Wonder Woman 1984 is fun, but doesn’t quite capture magic of its predecessor

[mood]

Wonder Woman 1984 is fun, but doesn’t quite capture magic of its predecessor

Patty Jenkins' sequel is hampered by nonsensical plot, heavy-handed moralizing

 

 

Count me among the many millions who likely logged onto HBO Max on Christmas Day to watch Wonder Woman 1984, Director Patty Jenkins' hotly anticipated, oft-delayed stand-alone follow-up to her 2017 global blockbuster, Wonder Woman. I'm a major fan of the latter, which gave us our super-powered Amazonian's origin story, and had high hopes for the follow-up.

 

Those hopes weren't completely dashed, but they weren't really fulfilled either. While Wonder Woman 1984 still has a bit of the old magic, and its leads all turn in terrific performances, the film is hampered by a frequently nonsensical plot, extraneous showy action sequences, and it's way too heavy-handed with the moralizing. But it still delivers quite a lot of slick, 1980s-infused fun if you turn your brain off and just go with it—and you'll definitely want to stick around for a post-credits scene.

 

(Some spoilers below, with a couple of major spoilers below the second gallery. We'll give you a heads up when we get there.)

 

Inspired by the comic book heroine created by William Moulton Marston in the 1940s for DC Comics, Wonder Woman got her own TV show in 1975, with former Miss World USA Lynda Carter in the leading role and Lyle Waggoner as Steve Trevor. The first season was set in 1940s World War II, with the pair battling Nazis, and subsequent seasons were set in the 1970s, mostly to save on production costs. The dialogue is leaden, the acting is terrible (there are some very bad German accents), the effects are pure cheese, and the less said about the fighting skills, the better. (That... is not judo, Stella Stevens, I'm just saying.)  But it's entertaining in a campy kind of way, and HBO Max is currently streaming some of those episodes, for the nostalgically inclined.

 

The Amazonian superhero made her big-screen debut in the DCEU with 2016's Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, followed by 2017's Justice League. As we reported previously, the first fell short of box office expectations; the second bombed outright. So when Jenkins took on Wonder Woman's origin story, she deliberately departed from the grim humorlessness and dark sensibility of those earlier films, bringing a brighter energy and wit to her tale, along with the usual action.

 

That vision paid off: Wonder Woman went on to gross $821 million worldwide and earned critical raves, making it the most successful of the DCEU films thus far. But let's face it, origin stories—where a hero comes into his or her full powers, learning valuable lessons along the way—just seem to make for better films, whether we're talking about Iron Man, Captain America, Superman, Spider-Man, and so forth. Jenkins' sequel was probably doomed to come up a bit short.

That '80s aesthetic

Wonder Woman 1984 is set almost seventy years after the original film. Since we're now in the 1980s, Diana is operating in a Cold War scenario, taking on Pedro Pascal's villainous Maxwell Lord, an ambitious, flamboyant businessman and purveyor of TV informercials. Jenkins has said her interpretation of Lord was modeled after Gordon Gekko from the film Wall Street (1987)—his motto was "Greed is good"—and Lex Luthor in 1978's Superman, starring the late Christopher Reeves. Kristen Wiig plays Barbara Ann Minerva, a gemologist who eventually evolves into Diana's arch-nemesis Cheetah. And Chris Pine is back from the dead as Diana's lost love, Steve Trevor (more on that later).

 

The film opens by bringing us back to Diana's childhood in Themyscira, when a young Diana (Lilly Aspell) competes in a grueling Amazonian athletic tournament. Diana does remarkably well for her tender years, but a momentary loss of focus results in her being unhorsed and missing a stage of the race. Desperate to win, she takes "the shorter path" to catch up, and is disqualified for cheating. It was a tough lesson for Diana to learn—"You cannot be the winner because you are not ready to win," her mother, Queen Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen) tells her—and one that will resonate throughout the rest of the film.

 

Flash forward to 1984, where an older, much less naive Diana is working as a cultural anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, by day, and fighting crime as Wonder Woman by night. She foils a robbery attempt of a jewelry store in a local mall, which turns out to be a front for smuggling priceless artifacts. She and Barbara, a fellow Smithsonian employee, are tasked with analyzing and cataloguing the recovered artifacts. Among them is something that appears to be a cheap knockoff trinket made of citrine quartz, that turns out to be something much more powerful—and dangerous.

 

(WARNING: A couple of major spoilers below. Don't read further if you've yet to watch the film.)

 

The artifact turns out to be a magical Dreamstone, created by an unnamed god of treachery and mischief, and it grants one's dearest wish. Unaware of the Dreamstone's true power, the lonely, isolated Diana longs for the return of Steve Trevor, while the mousy Barbara idolizes Diana and wishes to be just as strong and special as she is. Both wishes are granted: Steve's soul takes over another man's body (Kristoffer Polaha), reuniting our star-crossed lovers, and Barbara becomes stronger and more confident, and with more stylish sex appeal.

 

But like the proverbial monkey's paw, those gifts come at great cost: the stone grants your wish and takes what you value most. For Diana, it is her demigod powers. She becomes progressively weaker as the film progresses, even as Barbara becomes stronger, while losing her warmth and humanity.

Make a wish

Of course, Max Lord gets hold of the Dreamstone, and makes a wish to become the embodiment of it, investing himself with the power to grant wishes. This is where some the aforementioned incoherent plot elements come into play. Everyone only gets one wish, except Lord is able to manipulate others into making wishes and extracting whatever he wants from them in return. He has to be physically touching them, but finds a loophole around that, too, so he can grant wishes via satellite TV—something about the "particles" that convey the information in the broadcast "touching" everything makes it work. I'm not a stickler for textbook physics in superhero films by any means, but these elements should at least be internally consistent. A willing suspension of disbelief can only take you so far, even for a plot that revolves entirely on an wish-granting magic stone.

 

The same goes for the new superpowers Diana mysteriously develops. For instance, before her powers wane, she's able to concentrate really, really hard and make the plane she and Steve commandeer invisible, both to the human eye and to radar. Yes, it's Wonder Woman's trademark invisible plane! Diana is apparently able to, I dunno, create a magical cloaking metamaterial with a negative index of refraction. It's actually never explained, which is probably for the best, but it still makes little sense. And while she's always been capable of gravity-defying leaps, by film's end, she's learned to fly like Superman, thanks to a brief conversation with Steve about how he thinks and feels when he's flying planes.

 

That said, there's much to like about Wonder Woman 1984, even if an extended action sequence set in Egypt feels unnecessary and probably could have been cut entirely. The production and costume design are spectacular, and one could write an entire thesis on the contrast between Diana's and Barbara's changing looks, as a reflection of their shifting power dynamics and fundamental natures. I also loved the comic scene where Steve is trying to pick out a suitable outfit—a callback to when Etta Candy (Lucy Davis) helped Diana do the same—and discovers parachute pants. It's a nice role reversal, where Steve becomes the fish out of water in Diana's new world.

 

Their relationship (and the stars' onscreen chemistry) remains the heart of the film, and they make a good crime-fighting team, even though Diana must eventually accept that the cost of keeping Steve in her life is simply too great. Pedro Pascal imbues Max Lord with a vulnerability that makes his overweening desire for more—money, power, fame, influence—almost tragic; his wish drains him of health and vitality, and also threatens his young son. As for Wiig, she starts out playing a version of her scattered, insecure Bridesmaids/Ghostbusters characters, but gets the chance to stretch her range as Barbara slowly transforms into Cheetah, fueled by a crippling inferiority complex, and bitter resentment of Diana for the latter's perceived patronizing manner.

 

Ultimately, Jenkins seems to be trying to make a profound statement about 1980s-style greed—we want what we want, and damn the consequences—and how everything has a price; how our power must be earned, not magically granted; and how we must have courage to face hard truths, because "nothing good is born from lies." But despite hammering those various points home with all the subtlety of a pile driver, her message ends up as muddled as the plot. And that's too bad, because it's the sort of timeless wisdom we could all stand to be reminded of in these troubled times.

 

Wonder Woman 1984 is now streaming on HBO Max and playing in select theaters.

 

The path to greatness is not what you think. See young Diana in action in the opening scene of Wonder Woman 1984.

 

 

Source: Wonder Woman 1984 is fun, but doesn’t quite capture magic of its predecessor

 

 

[Nuclear Fallout]

I agree, the predecessor WAS better!

[csmdew]

Half to agree, scale of 1 to 10 she gets 3 from me; stupid storyline.

[funkyy]

Yep guys, it was a big disappointment, especially considering that the first one was really

entertaining. I stopped watching after about 45 minutes it was so baaaad!!

[mood]

Here's why Wonder Woman 1984 is disappointing

Opinion: The latest DC superhero movie is too long and too dull

 

Warning: Spoilers for Wonder Woman 1984 follow.

 

Wonder Woman 1984 has arrived at the end of a weird year for cinema. If you saw a blockbuster on the big screen after March 2020, you're pretty much in the minority; the pandemic hit the industry incredibly hard, from the way movies are made to how they're seen. But after a messy 12 months, having an all-new DC Comics adaptation drop on HBO Max in the US and hit the big screen elsewhere should've marked a pleasant end to 2020.

 

It doesn't feel like the release has been a slam dunk, though. A few outlets have covered what's perceived to be a negative or at least mixed fan reaction to the film – something I find impossible to measure when the angriest voices are always amplified around big pop culture moments. I agree with the overall sentiment that the film is disappointing, though. But I think this is only partly the movie's fault – timing is a factor here, too.

 

Wonder Woman 1984 sees Diana (Gal Gadot) living an undercover life decades after the end of World War I. She still grieves for Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), but has a nice career working as an anthropologist, and beats up criminal jerks in her spare time. She befriends Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), a nice but insecure colleague who wants to be more like Diana. Soon, the two happen across a mythical, self-explanatory object called the Dreamstone – which gives Barbara a newly found desirable status (largely by changing her outfit and removing her glasses) and super strength, though clearly at some kind of moral cost. 

 

Diana's unconscious wish, meanwhile, is that Steve Trevor comes back from the dead – and it works, though he occupies a different body now. The Dreamstone also attracts the attention of TV personality and struggling oil baron Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), who has his own world-altering plans for the artefact. 

 

Compared to the original Wonder Woman – an imperfect film that ably took Diana out of the sheltered life of Themyscira in order to intervene in The Great War – this is a surprisingly throwaway follow-up. It has one thing to say: be careful what you wish for. And it makes this point over and again, in such obvious ways, that it feels weirdly naïve and outdated, and perhaps targets the film at a younger audience than the original. 

 

The problem is, the film is not fun enough overall to make up for this. Wonder Woman 1984 is a painful 151 minutes long – and it really feels it, despite a few neat set pieces breaking all of that up. The last hour of this film is hard work. Despite committed performances from Pedro Pascal and Kristen Wiig – as Maxwell Lord and Cheetah, respectively – the movie's two villains are frustrating for different reasons.

 

Even the movie's best part – Steve being a fish out of water in the '80s, and reuniting with Diana – doesn't get to be fun for more than a few minutes of this very long runtime.

 

Here, I'll dig in to why I found Wonder Woman 1984 to be disappointing, even if I did like parts of the movie.

 

 (Image credit: Warner Bros. Entertainment)

A film made for a different time?

(Image credit: Warner Bros)

 

I found Wonder Woman 1984's overall message – of being careful what you wish for and trusting in people to ultimately do the right thing – to be particularly jarring this year. It's simplistic in a way that goes against the current of the times we live in, with
a brainless optimism that feels jarring.

 

I found Diana's vague superhero ideology of hopefulness kind of frustrating here, too, and I wonder if the filmmakers truly have an idea of what sets her apart from, say, Superman, other than the fact she's Amazonian. 

 

Still, I can't help feeling like Wonder Woman 1984's tone would've seemed less annoying in a normal year where it would be sandwiched between many other blockbusters. This wouldn't make it a good superhero movie, but being the only game in town right now puts an extra burden on it to impress – particularly when it's being used to prop up a confusingly branded (but pretty good) US streaming service.

 

Again, I don't think I'd have cared about Wonder Woman 1984 feeling outdated or simplistic in normal times, but coming in below expectations seems like a bigger deal when every other blockbuster movie is currently on ice. 

 

This film also has a bit of a setting problem. The '80s backdrop offers some fun color in terms of fashion and cultural reference points for the first hour, but the rest of the movie does little with it, save for using the Cold War as the basis of some third act nuclear war drama.

 

There's no set piece that comes close to the power of the No Man's Land scene in the 2017 original, either, though that was always going to be hard to top. Steve and Diana flying through 4th of July fireworks is a genuinely nice and romantic moment, though.

Why is this film so long?

 

Unless your superhero movie is a character-stuffed team-up picture like Avengers: Endgame – which I still think is a bit too lengthy – please don't make it more than two hours long. I reached the 90-minute mark in this film and I really wanted it to be over. 

 

I have no idea why Wonder Woman 1984 needed to be 151 minutes in length, and it's interesting to read that Warner Bros wanted director Patty Jenkins to cut one of the movie's two intro set pieces – one an overly long Amazonian Olympics sequence, the other a nicely-executed mall fight that gives us our first glimpse of Diana as a vigilante in 1984. 

 

Both do set up story and character threads that are to pay off later, but the Olympics sequence was way too protracted, not very interesting to watch, and felt like it mainly existed to remind us of the cool Amazonian characters we met in the first film – Antiope (Robin Wright) and Hippolyta (Connie Nielsen). 

 

Still, the first hour of this film isn't so bad. Still, as mentioned, once Chris Pine's Steve Trevor is back in the frame, you don't quite get enough of his and Diana's status quo in this new world – the idea that Diana is physically weakened by Steve's resurrection is an interesting notion, though, and it definitely lands when the two inevitably have to say goodbye to each other later on. 

 

The villains chew up too much of the running time for me. I didn't quite get what the filmmakers were going for with Maxwell Lord – a classic '80s excess guy who's all style and no substance, I guess, with a kind of vague layer of Trump. But I found Lord's scenes very hard to watch, despite appreciating how much Pascal throws himself into it. There's nothing sympathetic about him other than the fact he has a son, and he spends a bunch of the film sweating in front of powerful men, vowing to make their dreams come true. He's just not very entertaining to watch, and the movie's twist that he becomes the Dreamstone after wishing for it is conceptually confusing. 

 

I almost wish they recreated this fairly famous and controversial comic book moment, where Diana snapped Lord's neck. It was extremely contentious, but more dramatically satisfying than anything that happens in this film:

In the comics, the conflict between Wonder Woman and Maxwell Lord ends with her snapping his neck. (I wholeheartedly support this, fight me.)So, here's my question: Do you think Diana will snap his neck in WW84? pic.twitter.com/OMUFJSL2qSSeptember 5, 2020

Again, the movie would rather have us believe in the power of people making sensible decisions and being good at their core – this did nothing for me. When we met Diana in Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice, she was slicing bits off of the apocalyptic mutant Doomsday. Here, she's a much more passive figure, and I think the film is a bit too afraid to let her get her hands dirty. I wonder if this is an overreaction to the criticism that these superhero films were getting a bit too dark. 

 

Likewise, the movie waits a long, long time for Kristen Wiig's Cheetah to actually become a full-blown villain – and parts of their final encounter were already spoiled by the trailers. Barbara's obsession with protecting how she looks and how she's perceived is ultimately why she turns on Diana, but it surfaces too late into the film to have any emotional impact.

 

Like many other people, too, I'm over superhero movies doing this with their villains:

This is the weirdest, most specific comic book movie trope.#WW84 pic.twitter.com/CTLhZc67SADecember 27, 2020

Who is Diana, actually?

 (Image credit: Warner Bros/DC Entertainment)

 

Other than pining for Steve Trevor and having a career as an anthropologist, you don't get much of a sense of Diana having an inner life in this film. He's been dead for almost 70 years, and sure, her heart was broken, but that's a hell of a long time for a mythical superhero to accumulate some real-life experiences in the human world. It just feels like no time has passed between the two movies.

 

They could've done a little better by her – and, by extension, the other characters in the film. Diana's initial, supportive friendship with Barbara Minerva is actually pretty nice in terms of character development, and not something I feel like I see in these kinds of films so much, but after Steve returns from the dead, the film doesn't draw that much attention to their relationship. This meant I didn't really care when Barbara became Cheetah and inevitably fought with Diana much deeper into the film. I had no investment in it. 

 

I'm wary of not holding Wonder Woman to a higher standard than some of the more throwaway Marvel movies, which also aren't always that preoccupied with characterization or even having a meaningful theme (hey, Ant-Man and the Wasp!). 

 

I think my disappointment here stems from how confident that first Wonder Woman film was, in how it treated Diana as a morally switched-on outsider in a war-stricken human world. In Wonder Woman 1984, they don't find a way to make the character resonate in the modern age. What is her whole deal? Does she just save kids in malls now? 

 

Again, the vague optimism running through the heart of this movie just didn't do much for me – though it's still, by default, one of the better films of the DC Extended Universe so far. 

Wonder Woman 1984 is streaming now on HBO Max in the US, and has been released theatrically everywhere else.

 

Source: Here's why Wonder Woman 1984 is disappointing

[mood]

Original Content podcast: ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ might be a beautiful mess, or maybe just a mess

 

Image Credits: Warner Bros.

 

“Wonder Woman 1984” was released on HBO  Max on Christmas Day, where it quickly divided the hosts of the Original Content podcast.

 

Perhaps it was predictable that Anthony — a fan of clunky-but-ambitious superhero sequels like “The Dark Knight Rises” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron” — enjoyed the film. Darrell, meanwhile, took the side of most critics, who found the movie exasperating and even, at times, mystifyingly bad.

 

The biggest surprise was Jordan, who disliked the first “Wonder Woman” and actually preferred the sequel, thanks in large part to Kristen Wiig’s portrayal of the villainous Cheetah.

 

Everyone agreed that there were plenty of problems, including some slipshod and confusing plotting, as well as a portrayal of Wonder Woman that’s defined entirely by her longing for Steve Trevor, the Chris Pine character who died at the end of the first film but returns here under mysterious circumstances.

 

But where Anthony found the overall arc of the film — rewriting the melancholy love story of “Superman II” as a parable about capitalism and climate change — and its big emotional moments to be surprisingly affecting, Darrell thought the entire final act was ludicrous, with some of the worst CGI ever seen in a big-budget film.

 

In addition to debating the merits of “Wonder Woman 1984,” we also discuss our top streaming picks from the past year.

 

You can listen to our review in the player below, subscribe using Apple Podcasts or find us in your podcast player of choice. If you like the show, please let us know by leaving a review on Apple. You can also follow us on Twitter or send us feedback directly. (Or suggest shows and movies for us to review!)

 

If you’d like to skip ahead, here’s how the episode breaks down:
0:00 Introduction
0:35 Best of the year discussion
16:23 “Wonder Woman 1984” review
30:05 “Wonder Woman 1984” spoiler discussion

 

Source:  Original Content podcast: ‘Wonder Woman 1984’ might be a beautiful mess, or maybe just a mess

[mood]

Wonder Woman 1984 nosedives in second box office weekend

The sequel starring Gal Gadot wasn't as big of a moneymaker as the original film. But are closed theaters, HBO Max or disappointed fans to blame?

 

Clay Enos/Warner Bros. Pictures

Even Gal Gadot couldn't save the new movie Wonder Woman 1984.

 

Fans excited to see Wonder Woman in action again in the movie Wonder Woman 1984 -- starring Gal Gadot and directed by Patty Jenkins -- apparently weren't willing to pay for it. The new movie, which debuted on Dec. 25, dropped 67 percent for its second weekend in domestic US theaters. The film's opening weekend hit $36.1 million, with the worldwide total at $118.5 million so far. 

 

The large drop in Wonder Woman grosses could be attributed to a number of factors including theaters being closed due to the pandemic; fans watching the movie on HBO Max (at no extra charge for its subscribers); and the movie getting not-so-stellar reviews from fans sharing their opinions on social media.

 

The dip in movie profits could also be attributed to Wonder Woman 1984's release date. The movie was originally set for June 2020, then August, then October, and then finally in December on Christmas Day. Most comic book movies don't open on Christmas Day. 

 

It's also not clear how much HBO Max had on the impact on the movie's final gross. Fans who couldn't see Wonder Woman 1984 in theaters due to pandemic concerns, tuned into the movie on HBO Max. If they were already subscribers, they got to see Wonder Woman at no extra charge.

 

And then there are the critics' and fans' ratings. Wonder Woman 1984's Rotten Tomatoes rating is 61 percent from critics and 74 percent from fans. 

 

This is a lot lower than the original 2017 Wonder Woman film, which has a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 93 percent from critics and 84 percent from fans. This is unexpected considering the critics' first reactions to Wonder Woman 1984 were positive.

 

Not only that, fans took to social media on the movie's release date to express disappointment in Wonder Woman 1984. That negative word of mouth could also have contributed to the movie's less than stellar box office performance.

Regardless, this news of the plummeting drop in numbers of its second weekend isn't good news for DC Comics or Warner Bros. Time will tell if other movies will suffer the same fate for same day streaming on services like HBO Max.

 

 

Source: Wonder Woman 1984 nosedives in second box office weekend