Wonder Woman 1984 (Warner Bros., DC Comics, DC Entertainment, Atlas Entertainment, The Stone Quarry, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night Charles and I watched the other Blu-Ray disc I’d bought at our last Vons run along with Soul: Wonder Woman 1984, or as the film’s logo abbreviated it, WW84. As you’ll probably recall, Wonder Woman the character was created in 1941 by a psychologist, Dr. William Moulton Marston, as a sort of morale booster for women doing defense work, including such heavy-duty and traditionally male jobs like welding and riveting, while the men were off actually fighting the war – though her first comic-book appearance was in October 1941, before the U.S. was actually involved as a combatant in World War II. Before the current series started in 2017, Wonder Woman had appeared in a 1974 film starring Cathy Lee Crosby and a subsequent TV series with Lynda Carter (who appears in WW84 as Asteria in a post-credits sequence); there have been a number of cartoon adaptations but those were the only live-action movies until the current series kicked off in 2017 with Wonder Woman, directed by Patty Jankins from a script by three men: Zach Snyder, Allan Holmberg and Jason Fuchs.

In fact, it’s my understanding that the script was completely written before the executives at DC and Warner Bros. decided the project should really have a woman director, and they signed Jenkins on the strength of her film Monster, about Lesbian serial killer Aileen Wuornos. The film got excellent reviews and won an Academy Award for Charlize Theron’s performance as Wuornos, but I had problems with some of Jenkins’ decisions regarding the story – particularly her changing Wuornos’ girlfriend (and principal witness against her once she was finally caught) from a biker chick as hard-edged as Wuornos herself to a little teenage Lesbianette who was more “questioning” than actually “out.” When Jenkins’ first Wonder Woman movie was released in 2017, it got hailed as the superhero movie that would revive the flagging fortunes of the DC characters on film (which it largely did) and establish the superhero comic-book genre as one in which it would be possible to make Grand Statements about war, peace, humanity and the extent to which we owe each other support in our shared lives on Earth. I found the 2017 Wonder Woman good entertainment but weighted down by its pretensions, and I also wondered why the three male writers had decided to set this story, originated during the Second World War, in the First World War and include real-life characters like the German general Erich Ludendorff while giving him a personality and plot functions very different from his real ones.

What’s more, at the end of the movie they decided to have Wonder Woman time-travel and end up in the U.S. in the 1980’s – I can’t for the life of me remember how they explained that, not that it matters – and though Wonder Woman is supposed to have spent the intervening 66 years mourning the death in combat of her lover, fighter pilot Steve Trevor (Chris Pine), it’s not clear what else she’s been doing or even if she was conscious of the passage of time between her two appearances. This time Patty Jankins not only returned as director but was given a hand in writing the script, along with Geoff Johns and Dave Callaham, but just because the woman director was also a co-writer this time does not mean this movie is any more sensitive to the feminist aspects of the character than the first one. Frankly, though I can see why Warners and DC wanted a woman director to do the Wonder Woman movies, there are better ones around than Patty Jenkins – and not only the two women who’ve actually won the Academy Award for Best Director, Kathryn Bigelow and Chloe Zhao, but some of the people Lifetime has been incubating, including Christine Conradt and Vanessa Parise.

WW84 is reasonably entertaining as it stands, but I can see why it got a lot of adverse comments on social media when it was in its first run, mostly on streaming platforms since so few theatres were open during the pandemic. Not only is it one of those annoying fantasy stories in which the writers make anything happen just because it can, it tries to make Big Statements about the human condition and misses points that got nailed in Marvel’s Black Panther – which still remains my touchstone for attempts to use the comic-book superhero genre to deal with deep emotional and dramatic truths. The principal villain is Maxwell Lord, a character I first encountered in the Warners-DC Universe on the Supergirl TV series, where he was played by Peter Facinelli and emerged as a kind of wicked parody of the Ayn Rand capitalist superhero who regards himself as superior and entitled to rule over everyone else because he’s got more money than God. In this incarnation, Maxwell Lord is played by Pedro Pascal, who seems to have got the part largely because of his resemblance to pre-Parkinson’s Michael J. Fox and who’s drawn as a Trump-style figure (this movie is definitely a product of the Trump, not the Biden, Zeitgeist).

Diana Prince (Gal Godot) – Wonder Woman’s non-hero identity – works at the Smithsonian Institution cataloging historical relics and rare gems. She meets a rather ditzy colleague named Barbara Minerva (a typically quirky performance by Kristen Wiig) who insists on wearing stiletto heels to work even though she can barely walk in them. (I’m old enough to remember when the early second-save feminists denounced high heels as inherently sexist, a torture device to make it harder for women to function.) The two find a relic varioiusly referred to as the “Wish Stone” and the “Dream Stone,” which grants its holder one wish but at the cost of unforeseen consequences – much like the title object in W. W. Jacobs’ story “The Monkey’s Paw,” which actually gets referenced several times in the film. Eventually Max Lord (the shorter form of his first name is the one most often used here) buys access to this item via a major contribution to the Smithsonian, steals it and his one wish is that the stone be incorporated inside him, so now he has the power to grant wishes and, by doing so, enslave the people who make the wishes. Even Our Heroine makes a wish – she wants her hunky pilot from World War I back, and she gets him, setting up some bizarre fish-out-of-water gags in which he expresses amazement at the sight of subway trains, bicycles and escalators (all of which existed in 1918) and feels up the sight of a giant passenger plane out of amazement at its size compared to the dinky kites-with-motors he flew in “in the day.” (Charles joked, “It’s not as big as the starship Enterprise” – and I said, “I knew one of us would make a Star Trek joke,” referencing what’s probably become Pine’s most famous role as the young Captain James Tiberius Kirk in the current cycle of Star Trek films.)

The bulk of the film consists of Max Lord’s growing attempts to enslave the whole world in his web of wishes, including nearly starting World War III when he takes over the mind of a rather ineffectual President of the United States in exchange for granting his wish that the U.S. double the size of its arsenal of nuclear missiles – which causes the Russians to threaten to launch World War III. In the end Our Heroine realizes that the only way to restore the world to normal is to kill Max Lord, whereupon the wishes he’s granted will no longer be operative and the world will revert to normal – presented by some unintentionally funny shots of mushroom clouds de-exploding, missiles flying backwards and a woman whose husband wished her dead coming back to life in a tacky diner. I think there was a good movie hidden somewhere in this story premise, but it didn’t end up on the screen – and though it’s become a staple of the DC Universe I didn’t like the way one of Max Lord’s wish-grantings turned nice little Barbara Minerva into a super-villainess and Wonder Woman’s bitter enemy. I wouldn’t say WW84 is a bad movie; not only does it have a lot of the superhero action and violence people go see movies like this for (and Charles and I were impressed by the huge number of stunt people credited on the final roll; this is not one of those modern movies where they did almost all of it with CGI!), but it honorably tries to combine the superhero genre with screwball comedy – though even that was done a good deal better in the film that kicked off the modern superhero cycle, the 1978 Superman with Christopher Reeve. I’m probably coming off as a good deal more negative towards WW84 than I was while watching it, but in attempting at once to be a classic superhero movie, a dramatically serious one and a campily comic one, it seems to fall between all those cracks and not be all that satisfying as any of the above.