valencia Writes

I watched Wonder Woman 1984 and after a day of consideration, I realize that it falls much shorter than its predecessor.
I’ll try to refrain from using spoilers in this brief review, but I just wanted to warn you in case I slip up.
As a whole, the movie is pretty good. The acting is actually better than one would expect from a superhero movie, with timeless themes of good and evil being treated as more relatable than the first movie.
In Wonder Woman, the villain was the God of War: Ares, who has embodied a human in order to wreak havoc on the world.
In this movie, there are two villains – Mr. Lord and Barbara Minerva (i.e. Cheetah).
While we understand their desire to be better versions of themselves, there is a high price that they both pay for these changes in their own abilities. Unfortunately, these wants are misguided and the entire world suffers for it, and Diana Prince – Wonder Woman – has to intervene. She too has to pay the price for wanting the impossible, the return of Steve Trevor.
The movie is long – 2.5 hours. They could have cut out much of it because some scenes are unnecessary and don’t really advance the action or the romance plots. The first action sequence with the adult Wonder Woman is more cute than powerful. It’s 1980s nostalgia mixed with a bit of cheese.
There’s also action sequence that takes place in Cairo and it is just TOO MUCH – even for a superhero movie. It doesn’t feel exciting to me. It just feels like they made it last longer than it needed to, which reduced the overall quality of the scene. You’ll see what I mean. At first, I’m like “Cool” but at the end, I thought “really?”
Oh, and somehow – SPOILER ALERT – Wonder Woman can fly now – and make a jet disappear (not just from radar; but from actual view to the naked eye.) It’s not the same invisible jet from the comics/animated TV shows.
The way they brought Steve Trevor back is just plain stupid, underwhelming, and isn’t fully developed. (It’s like those rolls I tried to make that had all the right ingredients, but never rose because I killed the yeast. They killed the yeast with this movie. I still ate it, but I’m not going to make the same mistake.)
The director, Patty Jenkins, tried to pack so much into this movie and it came out at 2.5 hours. She tried to go back to Wonder Woman’s childhood and spent too much time, thematically, in the past. They were trying too hard and ended up with a potluck kind of movie: a bunch of random moving parts that are blended together to make a soup in the hopes that the majority of people will love at least a few incredients, but in the end, no one wants to eat it more than once. Basically, it was like a first date with a perfectly lovely person: It was okay, but you don’t want to call them back for a second. As we say in the South: “How Nice.”