Wonder Woman 1984 // Review #8

(*Sigh...* Okay. So it's come to this.)

I know I'm late to the party on this one, but in my defense, I really didn't want to come. 

Here's the thing about Wonder Woman 1984: I saw it on Christmas Day with my family last year, on the night that it premiered on HBO Max.

And, in a word, this movie was... underwhelming. 

In fact, if I had to pick a series of words to describe this movie overall, I would say that this film was "Long, messy, and emotionally exhausting."

(SPOILERS AHEAD for Wonder Woman 1984.)

Back when I started this blog in 2017, I had a review planned for the original 2017 Wonder Woman movie, starring Gal Gadot and Chris Pine in the roles they eventually reprised in the sequel. Before I inevitably scrapped that blog post, I wrote about how I admired that Wonder Woman was a badass, who was fully capable and cool without being unlikeable. The 2017 Wonder Woman movie was not perfect by any means, but I liked it, because it was fun and lighthearted while also showing that Wonder Woman was a force to be reckoned with.

It wasn't quite on the level of some of their competitor's IP, like Iron Man, or even Captain America, but it was definitely a good watch. I thought it was good that Wonder Woman was the first big-budget female superhero movie, and it was released to general acclaim. It was a big deal at the time, and it made me optimistic that we would get to see other female superhero movies in the future, like a Captain Marvel, or (eventually) a Black Widow movie.

Wonder Woman made waves when it came out, and it was a good time to watch, flaws and all. I really liked it. But probably more importantly, when I watched it, I didn't feel every minute of its two-and-a-half-hour run-time, like I did with the sequel.

To put it simply, Wonder Woman 1984 is a bad movie. It's definitely not the worst thing to come out of 2020, but it certainly did not help the already perilous state of affairs going on both in the movie industry, and the world at large. 

Allow me to get into the nitty gritty of why this movie was so bad. Behold:

Category 1: Body Swap Horror- F (for "Fully unnecessary")

Perhaps you have already seen all of the reviews hailing this movie for its lack of feminist vision and it's incomprehensible body swapping plot in regards to the male lead. Well, it's all true. I can confirm that this movie not only lacks a feminist vision by turning Wonder Woman into a lame sad sack that can't get over her boyfriend that she knew for like 3 days 70 years ago, but it also has a troubling body swapping plot that seems completely inconsequential to the plot as a whole.

For the sake of transparency, I will just say right now that Steve Trevor, played by Chris Pine, does come back in Wonder Woman 1984 to reprise his role in the sequel, despite dying at the end of the first Wonder Woman movie that came out in 2017. The only real question I had while watching the movie was, "How?" 

Well, let me tell you, it is a doosey.

Diana brings him back using some plot mumbo-jumbo (that I'll get into later), and it's weird. Like... you won't see this plot element coming unless you've already seen the movie or seen another review of the film (mostly because it's an irrelevant story beat that adds nothing but confusion to an already confused plot).

Needless to say, Steve Trevor comes back in another man's body, and is technically possessing this man the entire time that he is palling around with Diana. But it's okay, because they explain it away in the movie, right?

(*Silence*)

RIGHT?

Well, kinda. But also, not really.  They kind of treat it as a minor inconvenience that's not that big a deal, instead of a major plot hole, which it is. 

Now, an element that I hadn't considered in this whole conundrum was the aspect of consent in this movie. People on the internet have been objecting the use of this poor stranger's body for sexual acts that he wasn't aware of, but I wasn't thinking about that the first time that I saw this movie. If I'm being honest, that didn't even cross my mind at first.

To understand where my head was at when I was watching this movie with my family the first time, you have to know that I was re-watching the classic mid 2010's Lifetime show, Drop Dead Diva. It's a legal episodic drama about a skinny blonde model named Deb who dies and gets put into the body of the recently deceased plus-sized lawyer, Jane Bingum. (It's essentially if Freaky Friday and Legally Blonde had a baby, and I would highly recommend it if you haven't watched it yet).

   Lifetime's Drop Dead Diva (2009-2014)

Perhaps I wasn't as upset about consent as I should have been upon my first viewing of Wonder Woman 1984 (although I was admittedly very shocked), because on Drop Dead Diva similar things happen. The recently deceased model, Deb, is in the body of Jane Bingum, while Jane remains up in Heaven. This makes Jane's body now Deb's body, with which to do whatever she pleases. She even has guardian angels on Earth to make sure that she uses her second chance as Jane to live her life to the fullest. This means that Deb often has relationships with other men in Jane's body. However, because the real Jane is already dead, she is no longer the owner of that body, and so Deb is mostly allowed to get away with her relationship issues.

In Wonder Woman 1984, I was expecting a Drop Dead Diva-like switch , in which the person who's body Steve Trevor was inhabiting was that of the recently deceased. This would mean that that man would no longer be in need of his body anymore, leaving it available to Steve.

BUT NO. THAT'S NOT THE CASE.

IT BECOMES IMMEDIATELY DIFFERENT once you realize at the end of the movie that the person whose body Steve stole is a living breathing person still, who was just transported into the ether because of reasons??

So yes, Diana essentially sexually assaulted some guy because she wanted to sleep with her dead boyfriend. 

Overall, 0/10. I would not recommend this body swapping plot device. Watch Drop Dead Diva instead. It's much more satisfying and much less morally gray.

Category 2: Secret Identity-ing- F (0/10)

This one might just be a nit-pick, but I thought the whole point of Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman was that they had secret identities and so no one knew who the fuck they were. But in this movie, I suppose her secret identity isn't that much of a secret, because no one bats an eye when Diana shows up dressed as Wonder Woman in Egypt halfway through the movie and Steve Trevor openly calls her by her government name in battle.

What I don't get is if everyone in the world knows that Wonder Woman is Diana Prince, then why would she even bother with the secret identity in the first place? It's not like anyone would have had a hard time putting together that Diana Prince was Wonder Woman. I MEAN, THEY LOOK EXACTLY THE SAME.

Maybe I'm just upset because I grew up watching Hannah Montana and Cinderella-inspired movies where the quirky white girl puts on a wig or a mask to cover up her identity, but I was a little annoyed that it was so easy to put together that Diana Prince was Wonder Woman. I was even more disappointed when they didn't even attempt to change Diana's hair style or cover her face with glasses like the original Wonder Woman, played by Lynda Carter.

Lynda Carter as Diana Prince in the 1975 show Wonder Woman.

Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman in the 1975 show Wonder Woman.

The images above look like two completely different people, even though they were both played by Lynda Carter. Carter's Diana Prince looks mousy and shy (albeit there is a stereotype surrounding the idea that people who wear glasses are more shy and less outgoing, based in a history of mocking nerds in general), while her Wonder Woman looks powerful and heroic in the face of danger. It is easy to believe that people would not believe that Diana Prince would be Wonder Woman, based on how she presents herself as her alter ego.

But when you look at Gadot's Diana Prince and Wonder Woman, it's a little harder for me to believe that people won't immediately clock this-

Gal Gadot as Diana Prince in Wonder Woman 1984.

- as being virtually the same as this:

Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman in Wonder Woman 1984.

"Oh no! You mean to tell me that this strong confident woman with great hair is the same strong confident woman with great hair who also fights bad guys in her red and blue armor? Unbelievable!"

Overall, I'm annoyed that they undid a lot of the good work that was used to establish Wonder Woman's alter ego in the previous movies (which canonically take place after this) like Batman v. Superman and the Justice League. In those movies no one knows that Diana Prince is Wonder Woman because Wonder Woman hasn't been seen in like 100 years, and so a vague resemblance from someone from the early 1920s isn't really that interesting. In this movie, however, I guess everyone knows that Diana Prince is Wonder Woman, because she does literally nothing to hide it as she galivants around town saving people. 

Overall, F for effort.

Category 3: Plot- D

Okay, now let's get into the messiness of the film and why I found it so incomprehensible.

First of all, nothing in this movie is explained until it happens.

Steve Trevor is back? Well, kind of, but not in his own body.

Why?

"Because fuck you, that's why."

If Steve's not in his own body then how come the wishing stone also took Diana's superpowers away? Wouldn't Steve being in another person's body be enough of a bad deal for Diana's wish?

(*high pitched whining*)"Wouldn't Steve being in another person's body be enough of a bad deal for Diana's wish?" (*scoffs*) "Oh boo-hoo. That's what you sound like. Literally cry more, whiner."

Why is Max Lord dying because of the wishing stone?

"Oh, I don't know, why don't you shove your thumb up your ass?"  

Stuff just kind of like... happens in this movie. The worst part is that you have to be paying attention to everything, or you'll just miss important, seemingly random things happening.

I'll admit that sometimes it was easier to just turn my brain off while I was watching it, but even when I wasn't thinking about it, the plot was hard to follow. It was much easier to just wait for the movie to be over than to ask any questions regarding the multiple inconsistencies between this movie and the original Wonder Woman (2017), or even the Justice League movie that came out later that year.

I should probably back up a bit and actually explain the plot of Wonder Woman 1984 instead of just itemizing my gripes with this movie as a whole. If you haven't seen the movie yet, I'm sorry to have spoiled so much of it for you already (but it's not like I didn't warn you). 

The plot of Wonder Woman 1984 is that of a low-grade Disney Channel original movie- or, even worse- the even lower grade 2009 movie, Shorts, by Robert Rodriguez. 

Poster for the 2009 Robert Rodriguez movie, Shorts.

Actually, the plot of Shorts is surprisingly similar to that of Wonder Woman 1984, in that they both contain magical wishing rocks, they're both incredibly nonsensical, and they're both very bad movies.

While Shorts was a significantly worse movie in my opinion, I must say that I definitely did not expect that the plot device of a magical wishing stone would be the central part of the sequel to Wonder Woman (2017).

Wonder Woman 1984 starts with Diana moping about her long dead boyfriend, Steve, after she stopped a bunch of robbers from stealing a mystical item from an 80s mall. It turns out that this mystical item is a wishing stone, known as the Dreamstone, and Diana wishes to bring Steve back, without knowing that it will cost her her superpowers to do so (and cause a dumb body swapping dilemma for no reason). As it turns out, a fraudster billionaire oil magnate named Maxwell Lord (played by Pedro Pascal) was also looking for the Dreamstone to turn his luck around in the business world. Then the plot ensues from there. 

Fun, right?

Fun, wrong.

This movie was not fun. It was stupid and poorly constructed conceptually. I didn't even mention Kristen Wiig's character in the movie, or the fact that this movie did not have to be set in the 1980s at all.

However, I can't be too hard on the plot. The plot would have worked if the writers had actually bothered to make it make sense.

Categories 4 & 5: The Writing & Pacing- D

My first editing note for this film would be that the opening scene with the Amazonian women on Themyscira could and should be cut out of the final version of the movie. Not only does it add very little in terms of theme and overall excitement, but it adds a solid seven or eight minutes to the runtime that would have been better served either explaining the nonsensical plot of the movie, or cut out of the film entirely.

In fact, there are two main opening scenes in this movie- the scene on Themyscira, and the scene immediately following that in which Diana is an adult, fighting crime in the 80s. I know that the director, Patty Jenkins, had to fight for both of these opening scenes to stay in the film, as she thought they were integral to showing Diana's character growth and displaying the theme of the movie early on, but the moral that the Themyscira opening introduces is forgettable at best and ham-fisted at worst.

First of all, the theme of this movie should not have had anything to do with cheating, because it comes across as childish in the beginning and stupid and naïve at the end. When Diana is telling everyone on earth to renounce their wish because wishing is "cheating?" That's a swing and a miss for me, personally. 

I think that the whole wishing plot line could work if the theme was a lot more impactful to Diana's love story with Steve, instead of a hollow callback to the beginning of the movie when young Diana cheated at the Amazon Olympics.

The moral of the story should have been about letting go. Diana had to learn to let go of her long- lost love, Steve Trevor, in favor of someone new (so she could stop pining after Chris Pine. Get it? Pining after Pine? Come on, if you didn't at least chuckle at that, you have no sense of humor). If the moral was about letting go, then Pedro Pascal's villain would learn to let go of his greed and be satisfied with the life that he's living with his son instead of aspiring to be a wealthy mogul. Barbara would have to learn to be happy being herself, because she let go of wanting to be someone else, and so on.

This is a better moral because in the end of the movie when everyone is renouncing their wish, everyone would realize that no one was really going to be happy with the things that they wished for, because they weren't really what they needed to be happy. They were already capable of being happy with the people and things around them. This is sweeter and more heartfelt than the actual ending of the movie- which rang hollow. 

ANYWAY- the moral of the story was only one of the main writing flaws with this movie.

Another thing that bothered me about this movie was that it seemed to lack narrative focus. This had a very negative effect on the overall pacing of the movie. 

I think this is because sometimes when new characters are introduced into an established universe, they tend to dominate a lot of the movie's run-time while nothing interesting is happening with the main character of the film. (The most egregious example of this I can think of is Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, in which Angelina Jolie was paid tens of millions of dollars, only to have less screen time than the villain of the movie, played by Michelle Pfeiffer.)

This happens in Wonder Woman 1984 immediately after Steve is brought back to life (albeit in another man's body, because let's not forget that). The pace of the film immediately came to a grinding halt as Diana seemed to forget everything else that she was concerned about in this movie. She didn't even really question the situation- she was more than content to accept the circumstances that surrounded her boyfriend's reappearance (much like I suspect the screenwriters expected the viewers to).

In this down time, the movie shifts focus from Diana and Steve to Barbara Minerva (played by Kristen Wiig) and Maxwell Lord, in order to get the plot moving. However, instead of moving the plot along, it seems to pull focus away from the people who we actually came to see in this movie. 

If you ask me, I think less focus in this movie should have been put on Barbara. I understand what they were trying to do with her character, as she eventually becomes another villain for Wonder Woman to fight. However, sometimes the story just felt messy with these additional Barbara/ Cheetah story beats. 

For example, I was perfectly able to summarize the story of this movie without mentioning Barbara's character once. Honestly the movie would be more organized if her element of the plot wasn't even a factor. Perhaps it would be more interesting if the origin story of Cheetah was not explained and had nothing to do with the character being jealous of Diana. Apparently, the writers took their creative liberties with Cheetah from the comic books, because the original Barbara Minerva version of Cheetah from 1987 was... a lot, to say the least (You can read about it here.). I think it is possible to include Barbara Minerva in this movie without having the film feel overly crowded or distracted, but the angle that they chose to go with Kristen Wiig's interpretation of the character relied really heavily on tropes that we've seen before, instead of simply telling a good superhero-supervillain story.  

Speaking of supervillains, Maxwell Lord's motivation is confusing, as he attempts to impress his son (who is very clearly a different ethnicity than he is, albeit he is very cute) with how rich and powerful he is, while also not caring if the world burns down in the process. It would make sense if this conflict was ever resolved in a satisfying way, but his character arc is more of a pitiful squiggle. It starts off in a strong arc like shape, but then meanders and peters out until you're just left wondering at the end of the movie, "Did no one come to arrest this man for all of the shit he just pulled?"

Speaking of the shit that Maxwell Lord pulled, he brilliantly wishes to become the Dreamstone in order to grant people's wishes and take what he would like in return, as a part of the stone's "monkey's paw" agreement. This is never explained in a satisfying way. The only point in the story in which the "monkey's paw" element of the story is explained comes after bad things have already happened, like (SPOILER) Diana losing her powers, or Kristen Wiig's Barbara becoming a horrible person (although I'm definitely not going to argue that her kicking the crap out of a rapist makes her a horrible person). They explain this element of the story once, and then they never look back. If you can't keep up, you're going to end up getting left behind.

Overall, the movie feels unbalanced, disorganized, and bloated. With some major writing overhauls, this movie could have been good, I think, but unfortunately this was what we were left with. Had they restructured Wonder Woman 1984 a little bit better, maybe I wouldn't have had a headache by the time it was over.

Category 6: Action- C-

I was not impressed by a single action scene in this movie.

The opening mall scene was so poorly CG'd and hammy that it was comical (which I think was intentional, but I somehow found it incredibly unlikeable and inconsistent tonally, especially when you compare it to the earlier scene that showed a young Diana on Themyscira).

I was nonplussed because after the opening scenes there wasn't another action scene in this movie until about an hour in, in which Diana and Steve take out the tanks in Egypt. By that point, I was a little too hung up on the messy plot to follow the action, which was also a little drawn out and uninteresting visually in my opinion.

The problem is there's a little too much romantic drama in this superhero movie for me, and frankly not enough exciting action. Wonder Woman is in a total of about four fights in this two-and-a-half-hour movie, and none of them were particularly impressive. It's not like in the first Wonder Woman movie, where she walked out in the middle of No-Man's Land, single handedly deflecting bullets and enemy fire.

Wonder Woman (2017)

Overall, I was mostly uninterested in the action scenes in this movie, along with this movie as a whole. 

"It's gonna be a no from me, dawg."

Now, don't get me wrong. I didn't hate this movie. I just... didn't get it? 

When the movie ended, I wasn't sure how to feel other than relieved that it was over so I could finally take a nap. This movie left me feeling emotionally drained, with a headache that made me want to lie down with a cup of tea. 

Overall, I would give this movie a D. I feel like I would watch it again for the campy, corny villain of Pedro Pascal's Max Lord, and I do enjoy looking at Chris Pine (just because- well, he's Chris Pine). However, this movie is just not very good. It's poorly written, poorly acted, and there were definitely at least three scenes throughout the movie where I could easily clock Gal Gadot's bad wig. It was, overall, very upsetting.

The fact that this movie was meant to signal the death of cinema and the end of 2020 at the same time confuses me. It was neither good enough nor profitable enough for movie studios to consider this movie to be anything but a loss, and frankly, I believe that streaming on HBO Max is exactly where this movie belongs. With or without a global pandemic, I think I would have been very upset to have spent $15 to see this bad movie in a crowded theater.

As for the end of 2020, I suppose it's appropriate that the worst year in modern history didn't end with a bang but instead with a whimper, cinema-wise.