Oh I got a wish
Wonder Woman 1984 (2020): 3 out of 10: It has taken me far too long to write this review. Some movies are difficult to review because you love them so much that everything comes out as “It’s brilliant. Go see it.” I can struggle to find something useful to say about Goodfellas or RoboCop beyond pointing enthusiastically at the screen. Wonder Woman 1984 presents a unique challenge. It has a fatal flaw, so thoroughly fatal that it overwhelms everything else I might want to discuss. There is an entire movie surrounding this problem. I remember occasionally trying to watch it.
The story finds Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) working at the Smithsonian in 1984, quietly performing superhero duties while still mourning Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) after like seventy years, which is a whole other conversation. A mysterious artifact offers the opportunity to grant wishes, which attracts the attention of an ambitious businessman, Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), and Diana’s insecure colleague, Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig).
Naturally, these wishes come with Monkey’s Paw-style consequences. It is the sort of premise I would expect from a children’s movie involving Merlin and a kid whose parents are getting divorced. Here, it is expected to support a major superhero sequel.
Now, there are films I viscerally dislike because something happens that loses me completely. Alien 3 manages this before most people have finished arranging their snacks, although enough time has passed that I am willing to give it another chance. The Butterfly Effect has the puppy scene and the baby scene. If you have seen it, you know. Then there is the final act of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which sends you out of the theater carrying a torch and looking for whoever can authorize a refund.
The problem with Wonder Woman 1984 works differently. A thought wanders into your head fairly early, pulls up a chair, and refuses to leave. You eventually look online because surely somebody else noticed this. Somebody did. Lots of somebodies did. Before long, you have joined a mob whose principal demand is an explanation of what the hell everyone involved was thinking.
But before we get to that, there are other problems. Let us browse.
The eighties nostalgia is actually less irritating than I expected. I grew up in the eighties. I do not require every object I once owned to be paraded past me for applause. Stranger Things, a show theoretically assembled from things I enjoy, sometimes pushes those buttons so insistently that I want to unplug the machine. Wonder Woman 1984 is less overwhelming in that department. Unfortunately, I never found a compelling reason for it to take place in 1984. The year seems to have been selected because the wardrobe department had some ideas.
Pedro Pascal is entertaining as Maxwell Lord. I love Pedro Pascal. The problem is that this apparent Trump-style figure becomes a little too sympathetic and emotionally complicated for the surrounding film’s broad treatment of villainy. He seems to have wandered in prepared to play an actual person. More awkwardly, I spent a considerable portion of the movie thinking that our designated bad guy was no worse than the woman whose name is on the poster. We will get there.
And no, Gal Gadot’s acting is not my central complaint. I was not originally on the “Gal Gadot cannot act” train. I subsequently boarded the boat after watching Death on the Nile, where I found myself thinking, “Oh my God. Perhaps everyone was right.” Before that, I generally considered her serviceable. Yes, even in Red Notice. She could look glamorous, deliver the dialogue, and get through the scene. That was usually enough. Here, she sometimes has the charisma of a slightly irritated barista who has already explained that they are out of oat milk.
Barbara’s progression from comic relief friend to Cheetah is another thing the screenplay apparently considers adequately motivated because this is a comic book movie and eventually somebody needs claws. Meanwhile, Steve Trevor graduates from flying First World War biplanes to operating a jet fighter with remarkable confidence. I would give someone who spent a weekend with Microsoft Flight Simulator better odds of locating the correct switches. Fortunately, the Smithsonian apparently keeps fully fueled military aircraft out back for precisely this sort of emergency. (I mean, this is the type of thing you would expect in a Transformers film, not a DC tent pole.) It has the security procedures of a neighborhood bicycle rack.
Then Diana makes the plane invisible. There is an explanation in the sense that words are spoken before the thing happens. Rarely has a deus ex machina worked so hard to provide transportation.
The action is not good enough to distract from any of this, either. The opening athletic spectacle takes far too long to deliver its lesson about honesty, the conclusion is a muddle, and the stretch between them feels longer than it should. I liked the first Wonder Woman until Ares showed up for the obligatory third-act nonsense. I enjoyed spending time with that movie. I did not enjoy spending time with this one. I considered rewatching it for this review and found myself unwilling. You should see some of the things I have willingly rewatched for reviews. This is not a high bar.
All right. The elephant in the room.
Diana wishes Steve back into her life. Instead of simply returning Steve to existence, the movie puts him inside another man’s body. An actual person. Someone with a home, a job, and presumably people who might wonder why he has suddenly stopped answering the telephone. Diana sees Chris Pine. Everyone else sees the man whose life has just been commandeered.
Diana and Steve then resume their romance, including having sex, using this stranger’s body.
There is a rather substantial consent problem here. Anyone who has read my reviews knows I am hardly one to harp on things like problematic and consent. I mean, I grew up on eighties teen comedies.
There is also the much more relevant matter of his entire existence. Is anyone calling his employer? Paying his bills? Returning his mother’s calls? Does he have a girlfriend? Is she wondering why he has disappeared, or is she about to discover that he has been seen running around with a stunning woman who works at the Smithsonian? The poor bastard could return to consciousness unemployed, single, and facing eviction. That is quite a price to pay for not being Chris Pine.
Now, this could be the basis of a disturbing story. Diana’s grief has made her selfish. She has accepted something monstrous because it gives her back the person she loves.(You know every Scarlet Witch plot). A film could examine that. You wait for the moment when either of these supposedly decent people asks, “What the hell are we doing to this man?”
The moment never properly comes. The movie recognizes that Diana must give up Steve, but its emotional attention remains on her sacrifice. It never meaningfully confronts what they have already done to the person whose body they borrowed. He is treated as a convenient container for her boyfriend. She has effectively been issued a Chris Pine blow-up doll, except there is a human being trapped inside the purchase.
And here is the part that makes me want to bang my head against the coffee table: there is no reason to do this.
It is a wishing stone. Bring Steve back. His own face, his own body, his own trousers. The screenplay establishes the rules of this magical object and could easily have chosen that one. The emotional dilemma would still work. Diana would still have to decide whether to surrender the man she loves. Instead, someone introduced an innocent bystander whose bodily autonomy becomes collateral damage in a superhero romance, and then apparently nobody asked a follow-up question.
It is one of the most bizarre own goals I have seen in a mainstream film. Completely avoidable, profoundly distracting, and corrosive enough to make its heroine look worse with every scene in which she fails to consider it.
Without this problem, Wonder Woman 1984 would still be an overlong, poorly directed film with a horrible screenplay and disappointing action scenes and honestly some sketchy CGI.. Chris Pine deserves credit for remaining charming through the silliness, and Pedro Pascal gives the impression that he has found a more interesting movie somewhere inside the script. The two women fare considerably worse, although I am not convinced anyone could have made these character arcs work under the circumstances.
With the problem, it becomes a film about wishes that leaves me wishing someone had read the screenplay a second time. Three out of ten, and a strong contender for “What the hell did I just watch?” of the year.
RiffTrax Version
RiffTrax Presents: Wonder Woman 1984 (2021): 6 out of 10: In theory we should be in for a treat. Bridget Jones and Mary Jo Pehl are two of my favorite riffers and this film is right up their alley. But Wonder Woman 84 is a bloated two and a half hours and even with the ladies’ commentary, I was noping out before the two-hour mark.
If I had a criticism, I just think that this is a film that required a bit more meanness, for lack of a better word. Their criticism and riffs are more observational than sharp. Ironically, I think this is one the boys might have done better with the gloves off.
Wonder Woman 84 deserves the kind of scorn usually reserved for Transformers 2 or a Twilight film. This is a Crystal Skull level miscalculation. It deserves the kind of commentary that Crystal Skull got.
