Wonder Woman 1984

So I wanted to write an article about the new Wonder Woman movie. As you all know I love movies and I am a huge DC Comics fan, so whenever a new DC Comics movie comes out I am overly hyped by the trailers and admittedly act like Fry from Futurama screaming, "Take my money!". WW84 followed that trend of a movie that I was super hyped for, but after watching it the first time I felt confused. As always let's break down what the pros and cons of this new installment for the DCEU.

PROS

There are a lot of cool little details throughout the movie that pays respect to the original Wonder Woman comics and DC Comics as a whole. Whether its name drops, pictures hung on the walls, or items placed on the shelves there are many easter eggs to be seen throughout the movie.

Throughout the film we get to see more of Wonder Woman's powers, leading to a really cool reveal, her most iconic way of traveling (No spoilers). This brings a very important part of the overall story in my opinion, magic. Magic is the focal point of the entire story which I find to be very interesting for a Wonder Woman story.

Something I was very skeptical about was the return of Steve Trevor. In the comics there is always some way the love interest of Wonder Woman finds his way back to her, but I found this version to be interesting. It makes sense thematically and has a pretty satisfying conclusion. Pulls at the heartstrings.

Now that I've tried my darnedest to find some pros to this movie we need to talk about the cons, and boy are there some cons to this movie.

CONS

One of the downfalls to a lot of movies that end up having mixed reviews typically have a few things in common, one being pacing. This movie comes in at a whopping two hour and thirty-five minutes, far too long for what the plot tries to cover. At moments you feel scenes dragging on for exposition, but moves to a large and quick sequence, followed by another slow dragging scene. This could work if the plot wasn't so dry and stretched out.

Something that I feel needs to stop happening in superhero movies is adding too many characters. This movie introduces one of the most prominent super villains in Wonder Woman's rogue gallery and drops the ball hard. I'm talking about Cheetah, a character I was excited to see in the movie and felt extremely let down by the end of the film. I'm disappointed because I felt like without her character, the overall story could have still continued and concluded in a similar way. Replace her with a generic character that works at the Smithsonian and the plot moves in the same direction. Truly I'm just disappointed that this villain didn't get more love. Continuing with having too much in the film, the main villain I feel gets most of the limelight. You see his motivation, his pain and why he is doing what he is doing. This being said, the movie gets convoluted with changing the rules of how the magic works half way through. I understand that its implied about how it changes, but I truly feel this is one of the reasons the movie gets too complicated half way through. The last quarter of the film makes its own rules with magic and power without giving much explanation and just going a little off the rails. A missed opportunity for them to expand on the magic within the world of DC.

I know we always talk about CGI (computer generated image) in movies, but I feel like there needs to be more discussions about using practical effects in conjunction with CGI. This movie is a good example as to how more CGI is not the way to go. Motion blur is used to combine digital doubles with the actor and it makes the scene very janky. Moments where it should feel grounded, feel mystical, moments that feel that should be impactful feel fake. I can see how awesome this movie was on paper, but I feel as though the execution fell flat.

OVERALL

Though I love DC Comic movies, they have their faults like all movies. It's nearly impossible to make a film that is perfect, but its common place to make a film like WW84 where it's a hit or miss. It'll be a movie I will have to come back to later and try to look for more positive things but I think the first viewing is very telling. If you're a fan of Wonder Woman, I would say prepare yourself to not see much of the character that we love. The character that should be strong, honorable, and smart is not what we get in this film. If you go in with lower expectations I can see people enjoying it. I however, did not.

5/10 Gods