I'm gonna be honest here. Wonder Woman 1984 wasn't great, as a matter of fact, it was probably my biggest disappointment of 2020. There were a lot of neat ideas here, but it just felt like a massive waste of potential.
WW1984's plot feels simultaneously convoluted and overly simple at the same time. The premise is technically just about a wish stone that Diana (Wonder Woman), her friend Barbara, and businessman Max Lord uses. However, each wish also takes away their most valuable things, so Diana wishes for her dead boyfriend Steve back only to lose her powers, and Barbara wishes to be like Diana only to lose her kind heart and humanity. I don't necessarily hate this storyline, but coming after the first movie essentially being a World War II epic, this movie just doesn't feel like a sequel. It's too small scale and goofy, the tonal inconsistency is just ridiculous. In addition, the wish stone storyline is just poorly handled. The entire storyline feels like it's built around this simple McGuffin, and once Max Lord becomes the stone, the sheer amount of wishes to keep track of is just overwhelming. Diana is never actually shown making a wish so when Steve appears, it feels confusing, and that's not to mention the awful implications of Steve taking over another person's body only to promptly make out with Wonder Woman. How did neither of them realize how gross that is?!
The pacing might be even worse. The movie starts with an overlong sequence at Wonder Woman's home island, but after that, there's no action until over an hour into the film. WW1984 is 2 and a half hours long, but it never feels like it earns that runtime. Frankly, this story doesn't even feel like it deserves a feature-length to begin with, let alone 2.5 hours. I don't think the movie is irredeemable, however, and decreasing the length to tighten up the pacing can already be a massive help. Even more, I think the acting is pretty great across the board, though I'm not sure how to feel about Pedro Pascal hamming it up as Max Lord. The villains were generally the better characters due to having the most depth of the cast, but even they just felt cliche. Barbara was well-acted by Kristen Wiig, but she's still just the "ugly" nerd who runs into a superhero, and Max Lord is your usual gross billionaire figure. The action scenes were also solid, though not as frequent or as good as in the first movie. I thought the car chase in Egypt and the White House fight were both great, mostly because Wonder Woman losing her powers meant she was actually in danger of dying which added tension. The final battle was pretty underwhelming, though, but at least it didn't undermine the themes of the film like in the original. I also really liked Hans Zimmer's score which was the one thing that I thought improved compared to the first film.
The worst part about WW1984 to me, however, is just how much potential it had. There are so many things that could've been really cool if it was just explored or well executed. For example:
- The movie having Wonder Woman lose her powers was a really good idea, but it didn't last for very long.
- Wonder Woman gained some new abilities like turning a plane invisible and flying, but they appeared out of nowhere rather than feeling earned.
- Similarly, Wonder Woman's golden armor also appears out of nowhere when it could have easily been set-up in the opening, and is rarely used for the fight anyway.
- The opening also sets up a theme about lying, but that theme never comes up for most of the film.
- Cheetah only appears in the final act of the film, and after Barbara makes a second wish about becoming an apex predator (that line made me laugh). Not only does this not make sense at all, but why couldn't they just have Barbara literally lose her humanity from that first wish? It makes so much more sense!
- Worst of all, even though the movie is set at 1984, it feels like they do nothing with the time period. Most of the film feels like it could be set at the current era with nothing changing. It doesn't even have the bombardment of superficial references that other 80s nostalgia trips like Bumblebee and Stranger Things have.
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