Wonder Woman 1984

Patty Jenkins proves to be a fantastic writer as she opens new doors to female-directed blockbusters. A solid follow up to the 2017 hit, Wonder Woman 1984’s chemistry with Gal Gadot and Chris Pine carries a great story with subpar action.

Being set in 1984, it barely utilizes the time period. The colors are flashy, the Russian nukes are involved, women wear yoga leggings at the mall, and Chris Pine wears a fanny pack. Besides that, the 80s nostalgia is only in the first few scenes before the action takes over. In Wonder Woman (2017), World War I controls every element of the film; everything Diana experiences surrounds the horrors of war and how the human world has collapsed into hatred. With the sequel set in the 80s, there is a theme of consumerism and wanting more, and it even takes over Diana’s values in an interesting way, but its dramatic weight holds nothing up to the intense scenery of the mud-filled trenches and barbed wire from the first film.

Similar to the setting’s involvement with the conflict, the fight scenes sadly disappoint in how it shows Wonder Woman in action. There are way too many shots of Gal Gadot in front of a green screen, sliding across floors, kicking, or just running, and none of it looks good. The effects are rushed, and the fight choreography feels as if it is hiding the cracks instead of showing off what it could be with such a big budget. The only fight scene I really enjoyed was when she beat up the security guards in the hallway with her lasso. The big truck-chase in Egypt was ruined by the shots of her running as fast as the trucks. It just felt unnatural, and the camera angles and VFX never convinced me otherwise.

Gal Gadot and Pedro Pascal really shine with their performances. Gadot shows her acting strength best when she is on her own, giving a lot of stand out, emotional scenes. Pedro Pascal plays a stressed con-man perfectly, showing the cracks forming from the very beginning as a sleazy opportunist that takes advantage of Kristen Wiig’s character in a subtle and terrifying way. Looking at all the performances, Chris Pine and Kristen Wiig fall short. Chris Pine has very little to do in the actual story; he is an obstacle and a person to bounce off Gal Gadot’s performance. When he finally takes control, for only two scenes, it revives the magic of the original film in the best way. The best scene is when he and Gal Gadot are in the jet. He is fantastic as the romantic subplot, giving Diana a reason to keep fighting. When the fighting starts, though, he has little to do and is left awkwardly in the background trying to punch people. With his great romantic charm, I wished there was more of him, but that is the point. Kristen Wiig, on the other hand, is not a dramatic actress, she is a SNL comedian, and she is miscast in her role as Cheetah. She works in the beginning by just being Kristen Wiig, but once her corruption begins, it feels plastic and unbelievable. Her chemistry with Gal Gadot stumbles when the emotional scenes need it most, and I think Wiig’s lack of range is what holds many scenes back, preventing the potential of her character from being achieved.

With all the action and performances aside, the script is pretty solid. The structure of how each character relies on their flaws and ignores how they are pulling themselves deeper into their destruction is done perfectly. The biggest antagonists to the protagonists are themselves. I enjoyed the rules of the wishing stone and how the desire for more continuously drowns the person that wished for something simple. The integration of the Cold War is done well by using the heated tensions of the US and Soviet Russia, doubling down on the necessity of the consumer buying everything they can to feel more powerful. The world of this story revolves around power and greed, and it is up to Diana to learn how to live in that world happily without clinging to the past. With all the work Patty Jenkins put into this film, her writing really shines with the twists and turns keeping each scene dynamic while still cohesively building up to a show-stopping finale.

Now, about that finale. Patty Jenkins was told by Warner Bros. to have a big bad-guy vs good-guy ending in her first attempt at Wonder Woman. What she had to do to keep the rest of her first film untouched sadly muddies the water in the themes and character development all together, and prevented me from returning to the film for years. The ending to Wonder Woman (2017) ruins the film at first glance. With the sequel, though, Patty Jenkins had a lot more influence with what stayed in the runtime and what was left out. The first two scenes—the flash back to Themyscira and the jewelry heist at the mall—were almost taken out by Warner Bros., but Patty Jenkins had enough leverage from the first film to convince them otherwise. With the full runtime in her hands, she had her own swing at the ending to her sequel, and she did not disappoint. The messages are a lot preachier and flashy with the “humanity is good'' angle, but the message strikes right to the heart and offers a few twists along the way to keep the audience intrigued. It greatly helped that Pedro Pascal was giving a loud and enjoyable performance to a very developed antagonist that had his arc shown through the whole film—rather than a surprise villain that only reveals himself as a cheap twist so he can throw tanks at Diana. The choices Patty Jenkins took in her script are bold for a superhero film, and I really respect her tenacity to keep Wonder Woman far away from the other female superhero films in terms of sticking power. She is powerful, empathetic, and compassionate, while also having the free time to redirect bullets with her shiny gauntlets.

Overall, this film has too many weak spots to really stand alone in the endless collection of superhero blockbusters. The structure is really solid and a lot of the characters are really well done. It is the weaker performances and mediocre score that slows down the pacing, which is further broken up by the sloppy action. Kristen Wiig was horribly miscast, Chris Pine can only be in so many scenes, but Pedro Pascal serves as a great antagonist and Gal Gadot shines as a living demigod in a great superhero outfit. It is a shame it came out during Covid, but at least I did not have to burn $30 like Mulan. If anything, this film convinced me that Patty Jenkins deserves her spot as writer-director, and I have all the time in the world to watch the beginning of her career as I wait for her next installment in the Wonder Woman saga.

The grand average score calculated from the 101 scenes:

58.38%

The limitation of the system I created is that transition scenes—short sequences where characters are traveling to the next beat in a story—are graded with the same scale as important scenes, and are therefore resulted in a lower score. With this happening, longer films result in much higher cumulative scores and lower percentage averages. The reason I create three different interpretations of the scores offers multiple windows into how the films develops: the rolling average shows the momentum shifting between scenes over time, the cumulative score shows the rising and falling quality of the film through the full runtime while also being compared to previously reviewed films, and lastly my most recent update of the grand average score being divided by a "perfect scenario" of every scene being scored a 4/5 and thus creating a percentage. This new percentage calculation is harmed by high quantities of transition scenes, which Wonder Woman 1984 has in spades. It is up to the reader to decide which interpretation is most helpful and/or accurate.