Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

For the sequel to a commercially (and even critically) successful superhero blockbuster, this is one strange movie. I, at least, would not have expected the film to not just take place in 1984 but actually emulate some of the tone and structure of late 70’s/early 80’s superhero films  (the few there were at the time).

It’s not exactly a tone I’m particularly fond of, and at first the film does feel somewhat awkward - also thanks to the seeming repetition of the only larger flaw of the first film, taking ages to actually get going (later more on that) – but Jenkins is actually going somewhere with the film’s somewhat peculiar tone between faux-naïf and fairy-tale (which does feel a lot like reading “golden age” comics, minus the bloodthirst of those venerable books of often dubious quality) on a thematic level. It is indeed difficult to imagine a big mainstream film renouncing this bluntly and heavily the values (ha!) of the 80s in the West that eventually brought us neoliberalism and a world of other hurt and doing it in any different tone. Pretending to be harmless and a bit goofy is still a useful disguise for a bit of subversion, apparently, even if one is about as subtle about it as a sledgehammer.

Once the film has hit its stride, and a viewer has adapted to the tone (if one doesn’t, one won’t have any joy with this one, I suspect) it actually becomes quite a lot of fun, with action scenes that share the rest of the film’s complete disinterest in pretending to be naturalistic and instead increasingly live in a space of their own imagination. There’s a cheesy and deeply romantic sense of wonder on display in some of the slower moments in between the blockbuster business, Jenkins milking the tone she has decided upon to wonderful effect, turning what to some critics seems to read as “overindulgent” or just plain silly cliché into pure charm driven by the kind of intelligence that doesn’t need to show off in my eyes.

The performances are broad and big in a manner perfectly appropriate to the surroundings, with Gadot still being pretty much a case of perfect casting, Chris Pine giving the impression of genuinely enjoying playing the second fiddle most other films would have their female leads be, and Pedro Pascal repeatedly hitting just the right spot where caricature and real person meet. The only of the main players I wasn’t particularly fond of was Kristen Wiig, but I suspect her ever mumbling, curiously apathetic acting style is simply so little to my taste, I couldn’t say if the performance is any good on a more objective level or not.

On the surface, the film’s plotting can feel rather messy – particularly in a film world where the scripting ideal seems to be of film as a relentless clockwork automaton – but that’s less an actual weakness (alright, the film really could have lost the prologue on Themyscira) than a sign of a film that’s really trying to do justice to quite a few ideas and needs to take some time to do so. And make no mistake, while the presentation here is often charmingly goofy, the script by Jenkins, Geoff Johns and Dave Callaham is neither goofy nor stupid – it’s just not afraid to express its bigger ideas through cheesy dialogue and broad tropes, losing the sort of over-earnest man-face that pushed something like The Joker (aka “ranting arsehole in front of bad versions of all of the director’s favourite Scorsese scenes”) into being a critical darling but winning my heart in the process. Also having a fucking heart itself, which is of course isn’t allowed in proper art.

WW84 is really quite the movie, certainly not an attempt to make the first movie again, but bigger, but the product of filmmakers genuinely exploring the space the superhero genre affords them. That this sort of thing does exist can only be good for what looks to still be the dominant genre of huge Hollywood movies for at least the next half decade to come.

In short: Wonder Woman (2017)

Given the way DC’s movie universe has developed, I wasn’t as hopeful concerning Wonder Woman as some parts of the internet were. It is wonderful to finally have a superhero movie concentrating on a woman, but a female-lead film can of course be just as terrible as one featuring a man. However, only a fool would think a movie’s automatically terrible because it features a woman.

The first twenty to thirty minutes of the film are certainly not promising. They are slow going, with reams of exposition broken up by short action sequences and then even more exposition, with a bunch of fine actresses having basically nothing of interest to do – poor, awesome Robin Wright could as well have been replaced by a computer animation, for all the film does with her. The worst about this: much of the exposition is absolutely pointless, going into needless detail about things the audience could easily learn on the go later on. Most of the important stuff could have been condensed into five minutes.

However, once exposition time is finally over – when the main characters arrive in London, to be precise – Wonder Woman transforms from something deeply mediocre in the typically over explaining way today’s Hollywood is so fond of into a fantastic film that will from now on hardly do anything wrong (apart from some way too naive and on the nose dialogue during the final fight that says out loud what the film already told us in other ways and the random design of the Big Bad). Gal Gadot turns out to be a wonder, not just looking the part but much more importantly projecting it right, not just wearing the costume but embodying what (this interpretation of) the character is actually about - arguably the most important thing for superhero cinema. Compare with Ben Affleck’s Batman who never feels like anything but an overpaid actor in a silly costume striking poses, and you’ll feel the difference. The film’s feminism hits the spot where it is consistently part of the film’s meaning but never feels preachy – this one’s not telling us, it’s showing us, which is always more convincing. In general, the film’s politics are an organic part of it, and indeed of the story it tells.

The action is a wonderful cross of old pulp/serial style high adventure and modern cinematic superhero action, comparable to the first Captain America movie (which I still hold to be absolutely fantastic, sorry Inga) in all the best ways.

Apart from mostly doing a bang-up job with the action sequences, director Patty Jenkins is also great at evoking a sense of place and time. Now, obviously, this is not meant to be a realistic depiction of the Great War but the film’s version of it seems like a place its characters belong in (you could argue Chris Pine’s character would probably have been a lot more sexist in the real world, but then, who wants to see a contemporary version of Wonder Woman going through that sort of shit for the sake of “realism”?) and not just a series of CGI creations.


It’s rather a great film.