Wonder Woman '84 has probably been the most longly anticipated superhero movie this year, seriously we’ve been waiting for it to come out since July and it kept getting delayed by COVID. Anyways it’s out now and we should clap our Amazonian bracelets in rejoice! This is the second installment in the Wonder Woman franchise and is the most recent entry in the DCEU. The last Wonder Woman film was a spectacular film that we all loved and it was the perfect homecoming for our favorite feminist icon. The bar was set high for the next installment. Was Wonder Woman '84 totally rad or do is it as played out as Members Only jackets and our neon leg warmers.
As the '84 in the title implies, the film takes place in 1984, 60 plus years since the first year. Diana has adjusted to life in man’s world and is just as comfortable as the huge puffy 80s pants suits with huge shoulder pads she wears in the film. Early in the film Diana stops a heist which leads to a discovery of a magical stone that can grant wishes, at a price. Diana, still grieving over the loss of Steve Trevor in the first movie, wishes him to come back from the dead, which explains why Chris Pines is in the movie. We also meet one of the antagonist isn’t much of an antagonist in the film, but later turns into one as Barbara Minerva who is a nerdy awkward woman who never came into her looks and wishes to become like Diana and becoming a nerd girl turn hot trope. The main antagonist of the film, Maxwell Lord, is a con man who made a lot of promises who never came true and is basically pre-politics Donald Trump meets Ed McMahon with even a sting of cheesy commercials promising he can make dreams come true. As you can guess it he has been looking for the dream stone and later on wishes for its powers, becoming a human monkey paw in his quest for greed and power. Now it’s up to Diana and Steve to track down Lord and stop him before he sends the world into mayhem.
The first film was basically an hour and a half ad for hope using one of the darkest periods of our world history, World War I, to inspire us all. Wonder Woman '84? Kinda. There is a message there folks and it does hit you around the end, using the 80s as the quintessential them for greed and lust for power and the theme of the movie being the antithesis of that, not sacrificing your humanity for those things, which corrupts us all and can lead to a metaphorical mayhem, unlike the movie which had a literal mayhem as the world was close to an nuclear apocalypse. The message wasn’t consistent throughout the whole movie like the first movie which did beat you upside the head with it every moment in a good way, like BDSM. This time around it did a weird thing where it came full circle with young Diana at the Amazon Olympics in the beginning and it resurfacing around the end of the second arc, setting up the third arc and climax. Not well crafted but not an overall mess. What was good was that we got more Diana/Steve which was the height of the first film. Gal Gadot and Chris Pine have great chemistry. This is flipped as it is Diana who is the world (decade) expert as Steve is the new naïveté in the wonders of the 80s, you know with the being dead for 60+ years. You can pretty much describe the film as the further adventures of Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor, which could be a better title? The action scenes, while scaled back a bit for story, are still good. Not first film good but pretty ok. What was surprising was Kristen Wiig’s performance as Barbara Minerva a.k.a The Cheetah. We are used to seeing Wiig making us laugh in comedic roles and SNL, but she played the good girl gone bad villain well. Pedro Pascal’s Maxwell Lord was pretty solid. He played the cliche villain that’s doing all the bad stuff for good that we see in almost superhero film and tv show, but it didn’t feel sappy and over-dramatized as it usually is.
So, does it suck? Not so much. While it was not as inspirational, impacting, or not as actioney as the first film it does set you on an adventure. Focused too much on story and plot, but entertaining. Most sequels try to go bigger than their first predecessors, the point that seems to be forgotten that they sometimes just have to be merely continuations and while, again, it didn’t delivered as much as the first film it still had its fun and entertaining parts. A pretty solid film that holds together. I’d give it 3 thank god they didn’t CGI Kristen Wiig as bad as CATS out of 5.
What are your thoughts?
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