BEFORE: I suddenly realized last week (it's late February as I'm writing this) that "Wonder Woman 1984" was no longer on HBO Max, because it turned out that this "streaming the same day as theatrical release" thing for Warner Bros. came with an expiration date, a little fact they neglected to mention or properly publicize when they decided to bring the movie theaters into America's living rooms. So since I had programmed this film for March, after my usual February chain, I suddenly found myself without a way to watch it at a reasonable price. Suddenly my only options were to rent this on either iTunes or Amazon, both at the cost of $19.99. Now, this was not the end of the world, for sure, I've got $19.99 to spend and I'll probably have extra money to burn in the future, but things are a bit tight right now, and cable's expensive enough as it is. Thankfully, my boss heard me complaining about this movie expiring from HBO Max, and allowed me to borrow his Academy screener. So I've got to watch it out of sequence, because I promised to return the disc to him ASAP. My conscience is clear because I'll probably end up buying the DVD in the future, I just shouldn't have to double-pay for it, 20 bucks now and another $20 when the DVD comes out.
I've heard various things, this movie is great, this movie is terrible, this movie didn't live up to expectations. Let me just watch the damn thing now and get it over with, after the year we've had with releases not getting released, delayed films getting more delayed, and even though we've FINALLY got a target date for movie theaters opening up in one out of the two biggest markets (umm, I think the L.A. area's probably going to need a bit more time...) I'm not really sure if the NYC theaters are going to screen the 2020 films they missed, or just move ahead with future releases and not look back. Anything's possible, I just know that it's too inconvenient for me to go all the way to New Jersey just to watch a movie - so, screener it is.
Connie Nielsen carries over from "The Hunted"
(EDIT: I don't want to skip a day out of Women's History Month, so here are today's influential women birthdays: Swiss women's rights advocate Marie Adam-Doerrer (born March 23, 1838), American mathematician Susan Jane Cunningham (born in 1842), German-American mathematician Emmy Noether (born in 1882), actress Joan Crawford (born in 1904), inventor of Liquid Paper Bette Nesmith Graham (born in 1924) and singer Chaka Khan (born in 1953). Also Happy Birthday to actresses Amanda Plummer, Catherine Keener, Hope Davis, Michelle Monaghan and Keri Russell.)
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Wonder Woman" (Movie #2,652)
THE PLOT: Diana Prince must contend with a work colleague and businessman, whose desire for extreme wealth sends the world down a path of destruction after an ancient artifact that grants wishes goes missing.
AFTER: The first "Wonder Woman" film was set in 1918, and it's a long time between that year and 1984 - that's 66 years Diana Prince spent fighting crime in secret, and at some point she landed a job at the Smithsonian Museum, which is where we first saw her (our past, but still her future) in "Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice". She doesn't seem to age like normal humans do, but still, that's a long time for her to put her head down and just do her job, remaining in the shadows, never giving a thought to forming another strong relationship with a regular person, but sure, there's an explanation, she's still hung up on Steve Trevor, the love of her life that she spent what, a few weeks with, 66 years ago? Most superheroes are single, if you think about it - they're already leading a double life, they're busy most of the time, many of them are just not mentally stable enough to have a successful relationship, and on a more practical level, the average comic-book writer is also single, and people tend to say "Write what you know..." Batman's been single since 1939 (he almost married Catwoman two years ago, but it was a fake-out), and Superman may be the exception here, but he's only been married to Lois Lane (twice now, maybe three times if you count re-boots) for a relatively short time, considering how long he's been around.
In the DC Universe, marriage presents a huge logistical problem, when you have a new writer taking over any given character's comic book every year or so, and some of those writers are willing to work a relationship into the storyline, while others want to skip that in favor of blowing stuff up and otherwise saving the world. (Marvel may have a few more married super-heroes, but they have the same problem with Spider-Man, Hawkeye, and even Ant-Man & Wasp - the next writer always wants to undo what the last writer did, and that includes marriages, so they either end in divorce or get retconned away, or both.) Anyway, nothing is permanent in comic books except for change, so if your favorite character gets married or even dies, just wait a few months or years and the situation may change. I was just discussing this the other day with my co-worker, how for years Marvel kept resurrecting old characters, even dead ones, and really no character is dead if an writer can come up with a believable or even far-fetched way to bring them back. For years Marvel fans said, "No character is really dead except for Bucky" - because Captain America's sidekick dying at the end of World War II meant something, it drove Captain America and gave him a reason to fight on, plus you could tell immediately when a Cap story was set by whether Bucky was alive or not. But even then, some clever writer came up with a way to bring Bucky back, he didn't really die in that plane crash, but got frozen in ice like Cap did, then they gave him the Six-Million-Dollar-Man treatment and turned him into a secret Russian assassin called the Winter Soldier. It made sense, he could both still be alive AND since he was undercover, this explained why nobody else knew he was alive.
So, for months the audience had seen previews for "Wonder Woman 1984", and the worst kept secret in Hollywood was that Steve Trevor would, somehow, be back in Diana's life. HOW? Time travel, possibly - he could have been teleported off that plane just before it blew up and time-shifted to 1984. That was the most reasonable explanation, unless he was only mostly dead, frozen in ice, given bionic parts and turned into a secret Russian assassin for 60 years. Umm, OK, but that's been done before. I went into this one today still not knowing exactly how Steve Trevor could be alive again, so spoilers avoided, mission accomplished there. But I'm not sure that the answer given here was a satisfying one, and it points to the big problem with this movie overall - at every possible instance, the cart is being placed before the horse. Someone decided what the main plot would feature, as is normal, most movie ideas start with "Hey, wouldn't it be great if..." and then the writers just have to figure out a way to make THAT happen. But it's so obvious here, you can clearly see all of the "Hey, wouldn't it be great if"s, and then the overall plot has to bend over backwards and sideways in order to make that all happen.
I'll just stick to the first two sequences, and then no more spoilers about the plot - the first chapter here concerns an incident from Diana's childhood, where she's competing in some kind of triathlon race (mixed with a sort of "Wipeout"-style challenge) across Themyscira, against adult Amazon warriors - you'd think that since she's smaller she'd be at a physical disadvantage across the board. Kids have to take twice as many steps as adults do, if you think about it, but Diana makes up for this with her strength and determination. However, after getting knocked off her horse, Diana spots a slide that will take her quickly and conveniently down a mountainside, so she can catch up with her horse, which kept running without her because reasons. But she missed one of the checkpoints, so even though she had the opportunity to finish the race in first place, that still would have been cheating. The takeaway from this lesson is that Wonder Woman always stands for truth, that's kind of her thing. (Remember this, it may be important later...)
The second sequence sets the rest of the story firmly in the 1980's - we see a bunch of kids playing video-games in a mall, and also a woman jogging while wearing a walkman who almost gets hit by a Trans Am - so very 80's! And at that mall, a bunch of crooks rob a jewelry store, but not for money or the jewelry, they're there because of the black-market cultural antiquities business that's going on in the back. They nailed it, because wasn't every mall jewelry store back then really making it's money through black-market anthropology? The thieves make it out of the store with four bags of hard-to-carry antiquities, and this is, unfortunately, where the film starts to run off the rails. Upon encountering just one mall cop, the thieves all drop their stolen goods - you know, the reason they were there to begin with - and do stupid things like try to run up the down escalators and hold a little girl dangerously over that big open space in the middle of the mall. OK, so they're not criminal masterminds, but on the first sign of security, does it make sense that they all become idiots? They're smart enough to plan a robbery, but not smart enough to carry one out? Of course, they're really just cannon fodder to introduce Wonder Woman as a vigilante hero working in secret in the D.C. area, meaning that the news reports are always, "Umm, somebody stopped this robbery, but nobody's really sure who, or how." Well, there WERE witnesses, but somehow because one little girl agreed to keep quiet, the police and press are mystified. COME ON!
Again, it's putting the cart before the horse, plot-wise. The ends justify the means, and then as long as the scriptwriter gets THERE, it doesn't really matter how. Except that really, it does. One of these antiques is the key to giving both the minor super-villain and the major super-villain their powers, and it's got everything to do with wish-fulfillment. Which, as we saw in the opening scene, is not the same as reality - wishing something true doesn't make it so, even if it appears to. Marvel's been hitting this same sort of storyline with "WandaVision", where Wanda has the power to change reality, bring her dead robot husband back to life, even create two children magically and they can all live together in the ideal sitcom world of Eastview, New Jersey - only wishing a fantasy into reality doesn't always make it so, even if it appears to for a limited time.
Collectively we've created these fictional universes where nobody ever dies for real - the X-Men comics now have this immortality woven right in to their framework - all the mutants have back-up copies of their minds made regularly, another mutant has the power to clone their old bodies and grow a new one from an egg, but is that resulting mutant really the same person who was alive before, or just a copy? It's the "Replicas" conundrum, if you ask me. Maybe this is the kind of wishful thinking that some people enjoy, because of all the death in the world right now, but from a story standpoint, to me it's just more cheating.
Barbara Minerva, Diana's co-worker, wishes to be "just like Diana", meaning as popular as, as charming as, as likeable as - but she didn't realize that would also come with super-strength and other awesome things. Sure, but what's the downside? And Maxwell Lord just skips over the simple wishes, even skips over wishing for multiple wishes, and goes straight to the end of the "Aladdin" movie, where he wishes to become the genie himself. Umm, did he miss the part where that never ends well? Maxwell Lord is a character that's been kicking around the DC Comics books for a long-time, but I don't think he's appeared much in the movies and TV shows. Here he's a clear stand-in for Donald Trump, he starts out as a businessman who's got no real workable business, he's a con-man who promises everybody everything because that gets him investors, friends and probably a lot of tail. Sound familiar yet? What about the cheap suits and the horrible comb-over, are you getting it yet? No? How about the secret deals with heads of state around the world? How about building a giant WALL? (OK, it's in Egypt, not on the U.S./Mexico border, but it's clearly a reference...)
Lord also, in a very Trump-like fashion, never talks about the COST of getting things done, the trade-off that people have to make in order to get what they want. He just tells everybody whatever they want to hear, that's it's all possible, you can get rich if you just listen to him. You can get rid of those immigrants you don't like, if you just follow him. Whatever you want, you just have to name it, and we'll talk about quid pro quo later. It's all too familiar here, and yes, it is nice to see this being called what it is - the work of a super-villain. I would quite properly equate Donald Trump with Lex Luthor (who did become President in the DC universe, for a while anyway, and it was two reboots ago) but obviously Luthor's taken by the Superman films, so now Lord = Trump, I'm sure of it.
It's nice to see Steve Trevor again, too - and don't worry too much about the how or the why, because clearly the director didn't. There was some fuss online about how he was brought back, and what it all meant, and the talk over the implications of it all got icky rather fast, so I don't expect anyone will try something else like this again, at least not until a new writer takes over and thinks they have a better way to do this. May I recommend time travel, and snatching him from the plane in 1918 just before it blows up? It's just as impossible, and also a whole lot tidier. Also, remember that when the old TV series "Wonder Woman" wanted to jump ahead from the World War II era to the modern day (1970's), they just carried Steve Trevor over, same actor, same job, into another decade, with NO explanation at all. Who cares? The writer's job is to tell good stories with the characters they're given to work with, and worry about all the little details later. Every comic-book tale is set during "story time", which is whatever year it needs to be set in in order to make the story work.
And this is the way that the DC comic books are going - after so many reboots, from "Crisis on Infinite Earths" to "Year Zero" to "Infinite Crisis", "Rebirth", and now "New Frontier" is on the way next month, they've gone from a universe to a multiverse to a 52-universe continuum, and the new definition is a "linearverse", which means that all the stories ever told are ones that happened, there will always be a Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman in every universe, despite how many times things reset themselves, and once in a while, these comic book characters become aware of the fact that other universes existed before theirs, but it's sort of a passing phase, and before long they always return to the here and now and punching whatever super-villain is standing in front of them. The creators have settled for something ultimately comforting but also updatable, as they have to try to maintain a longtime reader-base while also creating new "jumping on" points for new readers. Hollywood is bound to follow suit, with the ability to re-cast and re-boot every franchise, eventually. (How many actors, in total have played Batman? Superman? Spider-Man?)
So there you go, "Wonder Woman 1984" doesn't make a bit of sense, really, but there's no rule that says it has to. We'll see Diana Prince again, hopefully in modern times for her third movie, and meanwhile they'll keep trying to satisfy everybody with reboots of "Justice League" and "Suicide Squad". But I think they'd be better off focusing their efforts on making those movies GOOD, instead of just hitting the story beats that they think everybody wants. Just a suggestion. Wonder Woman now gains a new super-power, and she gets her invisible jet, but I wish, as suggested by the opening sequence, she could have come by these things honestly - this method feels so much like cheating.
NITPICK POINT: Diana and Steve steal a military jet because they can't fly to Egypt fast enough via commercial plane. Plus Steve doesn't have a passport - only he might, if they just stopped for a minute to think about it and look for it. NITPICK POINT #2: This event occurs on July 4, and then like a week later in movie time, there's a Christmas scene? NITPICK POINT #3: Being able to pilot a plane in 1918 is probably not good enough experience to pilot a fighter jet in 1984. I'm guessing those are nearly totally different actions. Same in principle, sure, but the jet seems like a hundred times more complex. NITPICK POINT #4: Being invisible to the naked eye and "invisible" to radar are also probably two different things, I'm willing to wager.
Also starring Gal Gadot (last seen in "Between Two Ferns: The Movie"), Chris Pine (last seen in "Smokin' Aces"), Kristen Wiig (last seen in "Where'd You Go, Bernadette"), Pedro Pascal (last seen in "The Equalizer 2"), Robin Wright (last seen in "The Private Lives of Pippa Lee"), Natasha Rothwell (last seen in "Love, Simon"), Lilly Aspell, Ravi Patel (last seen in "Long Shot"), Gabriella Wilde (last seen in "The Three Musketeers" (2011)), Kristoffer Polaha, Amr Waked (last seen in "Lucy"), Oliver Cotton (last seen in "The Dark Force Rises"), Kelvin Yu (last seen in "Cloverfield"), Asim Chaudhry (last seen in "Greed"), Stuart Milligan (last seen in "Hunter Killer"), Patrick Lyster, Constantine Gregory (last seen in "Flawless"), Shane Attwooll (last seen in "Legend" (2015)), David Al-Fahmi, Kevin Wallace, Wai Wong (last seen in "Spectre"), Doutzen Kroes (last seen in "Justice League"), Lyon Beckwith, Ryan Watson, Jimmy Burke, Brandon Thane Wilson, Lucian Perez, Lambdo Demetriou, Jonny Barry, with a cameo from Lynda Carter (last seen in "Super Troopers 2")
RATING: 4 out of 10 fanny packs
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