Wonder Woman 1984 is big, bold and real damn dumb

The cast members of Wonder Woman 1984 look great in their ’80s outfits. The colors pop and the soundtrack soars, but the script is godawful.

Partway through Wonder Woman 1984, Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) and Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) need to fly from Washington, D.C. to Egypt, fast. They hop into a jet on the Fourth of July, marveling at a fireworks display as they soar right through it.

The sequence is lovingly directed by Patty Jenkins, with Gadot and Pine both giving their all to sell it. It’s also so stupid I nearly had to pause the movie to catch my breath. Here is an incomplete list of questions that have to be answered before this sequence can make any kind of sense:

1. The reason they’re taking a jet rather than flying commercial is because Steve “doesn’t have a passport.” You see, Steve is a long-dead World War I-era pilot brought back to life in the body of a dude credited only as “Handsome Man” thanks to a wish Wonder Woman makes on a magic rock. But did they check Handsome Man’s drawer for a passport? If he has one they could have avoided all of this.
2. How in the hell did they just wander onto a military base and hijack a jet without anyone noticing?
3. Oh wait, do they take it from the Smithsonian? That’s even weirder. Since when does a museum keep battle-ready fighter jets fueled and ready to go?
4. Once in the air, the people on the ground finally catch on that someone is making off with an incredibly valuable military resource and start to give pursuit. Wonder Woman (who forgets that radar exists, naturally) turns the plane invisible, which is…I guess something she can do now?
5. The biggest blank for me is that Steve, who last flew a plane in 1918, is perfectly capable of flying an advanced fighter jet in 1984. I’m not an aeronautics expert, but I’m thinking that’s…beyond preposterous?
6. Is it safe to fly right through a fireworks display? Also, why is Steve Trevor acting like the concept of fireworks is completely new to him? Fireworks are over a thousand years old, and have been used to celebrate the Fourth of July in the United States since the country began. Steve missed the last 65 years of human history, not the last 6,500.

I’m also told that no fighter plane could fly straight from D.C. to Egypt without needing to stop and refuel, although I’ll have to take the person’s word on that one.

The movie is full of gob-stoppingly dumb moments like this. Another great one comes towards the end, when Wonder Woman — who has shed her usual outfit for a golden suit of armor sacred to her people — is fighting with Cheetah (Kristin Wiig). The two end up underwater, and Wonder Woman defeats her nemesis by holding her there where a power cable zaps the surface of the lake, electrifying everything in it.

I think the problem here is obvious. Cheetah is knocked unconscious by the electricity but Wonder Woman, who is also submerged and wearing an electrically conductive suit of armor, is fine. What?

Then there’s Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), an oil tycoon who absorbs that wish-granting rock I mentioned earlier. He thus gains the ability to grant wishes himself, according to a set of rules that’s way more convoluted than it needs to be. One of the rules is that he can only grant wishes if the person making the wish touches him, although I didn’t realize that was the rule until the movie breaks it for the climax, where Max highjacks the world’s airwaves and gets people around the world to make wishes for him to grant. Apparently they’re “touching” him because…they’re touching the “TV particles” emanating from the screen? And that’s as good as touching him in person even though they’re thousands of miles away? I guess?

What kills me about that one is that they could have just invented their way out of it. Why make a rule that limits how wishes can be granted if you’re just going to break it in a nonsensical way later? Wish-granting rocks aren’t real; you can write whatever rules you want about them, so write one that works for your story.

I don’t subscribe to the CinemaSins school of critique that holds that movies are the sum total of their little niggling mistakes. Movies have contrivances and tentpole superhero movies have more than most, but Wonder Woman 1984 is mostly contrivance. I expect to have to turn my brain off a bit to enjoy a big action movie, but I still have to be conscious. If I turned my brain off enough to enjoy this movie I’d be legally dead.

The pacing is also terrible, and the movie can’t seem to figure out what it’s trying to say. A fun-but-overlong scene in the beginning shows us a time when young Diana cheated to win some kind of Amazon decathlon, and got chastised for it. I kept waiting for that theme to resurface, and it…kind of does? Because Diana is cheating by keeping Steve Trevor around even though he’s hijacked the body of another guy, which raises weird moral questions that are never addressed?

Only she didn’t choose to make that happen like she chose to cheat at the race. Even if I reach, it doesn’t fit, which makes me wonder why that Olympic sequence was included at all. Maybe to give cameo appearances to some of the Amazon actors from the first movie?

I feel like a lot of scenes are here for stupid reasons like that. The sequence with the jet isn’t there because it’s good for the story; the writers wanted a scene with Wonder Woman’s famous invisible jet so they wrote one, mountain of contrivances be damned. There’s a scene where Steve Trevor tries on ’80s clothes not because it develops his character or because it’s funny, but because ’80s movies sometimes have scenes like that so this movie does too.

In between all this, the movie tries to cram in an arc for Cheetah/Barbara Minerva that takes her from Diana’s mousy coworker to apex predator. Despite the movie’s two-and-a-half hour runtime, it feels rushed, and reminds me of other nerd-to-nemesis arcs in movies like Batman Returns, Batman Forever, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and even The Incredibles.

In fact, Wonder Woman 1984 has never met a cliche it didn’t love. There’s a stretch where Diana halfway loses her powers, making me think of when the same thing happened in Superman 2, Spider-Man 2, The Dark Knight Rises and Thor, and that’s just off the top of my head. Originality is not this movie’s strong suit.

Patty Jenkins has made a great-looking movie. The color palette is bubblegum bright, effectively evoking the spirit of ’80s action movies. Gal Gadot looks great as Wonder Woman and as Diana, who rocks a series of wonderful ’80s power outfits. Wiig looks fierce in a pair of thigh-high boots, and there’s a stray strand of hair that gleefully dances across Pedro Pascal’s face in his more manic moments.

So the visuals are solid, but there are still places where they fail completely. The final battle between Wonder Woman and Cheetah is murky and dim, as if to hide CGI imperfections, and Diana often looks weightless and fake when lassoing through the air.

But ultimately it’s the bloated, incoherent script by Jenkins, Geoff Johns and Dave Callaham that brings the movie down (the first movie, for what it’s worth, was written solo by Allan Heinberg, although others contributed to the story). Wonder Woman 1984 isn’t a complete disaster, but it’s really close. With a third movie on the way, I hope Jenkins sticks to directing and stays away from the script, and that Warner Bros. gets a writer with some sense of proportion and pace.

Lynda Carter’s cameo at the end was cute, though.

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