Wonder Woman 1984 Review: A still from the film. (courtesy gal_gadot)
Occupation: Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Pedro Pascal, Kristen Wiig, Robin Wright and Lilly Aspell
Director: Patty Jenkins
rating: 2.5 stars (out of 5)
The flight is easy, says Steve Trevor, the seedy American pilot who is Diana Prince’s love interest. It’s “wind and air,” he adds. All you need to know is how to catch it, ride it, and join it. But is that all to fly high? Certainly not if the trajectory is as demanding as the one that Patty Jenkins’ 2017 megahit Wonder Woman set for the sequels.
Wonder Woman 1984 manages to be a smooth cruise only intermittently. It floats on a wing – the returning Gal Gadot. As sturdy as this wing is, Gadot is undoubtedly in tip-top shape and is well supported by Kristen Wiig as the nerdy Barbara Minerva who gains Wonder Woman-like strength but loses her humanity – a two and a half hour movie takes a lot more.
WW84 (written by Jenkins with Geoff Johns and David Callahan) strives to find real inspiration when Gadot doesn’t do her number – she dons her red and blue golden eagle armor to save humanity and hovers over the mundane, to sell their super. Curb heroic deeds or criminals with their glowing lasso of truth.
The film offers old-fashioned escapist entertainment that isn’t exactly electrifying. The pattern exists because the mix contains the classic ingredients of a superhero film – a lot of drama, an emotional core, a bit of wit and a lot of wish-fulfillment that demands a price from the beneficiaries on screen and the audience (by the way) for a willing suspension of disbelief) .
WW84 gets off to a decent start – it begins on the magical utopian island of Themyscira in a throwback prelude that unveils an important rite of passage in Diana’s evolution before sending audiences to a consumer-frenzied Washington DC in the mid-1980s – but it never scales that dizzying heights of the earlier film.
Despite several rousing action sequences and the dramatic licks, WW84 rests less on wind and air than on an ordinary-looking ancient stone with extraordinary properties – a macguffin that fuels the confrontation between Wonder Woman and her two main opponents.
Like all superhero films, WW84 is a simple, morally serious fairy tale thread. It depends on the forces of truth, love, justice, and true heroism – represented by Wonder Woman (Gadot) and Steve (Chris Pine), who emerged in the Cold World era after their heroic deaths at the end of World War I. are Wonder woman – To take over a villain whose only wish is to wield power over the whole world. There’s no room here for irony or cynicism, the staples of contemporary superhero films, but social commentary is abundant.
The villain, Maxwell Lord, is a television personality who sells paper-thin dreams (“Life is good, but it can be better,” is his favorite punch line), a failed businessman and a delusional hustler who, if he gains power, the one he’s looking for makes a complete hash of it. Doesn’t Lord remind us of a man who is about to step down from office as the most powerful man in the world (in the same city where World War 8 takes place)? Indeed, Maxwell Lord, whose ambition far exceeds his ability, reminds us of many other unsuspecting megalomaniacs who ragged their nations.
Lord, played with rather broad strokes by the Chilean-American actor Pedro Pascal (from The Mandalorian), does not acquire the aura of invincibility that could push Wonder Woman all the way up against a wall, forcing her to use her unique strengths. If anything worries Diana, it is emotional upheaval and moral dilemma that is causing Steve’s return.
Wonder Woman, in WW84is not vengeful at all. She is only interested in saving humanity from the chaos that Max Lord started. Forgiveness is easy for her – she does not want to kill, but rather to heal and even give her enemies the chance to repent. Not such a bad idea in the context of 2020 for humanity – and for blockbuster cinema.
Gal Gadot is a charmer who can also act. It articulates agony, altruism, and assertion in one fell swoop without losing balance. The handsome Chris Pine serves to brighten up the action when the plot slows down in the middle parts of the film, which are devoted to the joy of a woman reunited with a lover she lost in World War I.
In the lively prologue, young Diana (Lilly Aspell, who played the same role in Wonder Women at the age of 10) learns a lesson in playing straight and fair in a multidisciplinary competition against elderly Amazons in Themyscira. Her moral advice, which she receives from her strict aunt-mentor Antiope (Robin Wright), stays with her throughout the film. “A true hero is never born from lies,” the young Diana is told.
We catch Diana in the American capital, who was overrun by flashy and fast cars, in clothes, tomahawk hairstyles and other garish outfits that defined the era. Diana, who works in antiques at the Smithsonian Institute, does her best to stay out of the spotlight.
When she’s not tending to the precious artifacts at the Smithsonian, where she’s a senior cultural archaeologist, she’s saving pedestrians from accelerating vehicles or stopping malls from raiding. But their act of saving is incognito. But that’s only until Max Lord shows up and the Dream Stone passes into his control. The world must be saved again.
The foiled robbery – the target is a jewelry story, which it turns out to be a front for an illegal business in rare antiquities, the trigger for the subsequent action of the film. The Dreamstone, part of the mall, reaches the Smithsonian.
A new employee in Diana’s department, Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), a nerdy, subconscious woman, adores her and wants to be like her. Her wish will come true thanks to the old citrine stone that she has to take care of. Her admiration turns into resentment, admiration for rivalry, and she herself mutates into the “apex predator Cheetah”.
In a year when moviegoers have been starving for big-screen entertainment, Wonder Woman 1984, on Christmas Eve in the Indian multiplex, delivers bushels of it. Not all is water, but why complain when Gal Gadot is shouldering her part of the business with all the flair at her disposal? She presses WW84 above the acceptable mark.