I can’t remember the last time a superhero movie disappointed me as thoroughly as Wonder Woman 1984. Granted, it’s also the first one I watched with any serious expectations since the original Wonder Woman, which remains terrific in ways that feel even more miraculous in light of the sequel’s bloat and superficiality. It would be one thing if this was clearly a lazy cash-grab, but there are ideas here. I mean, Diana Prince battling the hypocrisy and hubris of Reagan-era America? Sign me the heck up!
Except that isn’t what happens. In choosing smarmy, ambitious corporate suit Maxwell Lord as its chief antagonist, Wonder Woman 1984 sets the stage for a simplified yet potent moral reckoning with the corrupt pressures of capitalism and the false promise of the American Dream in much the same way that its predecessor tackled the horrors of war. Where the 2017 film foregrounded Diana’s internal conflict as she tried to reconcile her belief in humanity’s goodness with what she witnessed of its capacity for violence, however, the sequel gives its heroine no room to question the society in which she finds herself.
In fact, not only does Diana not challenge the status quo of the 1980s – which isn’t too far removed from our own – she accepts it. When Lord bellows “Don’t you want the world to be more?”, or whatever it is he says during the exhausting climax, she replies that the world is good as it is, a baffling response from a character who tore a room of British ministers a new one for treating soldiers as cannon fodder. In failing to examine systems of power and privilege, Patty Jenkins’s movie winds up defending the very culture it wants to critique: an oligarchy that sells itself as a meritocracy.
Epitomized by her declaration that “it’s not about [what people] deserve, it’s about what you believe, and I believe in love,” Wonder Woman understood with sharp-eyed clarity that Diana inspires not because she thinks people are inherently good, though she does, for the most part, but because she believes we can be better. She stands for love and hope, yes, but also justice, and WW84 seems to have forgotten that the former are useless without the latter; it’s so intent on projecting optimism it becomes drearily cynical.
In that spirit of imagining a better world, I wish we got a version of Wonder Woman 1984 that centered its second act on Diana showing Steve around D.C. and introducing him to the ‘80s instead of confining it to a hasty montage. I wish we saw his reaction to the existence of atomic bombs and how gender and sexual politics have changed since 1918, along with parachute pants and escalators. I wish it let Diana have a life after Steve’s death because 70-plus years is a really long time to not have any relationships, and there’s no way she would’ve skipped out on World War II and the 1960s. I wish Steve asked about what happened to Etta, Sameer, and the rest of their old crew, because that seems like something he’d care about. I wish there were explicitly queer characters and some mention of AIDS, because every time pop culture set in the ‘80s doesn’t recognize it feels like a new act of erasure. I wish the film called out Ronald Reagan by name and refrained from giving its Trump stand-in a tragic backstory, or at least gave him one that complicated the character instead of flattening him, which is to say I wish Hollywood would stop worrying about alienating conservatives and equating an unspecific point-of-view with a neutral one. I wish Natasha Rothwell had more than three lines of dialogue. I wish there were more ‘80s needle drops. I wish Hans Zimmer’s score felt as inspired as his original Wonder Woman theme, and I wish the action scenes had a sense of style and joy instead of feeling like interminable noise. I wish we could’ve stayed with Diana and Steve in that bed. I wish I didn’t still cry at their parting – or rather, I wish the movie earned my tears by developing their relationship in a meaningful way that acknowledged how it would be affected by death and the passage of time. Most of all, I wish it didn’t feel like such a fanciful request to want superhero films – any blockbusters, for that matter – with substance, personality, and a story and characters that feel written, not formulated by an algorithm or a boardroom of investors who only value art when they can profit from it.
The world we know isn’t the only one that can ever exist. Wonder Woman is supposed to guide us to a better one that lives up to our highest ideals, but instead, she seems to have gotten stuck in the muck like the rest of us.
lovingly derivative 