Pining After Pine: Wonder Woman 1984
It will be a historic day in my life when I can safely step back into a movie theater, buy overpriced popcorn, and be able to watch and react to lovely cinema in the dark and sometimes communal atmosphere that only a movie theater can create. Until then, I will gladly watch new releases on streaming services. At least we’re finally getting new films, right? So when HBO announced that the new Wonder Woman 1984 was going to be released on HBO Max on Christmas, watching it was a no-brainer. Not only is one of my favorite actors, Pedro Pascal, in it but I had been missing a good dose of female superheroes- Wandavision wasn’t released yet, Black Widow is to this day being pushed further and further away. Having been iffy on the first installment, I didn’t have high hopes for Wonder Woman 1984, yet it still disappointed me.
In this film, we follow Diana Prince aka Wonder Woman decades after the events of her debut movie. She’s working at a museum, seems to have caught on and gotten used to navigating her immortality and society. With Kristen Wiig as Cheetah, the film’s main villain, it seemed to have all the potential in the world. It was marketed as that too, consistently suggesting a powerful woman-led, feminist superhero film, that with director Patty Jenkins couldn’t go wrong. But it did.
There are some minor spoilers incoming: nothing that will give away the entire plot of the film, but spoilers nonetheless. If you want to take my synopsis above, run with it and nothing else to watch it for yourself first, be my guest. This film tackles an attempted subversion of dominant and traditional perceptions of womxn, looking at modern day inequities: the women are harassed by men on the street, the question of “popularity” and fitting in with feminine norms to achieve it. And yet, Diane’s very character is blinded by a stereotypical trope: being blinded by love. It was very difficult for me to believe that this powerful woman, who is completely valid to have emotions, but hasn’t seen her love, Steve, in nearly seventy years and only knew him for a few weeks (maybe months) is completely and utterly thrown off her game when he comes back.
Not only this, but there were many inconsistencies that threw me off balance: Diane being subjected to the male gaze and internalizing it despite growing up on and spending decades on an island where men didn’t even exist, her making colossal mess-ups because of her returned boyfriend, a truly long scene dedicated to a wardrobe montage of Steve, the fact that Steve can fly a 1984 plane despite having only been a pilot in the 1910s. The list grows and grows with each minute, and a good chunk of the film (which has a runtime of two and a half hours) is simply dedicated to her and Steve’s relationship, which was ended promptly at the end of previous one. Talk about beating a dead horse, or a dead Steve for that matter.
I can rant all day about this strange relationship and Diane’s desires all day long, but the pitfalls of the film don’t just end there. Wonder Woman 1984 cares so much about Steve coming back, that they fail to develop the other characters who are there as well. Maxwell Lord’s character is dependent on your preconceived notions about capitalist men while trying to give him more depth but not doing so until the final minutes of the film’s end which was an extremely odd place to just plop in some backstory. Cheetah’s character is brilliant but is so transfixed on the superficial, another trope overdone and harmful to the way we portray womxn in film. Between her and Lord, there is just simply not enough time to develop both of them in a holistic manner. Rather than explore the intricacies of these villains, or giving them more three-dimensional backstories, we are left with rather boring and surface level villains that Diane takes down too easily. Jenkins has us watch an hour-long stint of Steve returning rather than creating a sophisticated plot and I believe that is the biggest let-down of Wonder Woman 1984.
If you have exhausted your choices on streaming platforms, Wonder Woman 1984 can be a fine watch. Just don’t go into those two and half hours with any expectations other than entertainment.
Rating: 1 out of 5 Steve outfits, I guess.