REVIEW: Wonder Woman 1984

Wonder Woman, the superhero we need this year, hits HBO Max and theaters today with the hotly anticipated sequel Wonder Woman 1984. Wonder Woman (2017) was itself a bold statement about representation. By the end of the film there's no doubt about what sermon Patty Jenkins (director) wanted to deliver with Diana Prince's second round, and it is a stirring thing to say . . . though I'd be dishonest to not admit the film does take a few shortcuts to get there.

After her peace quest from the first film, Diana has spent the last sixty years sanctifying her life as a mission of love for humanity, and her missions, as far as we can tell, have been largely absent of vengeful gods or alien warlords. She mostly spends her intervening days yearning for the love she had with Steve Trevor, her lover who met a fiery end in the first movie. The plot is set in motion when a mundane artifact with enigmatic origins is dropped into the hands of the Smithsonian. "I wouldn't value it at more than $75," says anthropologist Barbara Minerva. Yet this deceptively powerful genie's lamp brings Steve back to her through means she cannot explain. But that's only a sampling of the stone's power. As the mysterious artifact passes hands among other pining souls, it thrusts the world toward total desolation that can only be reversed by a superhero who's willing to lose everything.

Though the first half of the runtime keeps the tension mostly domestic, the stakes go from zero to sixty in almost no time. (Don't worry, it surprisingly works.) In this sequel, we shift from the ruthlessness of WWI to the materialism of the 1980s. And it is this bottomless greed, not the fiery hate of a world at war, that this Wonder Woman film indicts as the base of humanity's worst impulses. The juxtaposition may feel a little unbalanced at first, but the film insists that indulgence and hunger can take more forms than marshmallow sleeves and tie-dye t-shirts, and the consequences can be cataclysmic. Even Diana herself possesses some of this greed, and learning to shed her displaced selfishness may make all the difference in whether she can save the day this time.

It is a little hard to accept the "wishing stone" that sets the plot in motion as it feels more like something out of a Care Bears movie. And the characters sometimes recite their motivations a little more explicitly than feels organic. Even Steve Trevor's initial resurrection felt surprisingly unceremonious. Just so, about halfway through you'll understand what the movie was trying to be all along. From there most of the film's narrative shortcuts amount to little more than white noise.

The villainous agenda that stirs Wonder Woman to action is more disguised in this film than the standard superhero flick, divided between Kristen Wiig's Barbara Minerva (alt. ego "Cheetah") and Pedro Pascal's Max Lord. Minerva is the Betty Lou from high school who never grew into herself and Lord is the failed businessman and father. Are Minerva and Lord true supervillains or not? I look forward to reading the inevitable thought pieces.

Both Pascal and Wiig pull their weight as the film's thematic and dramatic tensions reach their boiling point, with Wiig in particular emerging as the most powerful performer in the film. If WW84's villain gamble pays off, it pays off largely because Wiig knows what it looks like when recognizable working-class frustration mutates into superhero scale rage. She never loses sight of Barbara's humanity while knowing better than to infantilize her with unnecessary tragedy.

Returning cast members Gal Gadot and Chris Pine are striking as ever. Both are electric on their own and entirely at home with one another. Pine's Trevor is entirely believable as the wholesome leading man entirely deserving of someone like Diana. At one point his character insists there are hundreds of guys out there far better than him and I'm calling his bluff now. Gadot meanwhile reconciles a million different contradictions in her character and only makes it look natural. She's elegant yet human, powerful yet vulnerable. She's Wonder Woman.

By the time the credits roll (longtime fans of the Wonder Woman icon will want to linger through these a little) it's easy to identify exactly what plot-points the film's story was built around, but the film's return on demand favors the viewer. I can off the top of my head identify at least two spectacular sequences that I wished I could have seen in theaters, spectacular for their masterful visuals and their cathartic rainstorms. Maybe Jenkin's third outing with Diana will deploy a more even hand from start to close, but this film as is reminds us that the best superhero films are powerful, and not just for their visual effects.

--The Professor

Comments

REVIEW: Jurassic World - Rebirth

I had a mixed reaction to Jurassic World: Rebirth, but it did make for one of the most enjoyable theater experiences I've had in recent memory. I have to imagine that a part of this is because my most common theater appointments are matinee screenings, but I had the opportunity to see this one at a fairly well-attended midnight screening. And there's nary a film more tailored for surround-sound roaring and screens wide enough to contain these de-extinct creatures. ("Objects on the screen feel closer than they appear.") It was natural for me to cap the experience by applauding as the credits stared to roll, even if, as usual, I was the only one in the auditorium to do so. Yes, I am that kind of moviegoer; yes, I enjoyed the experience that much, and I imagine I will revisit it across time. That's not to imagine the movie is beyond reproach, but for I suppose it bears mentioning that, generally , th...

REVIEW: Superman

I feel like it's essential that I establish early on in this review that this marks my first time seeing a Superman movie in theaters. The Zack Snyder saga was actually in swing while I was in high school and college--back when I was in what most would consider in the target audience for these films--but that kind of passed by me without my attention. And I'll be clear that I take no specific pride in this. I wasn't really avoiding the films by any means. My buddies all just went to see them without me while I was at a church youth-camp, and I just didn't bother catching up until much, much later. I'm disclosing all this to lay down that I don't really have any nostalgic partiality to the Superman story. Most of my context for the mythology comes from its echoes on larger pop culture. I know, for example, that Clark Kent was raised in a smalltown farm community with his adopted parents, and it was them who...

REVIEW: ELIO

Here's a fact: the term "flying saucer" predates the term "UFO." The United States Air Force found the former description too limiting to describe the variety of potential aerial phenomena that might arise when discussing the possibility of life beyond earth. There may have to be a similar expansion of vocabulary within the alien lexicon with Pixar's latest film, Elio , turning the idea of an alien abduction into every kid's dream come true. The titular Elio is a displaced kid who recently moved in with his aunt after his parents died. She doesn't seem to understand him any better than his peers do. He can't imagine a place on planet earth where he feels he fits in. What's a kid to do except send a distress cry out into the great, big void of outer space? But m iracle of miracles: his cries into the universe are heard, and a band of benevolent aliens adopt him into their "communiverse" as the honorary ambassador o...

Resurrecting Treasure Planet

Wherever any given cinephile falls on the totem pole, they are certainly familiar with the idea of the film canon, this idea of an elect selection of films that signal the height of the artform's cultural value, touchstones for all who consider themselves good and true lovers of cinema. Films that belong to "the canon" are secure in continued cultural relevance even decades after their premiere. Any person's chosen reference for the canon will certainly vary between which list they believe carries the most authority (AFI Top 100, IMDb Top 250, The Academy Awards), or just as likely will synthesize a number of sources, but however any one person defines it, the canon is real, and it demands to be recognized. It will surprise some, baffle others, and offend others still, to think that Walt Disney Animation has its own film canon of sorts. Belonging to this selective society come with some very specific be...

REVIEW: SCREAM VI

Ever since Sidney Prescott asked audiences nearly 30 years ago "how do you gut someone?" with such disgust, the "Scream" franchise has forced a stab-hungry audience to question how they could ever entertain a ritual so violating as the gruesome act taking someone else's life. Last year, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett delivered arguably the franchise's strongest offering yet. Strong because the film played its game very well. These guys also know that subversion in film is fun, certainly, but also that films which sell themselves on their subversion tend to be very hollow. You need a strong thematic lifeblood and a cast of characters to root for. If your audience is more excited about the cut-up bodies than the victors, you have a problem. This is where the newer films, including this most outing, have found their strength. Scream VI sees the survivors of the last installment making a fresh break in New York City. Sam, Tara, Mindy, and Chad a...

REVIEW: The Legend of Ochi

This decade has seen a renaissance of movies claiming to be "this generation's ET ," but you probably can't remember their names any better than I can. We could have all sorts of debates why it is no one seems to know how to access that these days, though I don't think for a moment that it's because 2020s America is actually beyond considering what it means to touch that childhood innocence. But A24's newest film, The Legend of Ochi , does have me thinking this mental block is mostly self-inflicted by a world whose extoling of childhood is more driven by a dislike of the older generation than anything else. Fitting together narratives like How to Train Your Dragon with Fiddler on the Roof and tossing it in the sock drawer with 1980s dark fantasy, The Legend of Ochi is intermittently enchanting, but it's undermined by its own cynicism. On an island stepped out of time, a secluded community wages war against the local population of ...

The Many Fathers of Harry Potter

Despite being a Harry Potter fan for most of my life, I didn’t make it to "Harry Potter Land" at Universal until November of 2019. Some relatives invited me on a SoCal theme park tour, a trip which also saw my last visit to Disneyland before the shutdown. And when you and a bunch of other twenty-somethings are walking through a recreation of Hogwarts for the first time, you inevitably start playing this game where you call out every artifact on display and try to trace it back to whatever movie or even specific moment the mise en scene is trying to invoke: There’s the greenhouse from "Chamber of Secrets." Now they’re playing the “Secrets of the Castle” track from "Prisoner of Azkaban." Here we are loading in the Room of Requirement from "Order of the Phoenix." From start to finish, the attraction, like the franchise from which it spawned, is just one giant nostalgia parade. See, t he Wiza...

An Earnest Defense of Passengers

Recall with me, if you will, the scene in Hollywood December 2016. We were less than a year away from #MeToo, and the internet was keenly aware of Hollywood’s suffocating influence on its females on and off screen but not yet sure what to do about it. Enter Morten Tyldum’s film Passengers , a movie which, despite featuring the two hottest stars in Hollywood at the apex of their fame, was mangled by internet critics immediately after take-off. A key piece of Passengers ’ plot revolves around the main character, Jim Preston, a passenger onboard a spaceship, who prematurely awakens from a century-long hibernation and faces a lifetime of solitude adrift in outer space; rather than suffer through a life of loneliness, he eventually decides to deliberately awaken another passenger, Aurora Lane, condemning her to his same fate. So this is obviously a film with a moral dilemma at its center. Morten Tyldum, direc...

Hating Disney Princesses Has Never Been Feminist pt. 2

As we discussed in the last section , Disney Princesses are often held accountable for things that did not actually happen in their films--things they did not do. I feel like a part of this is the means by which said scrutiny typically takes place. There is, after all, a sort of stigma around watching "cartoons" as an adult, especially "princess cartoons," let alone watching them intently. And so I feel like a lot of the conclusions people come to about Disney Princesses comes either entirely from second-hand sources, like the memes, or from having it on in the background while babysitting as they scroll through their phone. I'll use an anecdote from my own history as an example: my very first week of film school, the professor drifted to the topic of female representation in the media. This professor dropped a sort of humble-brag that he had actually never seen Disney's Pocahontas , but that he didn't consider this a terrible ...

Wicked vs Maleficent

“Witch” has historically been used as a pejorative for a non-conformist woman, someone who does not obey the expectations of her culture. It’s little wonder, then, that a society with more progressive mores would commandeer the witch archetype into a warrior for social justice, or that the most famous witch of them all would spearhead this retyping. Yes, I am thinking of a certain Broadway musical and a fiery, green-skinned, justice-bent rebel-rouser. Wicked is a stage musical that follows the infamous Wicked Witch of the West as featured in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz . By shedding light on what happened before Dorothy dropped into Oz, Wicked recasts the witch as not a villain, but a misunderstood heroine. The show has been defying gravity on Broadway for coming on twenty years now, and it’s showing no signs of slowing down. When Disney’s Maleficen t came along a little over ten years later, the shorthand description of the film was basic...

Films and Feelings

Search This Blog