Amazon superheroine Diana Prince now lives in Washington in 1984. During the day, she works in a museum, but when crime strikes, she fights as Wonder Woman. The museum obtains a magical mineral which can grant wishes. Unpopular geek Barbara wishes to become popular and attractive, and achieves it. Diana wishes for the deceased Steve to be alive again, and he appears in some other guy’s body. When the fraudulent oil businessman Lord absorbs the mineral, he gets the ability to fullfil other people’s wishes, and uses it to demand favors and gain profits. When it is revealed that the wishes by the mineral are unstable, and that Wonder Woman is losing her powers, she renounces her wish, and helps the world do the same to stop Lord.
While weaker than the 1st film, the director Patty Jenkins managed to assemble a surprisingly good film, with some scenes that even top the original, when one considers the ludicrous, far-fetched concept she had to work with: it is a pity the audiences were reluctant towards it, since “Wonder Woman 1984” is at times almost an experimental superhero film without real villains, a product of its time, the Trump administration. Jenkins even said it herself: "Who is the supervillain, now? Who’s the bad guy? It’s all of us, we’re destroying our world. We’re letting ourselves support every villain in every passive way by buying their stuff." As outlandish as the story is, it is a contemplation on the ethical challenges of a Faustian bargain, based on rotten foundations, a one in which the quest for success is such a drug that people don’t even register the price for it, i.e. that their selfish interests are exploitative and actually cause more harm than good, whereas it also blends in the philosophy of “Fullmetal Alchemist”, namely that for every gain there must be an equal loss. The prologue serves as a nice foreshadowing: Diana as a kid cheats to get ahead in a contest, but is stopped before the finish line by her mentor, leading to this exchange: “But I almost won!” - “No, you did not win because you are not ready to be a winner.” Gal Gadot shines again and is excellent as Diana Prince / Wonder Woman, who is an irresistibly innocent and pure character. Her first entrance in the film as the superheroine stirs some sense of awe and wonder: a burglar threatens to throw a little girl from a balcony of a shopping mall, but Wonder Woman uses her golden lasso to catch the girl and descend her gently on a toy pony, appropriately.
After that, there are no more action sequences for almost an hour, to allow Diana to reconnect with Steve. The movie is beautiful to look at, as it boasts with stunning cinematography. One sequence in this first half is badly directed, though: the one where Barbara is harassed by a man, and then takes revenge by killing him, seems more like a ridiculous extreme-feminist caricature than a real, objective presentation of the issue of sexual harassment. Maybe if the stranger was Barbara’s alcoholic ex-boyfriend, it might have seemed more plausible. The second action sequence, the Egyptian truck chase, is the action highlight of the film, a ‘tour-de-force’ set-up where each piece of dominoes falls in its place, and even shows Wonder Woman in a flawed edition. Some of these fantasy ideas are a tad too audacious, but we are glad the authors were bold to try them out, anyway. The third best sequence is right after Wonder Woman renounces her wish, runs away, saddened by what she lost, and suddenly lassoes a plane to catapult herself in the sky. This is illogical, since she even at one point just lassoes clouds to remain gliding in the sky, and yet, it works as some sort of intimate dream-sequence for her, as if the movie grants her a fantasy break within the fantasy, to give her time to absorb the event and heal herself. The final 20 minutes fall apart, unfortunately: it seems the movie itself doesn’t know what is going on, since this wish-fulfillment business prolifirated over the entire world, and the authors lost oversight of where this is heading. This chaotic ending was inevitable giving the weird story flow. Nonetheless, even in this edition, Wonder Woman still has that elegance and esprit to lasso the viewers into her side.
Grade:++
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