screen. The theme, that one cannot take shortcuts in life to achieve lasting happiness or success, is simplistic but has some potency for our era of instant gratification. It's regrettable, then, that the movie is hoist by its own petard in this respect: it takes non-stop shortcuts and is continually undermined by them. Returning to the Amazon Olympics, young Diana is winning the obstacle course until she gets knocked off her horse, so takes a (literal) shortcut to get to the end first, only to be accosted by her mother, who punishes her and us with a stream of incoherent platitudes.
The scene discredits itself by having Diana already vastly better than her competitors, despite her being a child and them adults. In other words, Diana has effectively already achieved her goal and taking a shortcut merely gives her the opportunity to win a competition which she would otherwise only have lost through bad luck. Contrary to what her mother says, Diana's shortcut does not so much represent her telling a lie as preserving the truth of her athletic superiority. Had the movie not taken its own shortcut of having Diana be so much better than everyone else, it would have made more sense on every level. Had she been overconfident in wanting to compete with adults and inevitably fallen well behind in the race, only to then take a shortcut into a pole position she didn't deserve, her mother's words would have rung true - or might have, had they been better written, but I digress.
That fundamental lack of thought permeates the rest of the film. The central macguffin, a 'wishing stone' which grants a wish to whomever is holding it, never operates by a consistent set of rules. The stone brings some wishes to life in hyper-literal fashion, while others are interpreted more liberally, depending on the requirements of the plot. Sometimes it brings new things into physical existence, while other times it has to rewrite existence as it is, such as bringing back Diana's love interest from the previous film, Steve Trevor, in another man's body. A character late in the movie gets a second wish for no reason other than convenience. The way the havoc these wishes cause is undone? Having people simply say 'I renounce my wish', at which point everything returns to normal, apart from some things that don't. Not exactly dramatically satisfying, or much for emphasizing the movie's states values of hard work and sacrifice.
The film's ostensible 'girl power' feminism doesn't fare any better. In the first film, Diana's power was demonstrated through her compassion and her ability in leading others to achieve extraordinary things in seemingly hopeless circumstances. Her relationship with Steve was born out of his genuine admiration for her and her having him as a guide in navigating a new, seemingly terrible world, enabling her to discover a sense of purpose. In WW84, her character is so unhealthily obsessed with him that she's been miserable and alone for the past sixty-odd years. Her entire sense of self is defined by him, down to her gaining a new power later on simply by thinking about one of his offhanded remarks.
It is perhaps no great surprise that Diana never re-entered the dating scene when every man around her aside from Steve is a combination of predatory, sleazy or a multipurpose creep. There is a party scene in which every man Diana walks past obnoxiously propositions her. A few previous big-budget 'feminist' movies have fallen into the trap of trying to make their female leads sympathetic by surrounding them with awful men (itself defining women by the men around them) but never before has it been so comically exaggerated. When the only decent (speaking) man in the movie technically doesn't exist, your values might be a little off-kilter.
These misguided attempts at empowerment also afflict Kristen Wiig's character, Barbara Minerva, who later becomes the movie's entirely superfluous henchman, Cheetah. So unpleasant are the men in this movie that when Barbara drops some of her papers in an early scene, her passing male colleagues not only walk straight past her, but contemptuously sneer at her on the way. This is supposed to emphasize Barbara being underappreciated and overlooked - Hollywood continuing to believe that putting an attractive woman in glasses makes her a monster - but is, once again, so ridiculously over-the-top that it undermines its own intentions and only makes one wonder why Barbara apparently likes these people.
Barbara makes a wish on the wishing stone to become as powerful as Diana, which manifests through her suddenly being able to walk in heels. I wish I were joking. She later also wishes to become an apex predator and is turned into a human-cheetah hybrid, even though cheetahs aren't apex predators. All of this serves only to provide the movie with someone for Diana to have a fight with in the climax - one of the movie's surprisingly few, but all entirely unengaging, action scenes. Despite Wiig's best efforts, the movie does not treat her or her character well.
The main villain is Maxwell Lord, a(nother) Donald Trump analogue who uses the wishing stone to, erm, become a wishing stone himself, maintaining his human form but able to grant wishes and take whatever he wants from the wisher in return. To the movie's credit, Lord isn't too overt as a Trump stand-in, aside from borrowing a few mannerisms and expressions, focusing more on the destructive greed Trump represents than recreating him in all but name. Pedro Pascal is a capable actor but hams up his performance to insufferable levels. Though the character is not one for subtlety by any means, Pascal so overplays every line and emotion that his presence quickly becomes exhausting.
By the end, the movie has so completely given up trying to devise a semi-coherent way of resolving the increasingly out-of-control havoc it depicts that it resorts to plonking futuristic - read: magical - 'particle' technology, with the ability to transmit video only screens not even capable of displaying them, into an Eighties time period up until that point depicted realistically. Meanwhile, Diana, who previously lost some of her powers but only those not too inconvenient to the plot for her to lose, repeats her mother's lecture about not taking shortcuts. Sigh.
If this review has almost exclusively focused on the movie's near-total lack of cohesion, it is to emphasize the confusion and frustration which are the only consistent parts of watching it and its laborious two-and-a-half hour running time. Patty Jenkins' visual storytelling is messy at best, reaching a nadir in the climax with the aforementioned 'particle beam' technology, manifesting as a beam of light (a superhero movie cliché all its own) and swirling wind for no comprehensible reason. Hans Zimmer's score is entirely forgettable and underuses the electric Wonder Woman theme which would have fit much better into the Eighties than WW1. Gal Gadot's performance is passable, though where the previous movie turned her broadness into a strength, here the character and plot's lack of focus leaves her stranded. Chris Pine, too, is merely a passenger along for the ride, his only purpose being to rehash scenes from the first movie in reverse and tag along as a sidekick. He does get the movie's one genuine laugh, though, in his delivery of 'Well, SHIT, Diana!' after she only remembers the existence of radar rather later than she should have considering they've just stolen a plane.
Wonder Woman 1984 gets wrong everything its predecessor got right. That movie took a bold leap with its setting and made it central to the story it was telling and the character at its centre. Its similarities to Marvel's Captain America were undeniably manifold, but its singular vision in directing every beat of the movie, from its action to its relationships and characterisations, towards evoking the value of female power, gave it an identity discernably its own. WW84 is defined by a total absence of focus, lacking even the most basic level of coherence in playing by its own rules or adhering to the theme it twice grinds events to a halt to lecture the audience about. Worse, it diminishes Diana, an icon of female power, to being needy, desperate and having her sense of self entirely dependent on a man, for good and bad. At a stretch, the movie's sheer incompetence makes it somewhat interesting in retrospect. Really, the only wonder is how it got released in this state at all. [ 3 ]
