Wonder Woman 1984 [2020]
Huh, yeah. I just... never really reviewed this movie, did I? It's just so... underwhelming. And it really shouldn't be. Out of all the movies to come out of the DCEU, Wonder Woman in 2017 had the right blend of seriousness, faithfulness to the source material and the modernization and condensing of so many comic-book elements that made the movie still one of my favourite superhero adaptations ever. Sure, it's not perfect, but it was such a breath of fresh air to the otherwise dark, gritty mess that was the DCEU at the time.
So obviously Wonder Woman was going to get a sequel, and interestingly, instead of a sequel set on the present day after the events of Justice League (the way Aquaman was), we go back to... 1984. And the only real reason we do that, seemingly, is just for the film-makers to reference a whole bunch of 80's tropes. I can respect that, but... but the setting and the time period -- especially since this movie is still ostensibly within the DCEU -- makes the movie basically forced to already answer its stakes. Some movies can kinda-sorta work in this constraint, kinda like Black Widow, but most of the time there's a characterization moment that needs to be answered. Diana's pretty much already kind of set in stone, with the bulk of her character development already happening in the first Wonder Woman movie. Not to mention the obvious plot point of having Wonder Woman active in the 80's despite the fact that she's supposed to be hiding and only working as a civilian as per BvS and Justice League.
But even then, the plotlines of this movie is pretty messy even if we don't go to its pretty disappointing ending. There's an opening scene with the Amazons in Themyscira with young Diana where the whole moral is for Diana to be patient and not take shortcuts, which does have some vague tie-in with the motivation of the villain. One of them, anyway.
The movie has two primary villains -- the first is Barbara Minerva, or the Cheetah. One of Wonder Woman's most notable and recurring archenemies in comics and adaptations, they do a rather okay-ish job at showing Barbara's shyness and her growing psychosis before she eventually gets morphed by the plot device of the movie into a feral cheetah-woman. Barbara gets her wish granted of being 'just like Diana' by a museum artifact called the Dreamstone, and ends up... basically being completely irresponsible with those powers. Hence, the 'shortcut' theme before. But while the interactions between the two actresses are pretty okay, the comedy and the tone really didn't sell me too much on it. (Also, it is pretty much an obvious cheat to get away from CGI to have Barbara not be in Cheetah form for 80% of the movie). Barbara herself isn't portrayed terribly, but we've seen a lot of these 'obsessed with the main hero' villains (Batman Returns' Catwoman is probably the primary comparison here) and I'm sorry to say that Cheetah just isn't that interesting.
Diana's wish, meanwhile, revolves around her dead lover Steve Trevor, who is resurrected in another man's body in a completely pointless sub-plot other than to get actor Chris Pine back. Steve's ghost/spirit is resurrected within the body of another man, which... which leads to the very uncomfortable moment where they make love and Diana kinda gets a bit reluctant to send Steve Trevor back -- the man he's inhabiting has a life and everything, and... I don't know. A lot of people out there clearly feel the same, because this whole Steve Trevor storyline does feel a bit creepy. Which... it could have been good. It could've tied into the whole 'no shortcuts' theme that's supposed to run through the movie, but Steve's resurrection and Diana's dilemma is tied more onto her letting go of Steve instead of the moral implications.
The secondary villain in this movie is Maxwell Lord (or Max "Lord" Lorenzano, played by Mandalorian's Pedro Pascal), who really is adapted in name only. Maxwell Lord steals the Dreamstone to save his dying oil company. And... again, credit where credit's due, the scenes shot with Max and his son and his company and how he's becoming an increasingly distant father are pretty well-done. They're just... not very interesting as story concepts.
The Dreamstone itself is also very vague beyond being a typical magical mumbo-jumbo plot device. Max merges with it, Diana later discovers that it's created by a god called the Duke of Deception, and as usual with these wish-granting artifacts, they exact a toll unless they renounce the wish or destroy the stone. And... again, Diana's supposed to be conflicted about Steve being back, but all throughout this the script and the pacing makes her feel a bit more self-centered than the movie-makers probably intended. Plus seeing any hero pine for their love interest so badly is honestly never been all that interesting, doubly so when it's something so haphazardly done as Steve Trevor's 'resurrection'.
We do get a couple of (honestly rather samey) action scenes. Max gets more and more insane and tries to escalate nuclear war in order to... uh... broadcast his message to all the world so he can grant all their wishes? And then that's all so that his powers won't cause his body to deteriorate? Again, with better pacing this plotline might have a comic-book charm to it. Now it just feels incoherent. Barbara also hangs out with Max at this point, becoming his henchman.
After being beaten down by Barbara a bit too much, Diana finally lets Steve go and she gets restored to her full strength. And it happens kind of so late into the movie, and the dramatic tension just feels more stretched out than anything. Diana dons the Armour of Asteria from the movie posters, which looks cool and shit, leading to a pretty badass fight with the mutated, fully-terribly-CGI-Cheetah Barbara. The transformation involves some wish-sharing property of the Dreamstone that's never explained before. I would've praised this movie a bit if we get some character catharsis from a villain that used to be the main character's good friend, but Cheetah just gets electrocuted, knocked out and out of the picture. Then... Diana pulls out the Lasso of Truth and basically and literally cures the mass wishing all throughout the world with the power of friendship.
No, really. She just gives a speech, and somehow everyone who had their wishes granted renounces them all in time for the Dreamstone's cosmic devastation or whatever to stop. Sure, the wish had something-something about not taking shortcuts and wishes, but... not everyone's wishing for something selfish. And we're also meant to assume that any destruction caused by these wishes are just... reverted? I don't mind optimistic superhero movies. I like my optimism. This is over-the-top saccharine.
Also, Max gets to reconcile with his son in a plot twist that you could see from a mile away. There are some random scenes that show that Max Lord is a victim of child abuse himself, but the movie just hurriedly wraps him up and shoves him into a hugging scene and never follows up on it, making that revelation feel pretty detached.
Also also, we get the out-of-nowhere reveal that Asteria is living in the human world, but it doesn't really lead into anything other than a Lynda Carter cameo.
And... yeah. The setup for the Dreamstone storyline is just not very good, and neither villains are particularly interesting enough to follow. They had the bare-bones of stories, but it isn't followed up on! In the case of Cheetah, or just plain executed in the cheesiest, most eye-rolling way in Maxwell Lord's case. Diana herself goes through a very cliched and dragged-out characterization of 'moving on'... and the message at the end isn't particularly well-suited for the year that this movie is released in, right smack dab during the Coronavirus pandemic, where there's a fair amount of people that probably found the message of 'all you need to do is to have some hard work and everything will work out' to not be the message they want to hear.
And, yes. The Coronavirus pandemic was a major factor to why the movie feels so unfinished in the first place. But its bloated 152-minute runtime really didn't need to be this long, making all the padding moments of Diana and Steve, or Diana and Barbara, or Max and his kid, feel even more dragged-out when the final product of these characters all ended up still being one-note. Kind of a shame, because the DCEU really needed all the wins they could get with their limited amount of movies per year, and this certainly wasn't it.
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