The revived Wonder Woman franchise, now in the form of a sequel to the quite wonderful 2017 hit, deserves a lot better than this endless, dizzying, incomprehensible mess of a movie, WW84.
I love superhero movies, I loved the 2017 Wonder Woman movie, and I loved the Black Panther movie of 2018. I did not love WW84. Neither did Maria.
Twenty minutes into the movie, we turned to one another and said in unison: “This is so boring!”
We toughed it out. It never made sense, but it did move faster. And endlessly so.
I browsed the top-rated public review sites for the most chosen tags for the movie by moviegoers:
They were: boring, over-hyped, forgettable, corny, cringe-worthy, and overrated. These were the generous ones.
Poor Wonder Woman, a feminist pacifist pining for love, she was done in by a movie completely unworthy of her or the idea of her.
In this movie, the enemy – appropriately enough – is greed and dishonesty, not warped monsters with evil technology.
I saw the ghost of Donald Trump everywhere, in the plot, the site, the rapacious and self-serving money-grubbing, the havoc it is so easy to wreak on a democracy.
Wonder Woman 2017 tapped into MeToo and the rise of the empowered woman in America. In a way, the sequel tapped into our dysfunctional and sadly divided notions of right and wrong and the public good.
That movie seemed to have no idea what it’s about. I suppose it could be about America in the Time Of Trump. I can’t really say for sure.
The movie’s first scene was appropriate for a film set in the Greed Decade: it was a mall.
The film is set in Washington, D.C., and in many ways, our wondrous woman is the anti-Washington public figure – she is honest, generous, and empathetic, even to her enemies.
She is passionate about the truth.
Wonder Woman’s origin story was clear and simple: Diana left her home on the Amazon hideaway of Themyscira to stop a war engineered by a god who fed on the senseless destruction that wrecked.
The moral dilemma was always that she fights to keep people from fighting.
The movie is bright and colorful, sometimes gorgeous, as one critic said it “radiates bright, retina-sizzling neons and pastels.”
The director forgot to add a coherent narrative or a star with more than one dimension: being nice.
Some of the best superhero movies are cartoonish.
When it comes to enemies and villains, more is less. Pick an evil one and stick with him or her. Give them almost as much screen time as our hero. Have them stand in clear moral opposition to the hero, and move the story quickly and violently forward.
But this superhero movie chokes nearly to death on clunky cliches, ridiculous storylines, inane dialogue, and political correctness that has forgotten what it is politically correct about.
The hapless geeky Barbara Minerva (Kristin Wiig) and the shockingly unintimidating or charismatic Maxwell Lord (she’s pretty good, he is a cringe-worthy disaster) drag the movie down and throw off its pace and focus.
Every person of color in the film is heroic, sweet, or a boss; every white man but one is a shallow caricature in stupidity, cruelty, and sexual harassment.
The villain is an obvious incarnation of Trump; he is greedy, incompetent, and nearly destroys the world.
Is this really what we want to teach our daughters: all people of color good, all people who are white men are bad and need a savage whupping? No wonder Trump got so many votes.
Max Lord, our villain, cares nothing for the people he harms and the things he destroys. That is the minimum required of superhero villains.
But the awful thing about him as presented in the movie, his real crime, is not that he is ruining the world; it’s that he is a bad dad.
The standard mystical and lost artifact shows up to give the bad guy a way of seeking world domination and the sweet and shy girl to suddenly morph into a sexy and vicious supervillain.
Superhero gibberish and an ancient map reveals the true secret of the artifact and threatens Diana’s powers.
Watching this movie, I thought of how skillfully and even subtly Black Panther became a historic movie of the times. It made its relevant social points thoughtfully, without hitting us over the head.
It knew what it was trying to do, and more importantly, we knew what it was trying to do. So did Wonder Woman 2017. The makers of this movie seemed to have no idea.
What does feminism mean in 2020, when more than half the women in the country voted for an avowed sexual predator to be their leader?
In WW84, a sexual predator is beaten nearly to death by a character he assaults. An important but harsh message in a movie about peace and justice.
This movie is a catastrophe in that it takes the key elements of a good superhero movie – heroes and villains, jokes and action, menace and heroism – and mashes them all together in a very long (2.5 hours) boiling soup, a goulash of different elements.
The movie is all wind-up and no pitch. It is literally all over the place, and the start is not strong enough to carry it that far by herself.
The film opens with an interminable kind of Amazonian Olympics, the stadium filled with beautiful female warriors, tight thighs and butts, and semi-naked athletes riding on gorgeous stallions. What is the message for women?
I was sorry to see a movie about Wonder Woman open with such a shallow stereotype – thousands of beautiful thin women in golden robes cheering their athletes on like Romans watching gladiators. I guess Amazons can’t be ugly, have curly hair, or even look different from all the others.
Like the rest of the movie, the opening scene is too long and ends up extolling the virtue of “truth,” a timely subject for America right now, but Georgia’s vote counters did it a lot better.
“Nothing is born from lies,” says Diana early on in the movie. “And greatness is not what you think.”
Duh.
Villain Max Lord: “Welcome to the future. Life is good, but it can be better. And why shouldn’t it be? All you need is to want it.”
Screenwriter Frank Mankiewicz, the true author of Citizen Kane, isn’t about to lose his legacy.
The first movie inspired us about strong women, just as Black Panther-inspired us about African-American history and pride. There was something thrilling about that movie. There is nothing thrilling about this one.
This movie gave me a sore butt from watching it for so long and squirming three-fourths of the time.
Gal Gadot was wonderful in her debut.
She did as well as she could in the sequel, given her appearing and disappearing boyfriend (a thread that makes no sense) and an idiotic and hysterical villain played by Pedro Pascal, miscast as a superhero world-destroyer.
It just felt like Gadot doesn’t have the range to carry a two-and-a-half-hour movie and keep an audience focused on it.
The best superhero villains have tortured souls whose souls wrestle with good and evil. They don’t beg their victims to respect them.
The movie dances around a pretty heavy moral hole and contradiction. Diana is presented as a Warrior for Peace, not war. She is passionately opposed to fighting, yet she kicks ass for more than half of the movie.
Diana’s identity (she was created to help the country fight the Nazi’s in World War II) symbolizes the capacity for violence while solving problems through compassion, empathy, and Truth, always Truth.
But the Truth about Diana shows us that women can be badasses too, afflicting brutal beatdowns on those who deserve them. She doesn’t get to solve problems in any other way, and she solves almost all of them with her magic yellow whip.
Mysteriously, and inexplicably, lost lover Chris Pine (Steve Trevor) shows up at a cocktail party, a moment that should have carried a lot of emotional punch but fell flat as bird droppings.
The two team up, of course, and decide to steal a super jet fighter to chase Lord to Cairo.
Pine, who is paralyzed at the sight of a subway train and escalator (he first died in 1940, for God’s sake, not in 1500), slips unchallenged and into the cockpit with Diana and learns how to fly the plane in three seconds.
As the aroused powers see the plane taking off on radar and start shooting, Wonder Woman squeezes her eyes as if she is straining on the toilet, and the plane becomes invisible.
Later on (much later on), as she’s getting beaten up all over the White House, she seems to have forgotten that trick.
I sensed right away that Steve might have to go again, another sacrifice for justice and an opportunity for Diana to get us to shed some tears for her. I didn’t shed one.
But I’m not telling you what happens. This was when I started thinking of WW84 as the War Of The Stupids.
Villain Maxwell Lord’s weapon was an ancient stone that turned its owner into a wish-maker.
His character Maxwell Lord (played by the embarrassingly miscast Pascal) – threatens the world by giving himself and everyone in it the ability to make their own wish while sobbing and whining about how much he loves his son, who he abandons at every turn.
The result is endless chaos and mayhem; it seems impossible the world can ever be put back together again—no need to fret (this is a superhero movie). But no plot is dumb or fuzzy enough to stump Director Patty Jenkins or force her to think about whether or not her movie is making any sense at all.
In fact, plotlines to her are like jumping stations for show horses; Jenkins just leaps over them as if they don’t exist. You can’t ever figure out where you really are, let alone how you got there or what the film is trying to say.
Enough, you get the idea.
You can see the movie in theaters and stream it on HBO Max. I really wouldn’t bother.
In its best moments, it was insipid and pretty, and if you go and see it at night, you’ll sleep like a baby.
Probably right in the theater or front of your screen or Iphone.