'Wonder Woman 1984' Is the Worst DCEU Film So Far

I first used the title above for my review of Birds of Prey.  But, as it happens, I found its DCEU successor to be worse than it.  Yep.  For me, Wonder Woman 1984 is the worst among the nine DCEU films so far.

Wonder Woman 1984 is set in, well, 1984 – several decades after the first movie.  As Princess Diana of Themyscira continually fulfills her heroic duties as Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), she also maintains the civilian alter ego of Diana Prince, who works as an antiquities expert at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C.  One day, an encounter with a mysterious, ancient artifact triggers a series of events that causes Diana to be somehow reunited with her late lover Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) and to clash with supervillains Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) and Cheetah (Kristen Wiig) for the fate of the world.

This movie is such a letdown, primarily because it is the sequel to 2017’s Wonder Woman, which is one of DCEU’s best films.  Thus, when compared, the discrepancy in quality is painfully noticeable.  And it’s rather surprising consider that there was no change of director.  In fact, unlike the first movie, Patty Jenkins also co-wrote the script.  That means she had more creative control with this sequel.

But that could also probably be the reason why there was a huge drop in quality from Wonder Woman to Wonder Woman 1984.  The original writer, Allan Heinberg, wrote a good script for the former.  On the other hand, Jenkins (along with Geoff Johns and Dave Callaham) did not.  Her script sucks.  Its products: cringy scenes, godawful dialogue, underwhelming characterizations, and an asinine plot riddled with gaping plot holes, lazy plot points, and numerous “just happens to be” coincidences.

The plot’s incompetence is made quite obvious because it revolves around an unremarkable McGuffin that operates on inconsistent rules.  For example (SPOILERS), there’s no reason why the story must have Steve Trevor possess a random man’s body, when the McGuffin’s powers can clearly change reality, and thus, there’s no reason why it can’t straight up resurrect him.  It also unnaturally embraces absurdities that breaks suspension of disbelief, such as Steve Trevor somehow knowing how to fly a fighter jet when its workings are radically different from the WW I planes that he used to fly.  In addition, it’s thematically incoherent.  Its opening scene is a flashback (which, by itself, is actually genuinely entertaining) that’s seemingly setting up an important theme.  But as it turns out, it doesn’t connect to anything that happens later on.

None of the characters are striking.  Although I did like Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman and Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor, it’s simply because I already liked them prior in the first movie.  But if this had been the first time I would be seeing these characters, I probably wouldn’t have cared for them.  Kristen Wiig’s Barbara Cheetah is quite forgettable, as the treatment for her is the derivative socially-awkward-nerd-turned-confident-supervillain character arc that we’ve seen before in Michelle Pfeiffer’s Catwoman in Batman Returns, Jim Carrey’s Riddler in Batman Forever, Jamie Foxx’s Electro in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and (ugh) Halle Berry’s Catwoman in Catwoman.  Meanwhile, just as how great Pedro Pascal’s performance is in The Mandalorian, that is how bad he is in this movie.  He really hammed it up.  There’s this once scene where he looked so ridiculous and meme-worthy – the scene where he absorbed the McGuffin – that it made me burst out laughing.

My guess is that Jenkins’ intention with Wonder Woman 1984 is to not only make a superhero film set in the 80’s, but also as if it was made in the 80’s.  In theory, that’s absolutely awesome.  She probably was aiming for “cheesy fun”, similar to what James Wan brilliantly did with Aquaman.  Thus, there’s an attempt to channel 80’s camp. Unfortunately, she just couldn’t pull it off.  Her execution was awkward and lacked wittiness.  And thus, instead of “cheesy fun”, Wonder Woman 1984 turned out being just absolutely corny.

Eye-popping spectacles could have still saved this movie.  But it even lacks those.  The CGI is unimpressive.  There are several that’s-obviously-a-green-screen scenes.  Meanwhile, the set pieces are rather basic; there’s no memorably exciting action at all.  This is baffling, actually.  The story is bad, because the writer is different – understandable.  However, the director is the same as before.   Thus, there’s no reason why it doesn’t have any action sequences that are as great as those in the first movie (especially that sequence where Wonder Woman leads a charge across No Man’s Land and liberate a village from Nazis).

Did I like anything about Wonder Woman 1984?  Aside from Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Chris Pine as Steve Trevor, I also liked the joke about the trash can (a delightful jab at postmodern art) and Lynda Carter’s cameo during a mid-credits scene.  Other than those, I can’t remember anything else that I notably had fun with.

And thus, you can say that I didn’t like this movie in general.  It’s simply so bad – and not even the so-bad-it’s-good kind of way that can be ironically enjoyed.  It’s just the bland and disappointing kind of bad.

Hopefully, the DCEU gets redeemed by the new Suicide Squad movie by James Gunn, which looks very promising.