Won­der Woman 1984

Rem­ber the ​’80s? Remem­ber poly­ester and perms, aer­o­bics and Reaganomics? Remem­ber synth pop, hi-tops, acid wash and the inex­plic­a­ble pop­u­lar­i­ty of the bum-bag? Well, no mat­ter if you don’t – the lat­est instal­ment in the DCEU is here to pro­vide a whis­tle-stop tour of all the decade’s great­est hits, from Gary Numan songs to the advent of ath­leisure. Three years after intro­duc­ing Diana Prince to a new gen­er­a­tion via a glossy solo movie set against the back­drop of World War One, Pat­ty Jenk­ins reteams with Gal Gadot and Chris Pine for a day­g­lo romp through the era of excess in Won­der Woman 1984.

When we left Won­der Woman (Gadot) at the end of her first solo out­ing, she was mourn­ing the trag­ic death of her new­found pilot love Steve Trevor (Pine) who sac­ri­ficed him­self dur­ing bat­tle to stop David Thewlis tak­ing over the world. She reflect­ed on the fact that peo­ple are worth sav­ing, and that the earth is a pret­ty nice place, all things considered.

Unfor­tu­nate­ly for every­one, the under­whelm­ing Jus­tice League out­ing fol­lowed six months lat­er, in which DC tried to fol­low the Mar­vel juggernaut’s team-up strat­e­gy with under­whelm­ing results. Zack Sny­der is set to try and course-cor­rect all this with his revamped Jus­tice League: Director’s Cut, which will pre­mière on HBO Max some­time next year, but in the mean­time we get to see what Won­der Woman was doing in between sav­ing the world for the first time and part­ner­ing with Bat­man and company.

Open­ing with a flash­back to her time among the Ama­zo­ni­ans in which young Diana learns a valu­able les­son about cheat­ing, the film then estab­lish­es its set­ting very firm­ly with a quick heist in a decked-out shop­ping mall. Some goons set out to rob a black mar­ket den oper­at­ing out of a jew­ellery store; Won­der Woman turns up and gives them the run-around. Then it’s off to her day job for Diana Prince, who is study­ing antiq­ui­ties at Wash­ing­ton DC’s Smith­son­ian Insti­tute and large­ly mind­ing her own business.

When ditzy new col­league Dr Bar­bara Min­er­va (Kris­ten Wiig) stum­bles across a strange arte­fact con­fis­cat­ed dur­ing the heist, Diana’s inter­est in piqued. After estab­lish­ing it might be some kind of mag­ic wish­ing stone, Diana glum­ly wish­es her old pilot beau was around, before invit­ing Bar­bara out to lunch where they talk a lit­tle about their respec­tive lives.

It turns out poor Bar­bara is some­thing of a lon­er; she has a pas­sion for gemol­o­gy and has a sweet friend­ship with a local home­less man, but for some rea­son, her inabil­i­ty to walk in heels and slight goofi­ness is enough for her col­leagues to write her off as a com­plete weirdo. She is in awe of the grace­ful, well-liked, undis­put­ed­ly beau­ti­ful Diana, and wish­es she could be just like her. While, y’know, hold­ing the mys­te­ri­ous wish­ing gem­stone estab­lished pre­vi­ous­ly. As one does.

Mean­while, omnipresent tele­vi­sion adverts intro­duce us to Max Lord (Pedro Pas­cal) a self-styled oil mag­nate who is try­ing to find investors for his com­pa­ny, Black Gold. It becomes appar­ent he’s not quite as suc­cess­ful as his media per­sona would have us believe, and he’s also on the hunt for the ​‘wish­ing stone’, so he can make his dreams of strik­ing it big a reality.

After worm­ing his way into the affec­tions of naïve Bar­bara, he does exact­ly that – but Diana, appar­ent­ly the only hero in the vicin­i­ty of Earth, is slight­ly dis­tract­ed from the unfold­ing threat by the sud­den reap­pear­ance of her lost love, who turns up in Wash­ing­ton a lit­tle bemused but oth­er­wise no worse for wear. As Diana intro­duces Steve to the won­ders of Nike sneak­ers and aero­space advance­ments, Bar­bara learns about fig­ure-hug­ging cloth­ing, and Max grants wish­es with the reck­less aban­don of the Genie from Aladdin on a cocaine bender.

One of the endur­ing pieces of pop cul­ture from the ​’80s is Oliv­er Stone’s Wall Street, in which Michael Dou­glas’ ruth­less stock­bro­ker Gor­don Gecko extols the virtues of unbri­dled cap­i­tal­ism. It’s clear that Won­der Woman 1984 is read­ing from a sim­i­lar hymn sheet, try­ing to cri­tique the era of excess by point­ing out that the relent­less pur­suit of More with a cap­i­tal M is like­ly to lead to ruin in the long-term. Of course, it could be argued this feels a lit­tle insin­cere com­ing from Warn­er Bros, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the light of their recent HBO Max palaver, but even exam­in­ing this idea sole­ly with­in the con­text of the film, the over­rid­ing prob­lem is that every­thing is a lit­tle vague.

Max wants to be rich and pow­er­ful, but there’s no sol­id sense of his moti­va­tion. Maybe it’s to impress his young son, who repeat­ed­ly says he isn’t both­ered about his father being rich? Or because he had an abu­sive child­hood (a fact revealed in a momen­tary flash­back, deliv­ered extreme­ly late in the two-and-a-half-hour runtime)?

Pas­cal gives his all as a sleazy con­man out for blood, but the film hasn’t got a clue what it wants to do with him, and poor Kris­ten Wiig bare­ly gets a look-in as the much-hyped Chee­tah (con­sid­ered Won­der Woman’s arch-ene­my in the comics). This nasty habit super­hero movies have of hedg­ing their bets by includ­ing two bad­dies for the price of one rarely pans out, lead­ing to bloat­ed run­times and under­de­vel­oped char­ac­ters, and in the case of Won­der Woman 1984, it means that the third act redemp­tion arc feels unearned.

We already had a fish-out-of-water plot in Won­der Woman, which makes Steve’s (admit­ted­ly charm­ing) awe-struck atti­tude to the won­ders of mod­ern life a lit­tle old-hat. The most refresh­ing aspect of Diana and Steve’s rela­tion­ship is how well they work togeth­er as a duo: he’s per­fect­ly hap­py to let Diana run the show and feels no macho urge to pro­tect her at all costs but rather assists her as he can; although we glimpse this in bat­tle scenes, it feels almost acci­den­tal, as though the film is so pre­oc­cu­pied with ped­alling its vague nar­ra­tive about the per­ils of lying and greed, it doesn’t realise the ele­ments which make it inter­est­ing in the first place.

Diana also seems to have less per­son­al­i­ty this time around. While the first film was an inter­est­ing look at how our core beliefs can crip­ple us when it comes to prac­ti­cal­i­ty, and showed Diana’s trans­for­ma­tion from cal­low ide­al­ist to a more prac­ti­cal and world­ly hero­ine, 1984 feels like a step back. The film’s ​‘les­son’ pur­ports to be that noth­ing built on a lie can pros­per, but it seems odd that Diana would still need to learn this some 60 years after she defeat­ed a vil­lain whose entire arc was built around his use of decep­tion to incite glob­al carnage.

Sim­i­lar­ly, all the vague chat­ter about oil in Arab coun­tries and the assump­tion that able to wish for any­thing, the major­i­ty of world lead­ers would opt for more nuclear weapons rather than, say, an end to con­flict and suf­fer­ing, seems at best deeply cyn­i­cal and at worst xenophobic.

What is Won­der Woman 1984 try­ing to be, exact­ly? A pop­py cap­i­tal­ist cri­tique? A love sto­ry? A mis­sive against com­par­ing your­self to oth­er women? The film doesn’t seem to know, throw­ing so many ideas at the wall in the hope one of them sticks. It’s a shame, because Jenk­ins is clear­ly a gift­ed direc­tor, and the cast has a lot of tal­ent in it between Pine, Pas­cal and Wiig, but they feel wast­ed in a mud­dled nar­ra­tive which does noth­ing in the way of world-build­ing or char­ac­ter development.

Nev­er mind though – there’s approx­i­mate­ly a hun­dred super­hero movies delayed from this year that will be crop­ping up in 2021. Maybe one of those will be half-decent.