“Wonder Woman” (2017) was one of the best superhero films ever made. It was idealistic, classy, aesthetically pleasing, and romantic, and should have kicked off a fabulous franchise. Unfortunately, “Wonder Woman 1984,” also directed by Patty Jenkins, is a major letdown. Hollywood should have immediately expunged it from the record and gone back to the drawing board.
What Goes On
This time around, Diana Prince, the Amazon princess, aka Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), deals exclusively (well, aside from a few anonymous good deeds like drop kicking a would-be park rapist) with two villains.
Mainly she goes up against the greedy, megalomaniacal tycoon Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), who gets hold of a magical museum rock that’s just like Aladdin’s lamp and grants wishes.
Diana the Amazon multitasks dealing with all that while also suddenly having her old boyfriend, World War I pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) return from the dead. He incarnates into the body of another man. How’s that work anyway, like, “Hey guy, mind if I take that bod for a spin? I need to talk to my ex.”
Whatever. It’s not the film’s weakest point, but the fact that Steve and his superhero girlfriend are OK with this setup is mildly disturbing throughout the film. It does allow Chris Pine to switch roles with Gadot, giving him a chance to play fish out of water and be amazed at modern-day jets, elevators, and parachute pants. Also, having it explained to him that everything in a modern art gallery is art, he hilariously mistakes an actual trash can as art.
The Decent Stuff
The film opens with a sort of Amazon Olympics set in the fabled Amazon land of Themyscira, where the young girl Diana (Lilly Aspell), half the height of her strapping women competitors, rides horses, shoots bows and arrows, jumps around on a brass jungle gym obstacle course—and nearly wins. Except she cheats and gets a good-cop, bad-cop lesson in being truthful and fair from her über-Amazon aunt (Robin Wright) and her queen-of-the-Amazons mother (Connie Nielsen).
The Bad Stuff
I already said all of it. Actually, one of the things that made the first WW movie work so well was its comedic-fruit-bearing premise: Diana ended up as a fish out of water in old-school patriarchal Europe after growing up on a powerfully matriarchal Amazonian island. And the 1918 couture, architecture, and cultural demeanor was suited to Gadot’s classic looks and therefore more aesthetically pleasing.“Wonder Woman 1984” finds Diana in Washington, D.C., in ’84—not what you’d call a cultural high point in world history. It’s the era of the bandana headbands, Jane Fonda workout tapes, popped collars, pushed-up sleeves on shoulder-padded pastel sports jackets, New Wave-i-ness, Izod-and-docksider preppiness in the colleges, stonewashed jeans, perms, and giant hair for the New Jersey “Bridge-and-Tunnel” crowd, Devo, mohawks, mullets, leg warmers, and fanny packs. Not even Wonder Woman can look good in that world.
While I appreciated that the main reason of the 1984 setting was to teach about that particular 1980s zeitgeist—rampant materialism and having it all—eventually “Wonder Woman 1994” one the impression that returning director Jenkins said all that she had to say on the WW topic in the original.
