Wonder Woman 1984

[Lunkhead]

We watched this last night at home. It was a pretty mixed bag. The actors did their best and were mostly good. It sounded and (mostly) looked great, although, some of the lasso CGI was a bit wonky. If you just want to see attractive people and pretty imagery and watch stuff happen and not think about anything much it's probably pretty enjoyable.

That being said, it suffers from painfully lazy writing, with no consistent internal logic/rules, erratically being heavy handed vs just completely glossing over things with no explanation whatsoever, etc. All the usual lazy stuff, which for me is super distracting and takes me out of my suspension of disbelief.

Wonder Woman's character and Gal Gadot's portrayal were by far the most solid aspects of it, so I guess that mostly kept it from flying apart and being a complete train wreck. Chris Pine was also good as "charming nice love interest" / "man out of time" tropes. He didn't really get any character development, though, and the way he's introduced into the movie felt a little abrupt.

Spoiler

I think they should have had Wonder Woman say something aloud about it rather than her just going with it like it was a totally normal thing. For a movie that beats you over the head about some things it felt like an odd choice to make her own participation in the overall moral problem at the heart of the film implicit at first.

Kristen Wiig did fine with what she was given. She starts off doing the bumbling mumbling mousy dork thing she's done a million times. It's maybe a bit too in her wheel house. Then her character goes through an arc and it's fairly believable up to a point, but, the jump to full on Cheetah felt abrupt and frankly unnecessary other than for fan service.

Speaking of fan service:

Spoiler

They give the fans the invisible jet. But it's like, um, how/why does she have access to an air hanger with a fighter jet? And Chris Pine's character can just intuitively learn how to fly a fighter jet instantly? And then all of a sudden for no apparent reason Wonder Woman can make anything invisible for as long as she wants? ("My father Zeus did it to Themyscira and I did it once to a coffee cup for a minute.") And a fighter jet can fly 5000+ miles from DC to Cairo? Overnight? So many things to gloss over just to give people the invisible jet and a fireworks show.

Anyway, Pedro Pascal I guess did an OK job as a cheesy 80s sales guy turned over-the-top comic villain (although he's not really that evil, frankly), assuming that's what he was going for. His character didn't really make a lot of sense to me, honestly, and very late in the game they toss in some really brief childhood backstory for him which felt unnecessary. A lot of these comic movies lately seem to be trying too hard to humanize the villains or maybe I guess make then "multidimensional" with some offhand backstory details, and it usually falls flat for me.

Spoiler

One of the weirdest things to me about the villains in this movie is that they are not shown facing ANY consequences of their actions. Cheetah just goes back to her normal self and looks at the night sky and then we never see her again. Maxwell Lord is reunited with his son and then we never see him again. WTF?! He just nearly ended humanity. And Maxwell Lord appears to be suffering some kind of physical consequences from granting wishes and it seems like they're setting something up with that, like it's going to kill him or he's going to transform too somehow, but then they just completely drop that thread for no reason.

And one more thing on the fan service front:

Spoiler

Wonder Woman flying. Ugh. Just, oy. I guess apparently it was something from old comics that hasn't been used in a while? And she can lasso clouds and lightning? All this shit just feels like writers spitballing and making stuff up on the fly, and I hate when a character's powers are basically just "whatever the lazy writers need them to be at any time to move the plot or character development how they want". Also in this case, this is a prequel of sorts to DC movies Wonder Woman is in that happen later in this universe's timeline where she doesn't do _any_ of this stuff, so it kinda makes the whole set of stories feel incoherent. I had the same problem with the Star Wars prequels where, thanks to modern CGI, the Jedis were doing all sorts of cool stuff they'd "never done before" in the original trilogy, which takes places after the prequels.

Anyway, I guess I'd give it a C+ but if you watch movies only with your eyes, ears, and adrenal glands, you might find it's a B.

Oh, my favorite part was the opening sequence on Themyscira. I really wish they could just do a whole movie just on Themyscira, maybe just some simple "coming of age" story or something. Everything set on the island just looks incredible and feels very light and entertaining and unencumbered by obligatory world-ending level stakes.

[jb]

I give it a D. One of the biggest issues I had was how the screenwriters project the audience’s knowledge into the characters. So none of them are surprised that Diana is showing up everywhere

[Niveous]

C minus from me. A mixed bag. The movie logic was such a mess, and I hated the ending. Hated.

[Niveous]

Wow. Have you ever heard all your opinions come out of someone else's mouth? That's how I felt watching this. Nailed it.

[Lunkhead]

Yeah, wow, he totally nailed it.

[the idiot king]

It’s very much a movie I think of as fun. Inoffensive, nothing special, and it made me miss movie theater popcorn as close as I get to replicating it at home.

[fluffy]

It was okay to have it on in the background. Overall it gave me the same vibe as that Superman movie with Kevin Spacey as Lex Luthor, where it was trying really hard to be an homage but missed the mark badly.