Wonder Woman 1984 (2020) - 5/10
1. Acting
To kick things off, the acting is a real mixed bag. This cast includes some very talented people, but (and I imagine I’ll repeat this more than once) it feels like a waste.
We might as well start with the titular hero, played by Gal Gadot. Even casual moviegoers know that while Gadot can act, her range is quite limited. What bothers me here is that the first Wonder Woman film was actually a well-done performance by her. Here, with more experience under her belt, she somehow feels like she’s taken a step backward.
That said, it’s not all bad. Gadot is quite good in more subdued moments, and the early scenes are nicely handled. However, as the plot progresses and the stakes rise, her dramatic moments fall flat. I don’t know if it’s a delivery issue or an emoting issue, but it’s unfortunately too restrained.
Chris Pine returns as Steve and, despite having maybe the best performance in the film, even his efforts feel muted. I can’t quite pinpoint it, but it feels like he’s phoning it in a bit—maybe giving about 70% when we know he has more in the tank.
Kristen Wiig appears as the secondary villain, Cheetah. For those who only know her from comedic work, Wiig has proven capable of more dramatic roles in her post-SNL career. Unfortunately, despite bringing some interesting layers to Barbara/Cheetah, the script largely fails her. The character arc is overly clichéd, and there’s just not enough for Wiig to sink her teeth into to show her full talent.
Lastly, we have Pedro Pascal in an early post-Game of Thrones role before he started getting cast in literally every movie. As Maxwell Lord, Pascal gives a lot to his performance and, despite the writing, makes Lord a reasonably compelling villain. Unfortunately, it feels like someone told him the movie would be somewhat campy, and he ran a bit too far with that. Lord is meant to be larger than life, but tonally it feels out of place at times. Everyone else is playing things fairly straight, while Pascal is out there hamming it up. It’s a good performance overall—just slightly mismatched.
2. Cinematography
There are moments when this film looks great. The mid-80s setting allows for some fun sets, and the overly colorful vibe fits quite well. Some shots are genuinely striking—like the fireworks scene with Diana and Steve flying, or the POV shot from inside Diana’s armor during her fight with Cheetah, which was executed impeccably.
Yet, apart from these highlights, a large portion of the film feels... bland. It looks like a big-budget blockbuster should—with massive set pieces and polished CGI—but it feels vapid. It falls into the classic blockbuster trap of putting spectacle above substance.
3. Production and Costume Design
If there’s any part of this film that truly succeeds, it’s the costume and set design. The 80s setting clearly gave the production teams a lot to work with, and they seem to have had fun executing it. Everything from the mall sequence to the completely unnecessary scene of Steve trying on 80s outfits feels like the crew just wanted to show off. It even elevates some of the film’s weaker elements, including the cinematography.
4. Writing
While the film fails on a few fronts, the writing is at the core of most missteps. The basic plot isn’t terrible—it’s essentially a superhero version of The Monkey’s Paw, a concept that many storytellers have borrowed. The problem is that, despite the superhero twist, the story doesn’t add much of its own voice. They try to shoehorn in a muddled message about truth or shortcuts or some crap, but it’s stated so plainly and repeatedly that it loses meaning.
But, before diving into the main plot, let’s step back to the nearly 11-minute opener, where child Diana competes against adults in an Iron Man–style contest. It’s never made clear what the contest is for, what the rules are, or what it’s meant to establish. It drags on, and the supposed moral—something about truth or cheating—is confusing. Since this serves as the film’s thesis, it’s no wonder the rest of the story feels messy.
Getting into the main plot, we meet up with Diana in the 1980s as she foils some thieves robbing a black-market antiquities dealer in a mall. It’s a cool set piece, but we’re missing key details—like who these bad guys are or how Diana gets there so quickly. And this is often the problem with the movie. We have these moments where the actual point gets muddled because there are too many unanswered questions.
During this time we also get to meet a new character- Barbara. And guess what? She can't walk in high heels! And she drops a bunch of papers she is carrying in front of everyone at work! And she wears glasses!? What a klutzy loser nerd. Listen, I am not against films leaning into cliches sometimes, but Barbara's character introduction feels like it was generated from ChatGPT's first ever prompt. Just super low effort drivel and Wiig deserved better.
Like I said though, it's not all bad. As wishes start getting granted, Steve's return creates a great emotional anchor for Diana's story. She has been in a state of prolonged mourning for a long time and his return reawakens her. And the chemistry between the two is fun and light and gives the audience something to care about. But, we again have a problem. It would be one thing if Steve just fully returned. Yet the writers, for some inexplicable reason, decide to go the body swap route where Steve is inserted into some random guys body. Now we have a situation where this dude and his life have basically been erased from existence? His job, his family, his friends having no idea or understanding of why this would happen or where he even went. And then Steve and Diana spend the night together which has tons of implications that are all problematic. So, even when its good, the writers just seem to really want to shoot themselves in the foot.
Outside of Diana's story, the other characters do have at least some interesting interactions with the plot device. Wiig's progression from feeling empowered to eventually losing her humanity is a tired idea, but not inherently bad. Where it does get bad is the shoehorning of her wanting to later become an 'apex predator' as a way of forcing her mutation into Cheetah. I will say it's not necessarily an easy task to realistically find a way to insert a half human/half animal demigod into a live action movie in a manner that makes sense, but at the same time no one was forcing them to choose Cheetah as a character. I'm sure there was other options to choose from the comics and this feels like a situation where they set their minds on a certain character and forced it to work.
To the writers' credit, Max Lord is a somewhat interesting character. We meet him as a bit of a loser and con man who is in over his head. Out of desperation he turns to magic to fix his problems and starts down the villain path. His story has a nice emotional anchor in that he is a father who just wants to make his son proud. However, they only seem to half commit to this idea. A lot of what Max does seems to do comes from a selfish place vice the implications of the later story where his son is basically the reason he gives his powers up. The arc just never fully gelled for me, but his descent into a never ending power grab by being able to grant wishes is at least novel.
As the story comes to a head, all of the character arcs begin to converge. The best part of the film is Diana making the incredibly difficult decision to let Steve go by renouncing her wish. It is a self sacrifice that prioritizes humanity over herself and plays out in a well executed moment. However, as the film moves into its showdown between hero and villain, it gets a bit sloppy. Diana's speech in the finale asks the entirety of the world to renounce their wishes and set the world back to the way it was. It's not a bad speech, but is a bit convoluted. It mixes ideals of truth, beauty and self sacrifice, but doesn't really address the core issues of the wishes. Also the implications of renouncing the wishes are not fully addressed. How do the wishes go away? Is it like it never happened in the first place? Or does it stop in the present moment? In the film, the entirety of the world is in utter chaos, but would the chaos really come to a full stop in that moment? How does the Lasso and Broadcast center even work? There is just a lot of questions that the premise creates and that is because the writers never really place any limits on the situation. To top it off, Max renounces his wish for the sake of his son. It's a nice notion, but with their relationship getting sidelined for the bulk of the movie, it doesn't carry the weight the writers seem to think it does.
Ultimately, I don't think the writing is terrible. I think my problem with it is that it feels like a lot of loose ideas that needed to be tightened up. There are too many plot holes and the character arcs are too cliched or not fully fleshed out. There is a good script buried in there somewhere, it's just unfortunately too messy in this state.
Before we move on, I don't like getting bogged down into plot holes or similar aspects of screenplays too much on these reviews. If you like nitpicking movies then CinemaSins will scratch that itch much better than I could. But this film has some just really egregious moments in it that are hard to ignore. I already mentioned a few, but:
1) The openers lack of clarity and Diana's scolding for taking a 'shortcut' is just baffling to me.
2) The entire mall sequence is so weird to me - from the hilariously bad thieves, to Diana arriving at an extremely precise moment without any indication of how she knew to be there anyway. Also she uses her her headband to destroy some cameras that have seemingly already recorded her anyway. Not to mention her utter lack of care to hide her identity anywhere else in the film besides this.
3) One aspect that really got under my skin was the stealing a plane sequence. First off, not that easy to just walk onto an airfield and take a plane. And even if you happen to be a pilot, you can't just jump into any plane and know how to start it, let it alone fly it, without training. The bit about radar and people being able to see the plane is definitely not how radar works. And simply making it invisible with magic doesn't make sense. Also you would never be able to fly over the freaking ocean from DC to Cairo in a fighter jet simply from a fuel standpoint, let alone without having any sort of navigational planning done.
4) Once in Cairo, Diana has an action sequence when she tries to capture Max Lord and has an almost instantaneous outfit change in the middle of a car chase. Then that same scene ends when she falls down and just basically lets the villain drive off for no reason after having literally just chased them down on foot pretty easily prior to that.
5) Shortly after this scene, Diana and crew learn about the magical origins of the gem they've been chasing from some random guy because Barbara found his info when, *checking notes*, she stumbled upon a flyer at 'the embassy' while doing research. Sure.
6) As Diana gets closer to confronting Lord again, we take a
brief pause to introduce an ancient piece of Amazonian Armor complete
with a horrendous flashback sequence to justify its place in the plot.
It is so clearly a setup for later and is completely inconsequential to
the plot other than to have something that will look cool in the
trailers and setup a post-credits cameo.
7) Shortly after this, we get a brief showdown in the White House where all the characters are conveniently converging all at once. In particular we get Barbara who seemingly just walked herself into the most secure building in the country at just the right moment with no explanation of how she knew to be there.
8) And lastly, I really dislike Diana's flying. The implication, I think, is after living for an extraordinary amount of time, she suddenly learns to lasso air, clouds and lightning to propel herself because of something Steve says earlier in the movie? I just can't be immersed in a movie as sloppy as this.
5. Sound Design
Hans Zimmer is an accomplished composer, but this soundtrack isn’t his best work. It’s not bad, but it lacks identity. Being part of the DCEU seems to have limited the score, which borrows too much from other Zack Snyder films. Also, it feels like a missed opportunity to set a movie in the 80s without using any iconic tracks from that era.
Also, while not every superhero can have an iconic theme like Batman or Superman, I don’t hear Diana’s personality in this score. If anything, I hear Snyder.
That said, the music still enhances certain key moments—especially Diana’s goodbye to Steve. Despite the film’s flaws, that scene works because acting, writing, and music come together beautifully.
6. Editing
For what’s on screen, the editing is decent. The two-and-a-half-hour runtime feels long, but pacing isn’t the main issue—it’s the writing.
There’s also a lot of repetitive shot composition. In the mall scene, for example, Diana jumps back and forth between wings of the mall over and over, almost comically. The same thing happens in later fight scenes with Cheetah, where they are repeatedly swinging from the lasso or the power lines. It’s not necessarily the editor’s fault, but it feels uninspired.
7. Visual Effects
The CGI is plentiful and, for the most part, well-executed—though with a $200 million budget, it should be. The VFX team does its best with what’s on the page, but some of what’s on the page is silly. Lassoing lightning bolts and creating a human-cheetah hybrid may look polished, but they still don’t work conceptually.
Also, Wonder Woman’s flying looks awkward and unconvincing. Her super speed suffers from the same issue—it often looks cartoonish, especially in the Cairo car chase.
8. Originality / Adaptation Strength
As mentioned earlier, this is essentially The Monkey’s Paw with superheroes. It’s not a bad idea, but it doesn’t add much to the concept. As a sequel, it adds little to Diana’s character or the Wonder Woman mythos. It feels like a cheap cash grab meant to expand the DCEU without purpose.
9. Stunt Coordination
It’s just not great. None of the action scenes or fight choreography stand out. The stunt actors do fine work, but the choreography feels repetitive and uninspired.
10. Direction
Patty Jenkins is a legitimately good director with a somewhat baffling filmography. She’s capable of producing hits like Monster and the first Wonder Woman, but also misfires like this and Poolman (2023), which was panned critically. I can’t pinpoint exactly what went wrong here, but expectations clearly weren’t met.
Legacy / Final Thoughts
WW84 came out a few years before the ultimate demise of the Snyderverse-era DCEU and is by no means the only culprit for its failure. Still, it’s a telling marker of a cinematic universe that never had a clear identity.
It was also a victim, at least in part, of the COVID-era shift to simultaneous streaming and theatrical releases. Warner Bros.’s decision to release it on HBO Max alongside theaters hurt its box office numbers and contributed to a wider trend that’s damaged the theatrical experience and hurt movie goers.
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