This spring and summer, many were speculating whether or not Wonder Woman 1984 could be the savior of movie theaters after the box office drought since March, caused by the pandemic. Before it was delayed from its August release, WW84 was shaping up to potentially be the first big blockbuster of the COVID-19 era. "Would it bring people back out to the theaters?" we all wondered. But Warner Bros. decided to pull the plug, pushing it back to October, and then again, to its current release date of Christmas Day. Frankly, it was a smart move on their part.
Smart because, not only were we clearly not in a public health position to be returning to theaters en masse to huddle in close proximity for 2-plus hours, but also... having now seen the film, it might have come up considerably short as the "savior of the cinema."
Wonder Woman 1984 is not a bad film. In fact, there's plenty to love. It's upbeat, colorful, goofy, and just generally optimistic about people and their potential for good. In times like these, a movie this big being that positive goes a long way. Additionally, Pedro Pascal characteristically lights the whole thing up as entrepreneurial villain Maxwell Lord, with a performance that's both cartoonishly gargantuan and endearingly sensitive.
Unfortunately, it also struggles with a heavy plate and a bit of an identity crisis. After 2016's Wonder Woman, a World War I film that spends its finale addressing concepts like humanity's inherent proclivity for violent conflict (albeit somewhat awkwardly), I wouldn't have pegged the WW series moving forward as the one to most closely resemble that era in '90s cinema wherein Arnold Schwarzenegger mostly made family films. In a lot of ways, WW84 is more similar to Jingle All the Way or The Last Action Hero than it is to Wonder Woman, or any of Diana Prince's other on-screen appearances in the current iteration.
The first proper "action" scene of the film comes after an extended and ultimately pointless flashback to Diana's youth, and it's the first real indication of this new and strange flavor for Wonder Woman. It's the 1980s, a stop-the-robbers sequence in a shopping mall that would feel right at home in one of the old Superman films. I know that sounds charming and fun, especially given Wonder Woman's history in campy television, but here, I found it mostly jarring. The acting and editing are ridiculously hammy and over-the-top, the wire work and fight choreography goofy and unconvincing. It's a bold choice after the much more Zack Snyder-flavored action of the first film (and it's kind of refreshing, in a way), but it's also about three minutes of uninterrupted and highly accelerated cheese and stupidity. This uneven shlockiness will come to define the rest of the film, even when it starts asking us to take it more seriously. And believe me, the fun begins to wane over two-and-a-half hours.
When she's not stopping bad guys, Diana (Gal Gadot, returning) works as a director of a museum in Washington, D.C. She's doing well for herself, and is able to keep tabs on secretly powerful ancient artifacts, but she longs for the one thing she can't have: the love of her life, Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), who died in WWI. But she makes a new friend at work in the form of awkward-but-intelligent gemology expert Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig).
Meanwhile, wannabe oil baron Maxwell Lord (Pascal, in greasy, sleazy blonde hair) is attempting to build his new empire, Black Gold, the fast-and-easy way: he's found out about a legendary stone that will grant him whatever he wishes, just like that. And that stone has arrived in the collection at the nearby museum (yes, the one Diana and Barbara work at). Suddenly, "megalomaniacal business tycoon" is only a few easy grifts away.
Thus, the seeds of conflict are sown. Once again, very quick, very cheesy, very retro.
As WW84 gets rolling very quickly, and in several directions at once, we arrive at the second pervasive problem of the film: the story juggle. In addition to Diana's arc about grief and the past, we are establishing an origin and arc for both Barbara and Maxwell. Don't get me wrong, it's good to have well-developed supporting characters and villains, but for the majority of this movie, it feels like these three are splitting the pie pretty evenly, and frankly they're all a little too padded out.
Barbara didn't do much for me; her trajectory was pretty clear from the start, and I wasn't given much reason to root for her to listen to her better angels. It all felt just a little too predetermined. Wiig felt a bit wasted—she did the whole "awkward nobody to glow-up baddie" thing just fine, but she wasn't given much to do, comedically or emotionally.
Diana spends the film in somewhat of a role-reversed rendition of the fish-out-of-water dynamic from the first film. This is no spoiler, as the trailers readily gave it away, but Steve is back (I won't explain how), and this time, he's the fish instead of Diana, floundering to catch up with all of the advances in technology and style since the early part of the century. Aside from Pascal's performance, this is probably where most of the fun is had; the couple have cute enough chemistry as they traipse around '80s America before winding up on a mission to stop Maxwell from doing irreversible damage with his new-found artifact.
But Max is the real highlight. Pedro Pascal brings everything to this role. And I mean that. Not only is he hilariously skeezy (in that stereotypical "car salesman" way) as he tries to shmooze his way out of bankruptcy and up the ladder of wealth, but he also reveals Max's heart to us, in a way that I don't think I've ever seen from a scene-chewing. There are some moments later in the film that genuinely pulled at my heart—of course, writer-director Patty Jenkins and the rest of her writers put that material in there, but Pascal loads it with sincerity. It's an incredible two-handed feat on his part. God bless Pedro Pascal.
For a big-budget action movie, the action is fairly perfunctory. Less than a day later, I'm having a hard time remembering much of the detail in the fight scenes. There is a really great sequence that sees Diana doing what I wish more superhero films would portray: saving civilians instead of just slugging it out with the bad guys. For every act of violence by the villains against the guards or bystanders in their way, Diana arrives just in time to cushion their fall or block projectiles. That was a fun and different sort of action scene. But aside from that, eh.
The balancing act manages to work itself out a little bit in the third act, and the cheese finally feels like it gets fully, naturally integrated during the climax. But there is no reason for this movie to be as long as Avengers: Infinity War. For as light and bubbly as it is, and as little of actual substance as its actually dealing with, it begins to feel like a bit of a slog after an hour and a half go by and we still aren't in the third act. I'm not sure Gadot really brought any more to the role than she has in previous entries, but Jenkins seems to have a good enough handle on what to do with the character (even if not the movie overall) that it doesn't really matter too much.
I haven't loved either of the Wonder Woman films, but I still wouldn't mind watching another one. And given that its an uplifting blockbuster, arriving on HBO Max in time for Christmas, at the end of the gas leak year that has been 2020, there are far worse ways to spend your time this holiday than Wonder Woman 1984.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfM7_JLk-84[/embed]