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Wonder Woman 1984 Movie Review

Wonder Woman 1984 is a 2020 superhero film directed by Patty Jenkins and starring Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig and Pedro Pascal. It’s all over the place.

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“No true hero is born from lies“

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Sequels to superhero movies usually are bloated in runtime, messy in structure and populated with too many characters, especially villains. All of that unfortunately applies to this sequel as well. I personally found the film quite engaging and fun, but there is no denying that its length of two and a half hours was unnecessary and that the pacing is quite bad.

This time around, Diana is in the eighties, she finds this stone that grants people wishes, she wishes for her love to return, but at a cost as she becomes physically weaker. She has to fight this megalomaniac who has turned to the stone himself. The main problem here is that it’s way too influenced by eighties superhero movies, especially ‘Superman II’. The film honoring those early genre flicks was fun, but it led to a sillier tone and ridiculous villains.

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Yes, Maxwell Lord and Cheetah are far from the best comic-book villains out there. They felt too silly in that uncomfortable eighties and nineties superhero movie fashion with ‘Batman Forever’ coming to mind as well while watching them. I actually preferred Cheetah as Barbara is such a well developed, interesting character easy to relate to. Kristen Wiig is terrific in the role and the first couple of scenes with the two women chatting were among the best of the bunch.

But her Cheetah scenes were terrible as was her look overall. It was just all sorts of rushed and they should have waited to include her transition in a sequel instead of making this movie suffer from having too many villains. Lord is even worse. Nothing here worked, except for Pascal’s excellent performance (all acting in the film is good). This Lex Luthor-like character was way too over-the-top for me and none of his powers made sense whatsoever. I hated that final confrontation between him and Diana as it was way too cheesy and all of the emotion with him was simply not earned.

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But the good guys are great here. Yes, Diana and Steve are amazing. Chris Pine is clearly a better actor, but Gal Gadot is beautiful in the role, very powerful and also solid in her performance, though she still has trouble acting out anger properly. The best scenes in the film are all those revolving around this couple: the invisible jet sequence represents pure cinema magic, Steve witnessing the wonders of the future was so sweet and moving and of course their final goodbye was just heartbreaking. It was so brave that they decided to kill him off for real this time around as it led to such an amazing flying sequence with Wonder Woman that was emotionally very rewarding.

I absolutely adore their romance that is one of the greatest in this genre. The movie is surprisingly kind of a romantic comedy inspired by the eighties in certain sections and I actually liked the more comedic tone to the film. The first act was so fun and charming while that opening was just incredible. That athletic competition on Themyscira was absolutely thrilling and I wish that they finally make a spin-off about the Amazons.

I wish that I could say the same about the other action scenes in Wonder Woman 1984, but I can’t as they are so mediocre. The Cheetah fight is poorly lit and just terrible, the mall sequence is too cheesy, though charming in a way, and only the Cairo action scene was solid and impactful. The score is good, but the VFX aren’t so great. Overall, the original is better focused.

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