2020, d. Patty Jenkins - rental
Before COVID hit, superhero films had basically taken over cinema. Depending on your perspective this may have been a golden age of blockbusters, or the death knell of cinema altogether. If superhero movies were what allowed movie theaters to hang on by a thread, but were also what was killing what kind of movies studios would fund and theatres support, well COVID has certainly changed that. It's possible that the major movie theater chains will be bankrupt before COVID is tamped down, and it's also possible that studios will no longer be willing to invest hundreds of millions into any movie anymore. COVID may just take down BOTH cinema and superhero movies.
The last "big" superhero film to be released was fucking Bloodshot back in February, which was barely watchable. Since then every blockbuster release, with the exception of Tenet, has been postponed time and again. Wonder Woman 1984 was a miscalculation on Warner Brother's part. Originally slated for November 2019, WB decided to postpone the film to summer 2020 expecting bigger profits. Whoops.
After two postponements, WB decided to no longer sit on the film, pushing it to their newly launched HBO Max platform and to digital rental internationally. Both moves are gambles, but with Disney announcing a broad slate of animated movies, PIXAR features and shows, Marvel series and Star Wars shows for Disney, WB decided that not only was HBO Max going to have big budget series but their entire slate of 2021 movies (starting with WW'84) would debut on the service (to the rightful consternation of the creators who weren't consulted at all with this decision). Time will tell if the gamble pays off or sinks WB.
The 2017 Wonder Woman feature took in over a billion gross, and proved that both a female-directed and female-starring superhero movie could match up to even the biggest Marvel movie. There shouldn't have been any question about it. But even still there's something to prove, and expectations are still loaded on top of the sequel. It certainly filled a void, one that shouldn't have taken this long to fill. Wonder Woman has been a marketable, name property for decades, even before the Lynda Carter series in the late 70's. Why there wasn't any major motion picture between the end of the series in 1979 and 2017 is straight up injustice.
Which maybe explains the decision to set this picture in 1984. Once we pass through the cold open flashback - - in which a pre-teen Diana competes in a Themysciran skills race and learns a lesson in losing -- we segue into a vibrant and brassy sequence where a group of stick-up men rob a mall jewelry store (of it's black-market backroom goods) and Wonder Woman intervenes with big-time heroics. The score from Hans Zimmer turns into a full-on John Williams pastiche, feeling akin to his Superman score... which is funny considering Zimmer has failed to really develop a signature sound for the "Snyderverse" Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman. The action during this sequence is low-stakes and overblown, just like the Richard Donner's Superman. It's really silly, but enjoyable (and I should note, not Schumacher-level silly, mercifully). Gal Gadot is alive and seems to be having a blast in the role.
From there the picture returns to the more expected sights and sounds of modern filmmaking. I don't think the film could have or should have sustained the 80's aesthetic but it would have been a much bolder movie had it tried.
We meet Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) who is an awkward, nerdy, kind, overly chatty, multi-disciplined new colleague of Diana Prince at the Smithsonian. They become friends (sort of, the film doesn't build the friendship enough, and probably would have been better served had they established they were already friends). One of the objects from the earlier heist the FBI is having trouble identifying and have asked Barbara to research. Both her and Diana are stumped, but the Latin on the god ring around the chip zirconium seems to imply that wishes upon it will be granted. Both Barbara and Diana make their own silly little wishes on it, never considering there to be any possibility they would come true.
Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), a floppy haired TV personality posing as a wealthy business man (sound familiar? At all? No?) is running an infomercial-driven, oil digging ponzi scheme. He somehow has hedged all his bets on this wishing rock (no real understanding of how he came to learn about it, but it's evident he'd been researching it for some time) and when he tricks Barbara into giving it up he wishes to become the rock itself, able to grant wishes but taking something for himself in return.
Barbara finds herself slowly gaining the strength, speed, confidence and glamour of Diana (her wish), and Diana gets Steve Trevor back (in the hijacked body of another man). She knows it can't last but for the past 6 decades Steve is all she's ever really wanted for herself, and for a time, at least, she refuses to give him up. Likewise, Barbara refuses to give up what she's gained, to the point that she stands in Diana's way from stopping Max Lord's schemes.
Max's wish granting keeps getting bigger and bigger in scope, an addiction that he needs to feed. His wish granting (and what he takes in return) have started to thrust the world into chaos. The abbreviation of the film's title to "WW'84" could just as much be "World War 1984", and the 80's nuclear arms race accelerates dramatically.
It's up to Wonder Woman to save the day, fight with Barabara (now evolved into a cat-woman) and give up Steve in the process, but it's not her strength and fists that are going to win the day, but her compassion, her inspiration.
This film is a mess but I found it enjoyable. The quartet of Gadot, Pine, Wiig and Pascal are endlessly watchable, even if what they've been given isn't perhaps the cleanest or best arcs for their characters. It's overlong at nearly two and a half hours, and there could definitely have been some trimmings (the opening flashback on Themyscira wasn't really necessary at all). Even still, I was never bored...sometimes puzzled by the choices made, but never bored.
That Jenkins managed to shoehorn in the throwing-tiara, the invisible jet, Diana's flying (or, wind-riding) and the more recent Golden Armor (and there was some real shoehorning going on) made for more than a few fun fanservice-y moments. My own fan gripes were more around Max Lord and the fact that they disposed of his mind control power in favor of the wish fulfillment. In general Max Lord is basically Max Lord in name only, but Pascal does everything asked of him (and a lot is asked of him) and delivers.
While I was hesitant for them to return to bringing Steve Trevor back, Gadot and Pine are just as charming together as they were the first time around. Wiig is a mercurial actress, so the transitions she's asked to go through in this film are a breeze for her to pull off, but the film doesn't know how to really deal with them, or make much use of her. If anything, this film decided to go into the stereotypical sequel trap (double down on the villains - Max Lord and Cheetah - and increase the romance). It feels like a Batman sequel... any of them, where it's just more, more, more.
In the end though, it does honor the character, even if it loses focus on her from time to time, and that's ultimately what I wanted it to do. I was hoping for maybe more of a neon-lit trip (like the posters intone) but two days later and I'm actually ready to watch it again.
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