Review: Wonder Woman 1984 | 2 ½ out of 4 Stars

Review: Wonder Woman 1984 | 2 ½  out of 4 Stars | PG-13

By Kyle Osborne

Wonder Woman 1984 (stylized as WW84) would have been a four star movie if it’d been about an hour shorter.

Alas, the considerable goodwill begins to wane heading toward the conclusion at 2 ½ hours. There’s just too much of a good thing going on here. Still, there are far worse complaints one could make about a movie, especially a superhero flick (good god, there’ve been about 40 of them released in the last 15 years. We.Are.Exhausted.)

Actually, 2017’s Wonder Woman, and now this sequel, are among the most enjoyable within the genre. WW84 is almost wholesome. I mean, even the villain (Pedro Pascal) loves his young son and warmly shows his affection, how much nicer can you be?

But there may be no better combination of guts and glam than Gal Gadot in the title role.  Having flashed ahead from the WWI  era to the mid 80’s, Diana Prince (Gal’s alter-ego) finds herself working at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, having something to do with gemstones and artifacts or whatever.  She’s in a mood – probably because she lost her boyfriend, Chris Pine, in the last movie, and so she’s a bit morose and defensive against the many males who hit on her, understandable, but she even rebuffs her smitten female colleague (Kristin Wiig, who will later, briefly ,become a villainess) before later letting her guard down enough to befriend her naïve and nerdy workmate.

The 80s setting is superficial at best, though as someone who lived in the DC area for 30 years, it was cool to see, as it always is, what the filmmakers captured and what they screwed up with the nation’s capital as a location. But apart from the villain’s double-breasted Gordon Gekko suit and some kids playing in a video arcade, the 80s setting feels more like a missed opportunity.

The other thing is, and I don’t even know how to put this into words, the main plot point is, like, super abstract. Instead of writing something that you can put your arms around, the filmmakers have chosen for the villain to go too big in his pursuit.

That is, in fact, my complaint with the movie itself. It’s just too much. Too long, too many sidebars, too…..just too much of everything.

Director Patty Jenkins isn’t the first director to get “sequelitis” – the phenomenon where you make a big movie that’s a big hit, so you feel the need to go even bigger for the follow up.  It’s almost always a mistake, though a perfectly logical one on paper.

What does work, besides the excellent cast, including the return of Chris Pine, which you’ll have to see for yourself what brings him back from being long dead, are some great action set pieces that are as skillfully filmed and edited as you could hope for.  An invisible jet? A lighted lasso? Yeah, they pull it off. Hopefully, we don’t have to still be surprised that a female lead in an action movie can kick ass and hold her own, but the positive representation is still nice to see.

Pretty sure this would’ve been spectacular on the big screen, but most of us will see it on HBO Max, where subscribers will have access to it for one month. The lucky and/or the brave and/or the foolhardy who see it in the cinema, where it is being simultaneously released, will be visually immersed from the first minutes of WW84.  Photos courtesy Warner Bros.

Kyle Osborne