Wonder Woman 1984 is campy, corny, cheesy, and bloated, a major down grade from the 2017 film. The script is weak, on the level of a CW network TV show. The acting doesn't fare much better. Some characters, like Diana Prince, Steve Trevor and most of the minor characters, are wooden and under-acted, while characters like Maxwell Lord and Barbara Minerva are over-acted. The CGI at times looks cartoonish, and Kristin Wiig's fully realized Cheetah is
Cats laughable. About 30 to 35 minutes could have been (should have been) cut out, as the movie has too many slow paced moments that quicker editing could have helped eliminate. Something else dragging this movie down is that it is set in 1984 for no apparent reason other than to showcase the '80s styles and trends in a fit of cheesy campiness. In the third act, the tone suddenly and abruptly switches to over-baked ham-fisted melodrama.
It is the cinematography that elevates this movie slightly above a CW level of quality. There are some individual bits that are great, such as the creation of the invisible jet, and Wonder Woman swinging from lightning bolt to lightning bolt, but other things are real head scratchers, such as Wonder Woman dressing like Hawkgirl in the climax, or that Maxwell Lord as the main villain is essentially Impractical Joker's Joe Gatto from the genie punishment.
The chemistry between Gal Gadot and Chris Pine, which really drove the first movie, is still there, but it's not enough to salvage this sequel. For anyone who has seen the abysmal William Dozier Wonder Woman test reel from 1967, you will notice that a main aspect of it has been tweaked for the Steve Trevor character in this movie. All in all, it is easy to see why Warners did not release this movie on its original date pre-pandemic, and once the pandemic started, decided not to ride it out for a Summer 2021 date, and rather dumped it on the HBO Max streaming service. Apparently Warners has already put
Wonder Woman 3 on a fast track despite the mixed reviews for this movie. But these days, things change fast, so we'll see in time.
1 comment:
I agree with you. I thought that WW84 was the modern equivalent of Superman III: Mediocre to the core.
I thought the Steve and Diana bits felt genuine, and the Diana and Barbara bits felt genuine, too (up until Barbara turned on Diana), but it was all in service of a great big "meh."
The astonishing thing about this film is that it sat on a shelf for over a year. It was finished. And yet no one at WB during that time ever thought that anything was wrong with it, that anything needed to be fixed. That the Hamada regime has produced WW84, Shazam!, and BoP, but is not interested in continuing the Snyder-verse just further drives home what I, as a WB/DC customer, think is a staggering lack of good taste and judgment in the WB/DC leadership ranks.
(For what it's worth, my initial negative opinion of Shazam! has softened over the last two years (it went from a C to a B in my mind), but nevertheless, it's clear that what Walther Hamada thinks is good is just not connecting with audiences.)
I hope the middling response to this film is the final nail in the coffin to the nostalgists neverending attempt to keep recreating the first Chris Reeve Superman movie with every successive DC film. Superman '78 was great for its time, but times have changed.
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