I watched Wonder Woman 1984, and I could follow it okay despite not seeing the previous one thousand nine hundred and eighty-three films. The problem with this joke of course is that if you've watched all the DCU movies before this one, it does actually feel like there's been that many (and there might soon be that many if Zack Snyder insists on taking his revenge on the world by remaking them all), and this one drags a lot, too.
It was only when the action scenes - in which Wonder Woman is Spider-Man now for some reason - started that I realised there were no musical numbers, because this thing is like a Bollywood superhero movie more than anything else I've seen in years. Just not in a good way.
I guess if it had the musical numbers I might have liked it more, if only because I would know that it knew how stupid it was, but there's some troubling subtext in here about that is never quite unpacked and ratified with the supposedly compassionate and warm person at the center of the story, such as how exactly does this person lecture anyone when her mission is exporting Themyscira's philosophy of an isolationist, martial society which ritualises violence, seems to have drafted its entire population into its military, and which teaches its children that they must fear the Other outside their walls who are perpetually warlike and would be pitiable if not for how dangerous and lesser they are? "The enemy is both weak and strong" - I mean, come on now.
We keep hearing about compassion from Diana, but it's just words, which is a shame because I actually quite liked the idea of ending one of these seemingly endless superhero films on something other than a giant space machine menacing the world and having to be dropped on the baddie's head, but there's a character in this movie who seems like they really should have been the one talking the baddie down off the ledge (his son) rather than Diana, a demigod who is already fully-formed as a character when the film starts and thus has no real need to grow from her experiences. Don't get me wrong, I do like the idea of a hero as a film's moral compass, too, but there's that small matter of The Fascism that never gets addressed before the hero shows up dressed head to toe in glittering gold like something out of an Aryan wet dream. I will also never forgive the makers for having her show up with giant stupid wings yet never find a pretext for the actor to utter the words "Gordon's Alive". For fuck's sake, this is basic cinema.
Anyway, did I actually like it? The first half is okay, if very low-key silly and not much to do with Wonder Woman, but the second half is more openly dumb, concerning an orbital death ray laser that shoots wishes and is powered by the Mandolorian in a Quantum Leap Accelerator, and I do love me some orbital death ray action - the final act of Die Another Day was the best part - so I did like the willful stupidity of it all, but all told, it felt like a lesser movie than the previous Wonder Woman outing.
A perfectly passable superhero film, but unremarkable and entirely forgettable.
