Wonder Woman 1984 is Really Long and Very Bad

Wonder Woman 1984. Image courtest of Warner Bros

Wonder Woman 1984 probably deserves some leeway. 2020 has been a hard year, and the fact that this movie even made it up on screens is something of an accomplishment. I had high hopes for this movie, since I really liked Patty Jenkins first take on the character and I like Gal Gadot as Diana. However, Warner Bros has not inspired particularly robust confidence in their ability to handle these DC properties and in my opinion this Wonder Woman sequel drops the ball. It even manages to pull of the difficult trick of making Pedro Pascal really hard to watch.

This movie suffers from the same problems as Aquaman - it’s too long and it’s overstuffed. I don’t know why but Warner Bros keeps doing this with their DC movies. Instead of stripping them down and focusing on doing a few elements well, they just throw everything at the wall and see what will stick. Wonder Woman 1984 has at least two villains, and it goes the extremely lazy route of resurrecting Chris Pine’s character from the first movie which is boring but also kind of cheapens the sacrifice his character made.

And somehow, in all this noise, Pedro Pascal’s performance manages to stand out as being quite terrible. Making Kristen Wiig into a villain should have been a great and unexpected move that played against type, but it’s completely wasted. I could not believe just how long this movie was. Every time I thought it was getting close to concluding, it kept adding on more parts and more villains. I began to suspect as I watched it that the movie needed some reshoots after principal photography wrapped, but they weren’t able to get the actors back in the studio because of COVID-19 so had to edit around it (Pedro Pascal’s final scene seemed particularly hacked together).

I think at this point Warner Bros has proved they do not know what they are doing with these films. Joker was masterful, but they keep putting out bombs like Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey and now the one character who had a good film going for her was not done justice in this bloated, confusing and rather boring sequel. The really remarkable thing is they keep making the same mistakes, overstuffing these films and not spending the time to get the details right.

The first Wonder Woman spent quite some time developing Steve and Diana’s relationship - there is a lengthy interlude in a boat where they talk about the classics of Amazonian literature or something. This is important, because it gets you invested in their relationship so that down the line when Diana is doing ridiculous things like going over the top of some German trenches while wearing a dangly mini-skirt, you buy into it. Wonder Woman 1984 doesn’t spend the time to get the buy-in, so when the ridiculous stuff starts to fly you see it for what it is - nonsense.

I don’t want to be too hard on the film, because movies are precious things in these trying times, but just like with Birds of Prey and Aquaman I could not wait for Wonder Woman 1984 to end.