3 / 10
Official trailer
Wonder Woman 1984 is the sequel to Patty Jenkins’s 2017 Wonder Woman and one of the steepest critical reversals in modern superhero cinema. Jenkins directed and co-wrote with Geoff Johns and Dave Callaham. Gal Gadot returns as Diana Prince, now working at the Smithsonian in 1984. Chris Pine returns as Steve Trevor through a wish-magic plot device. Pedro Pascal plays Maxwell Lord, a failing oil baron who acquires a magical artifact called the Dreamstone. Kristen Wiig plays Barbara Minerva, a Smithsonian gemologist who becomes the Cheetah.
The plot involves the Dreamstone granting wishes that come with hidden costs, Lord using the stone to consume world power, and Diana having to convince the entire world to renounce its wishes to fix the damage.
The film made about one hundred and seventy million dollars worldwide on a two hundred million dollar budget during the pandemic. The simultaneous HBO Max release affected theatrical performance. The critical response after release was sharply negative compared to the first film.
The audience response was the steepest drop in superhero sequel history. The planned Wonder Woman 3 was canceled in December 2022 following James Gunn’s DC restructuring.
Two and a half hours of Wonder Woman 1984 left me more annoyed than any superhero sequel has a right to. The 2017 film gave Diana a war and a reason to fight it. This one gives her a wish, a borrowed body and a microphone, and I spent most of it wondering who signed off on the script.
What Made It a Woke Disaster
The film’s central premise is that the 1980s were a moral disaster.
Maxwell Lord is a Reagan-coded antagonist whose magic stone grants wishes the audience is meant to read as the entire decade’s pathology, from greed and consumerism to American optimism and Cold War triumphalism. Lord’s pitch to the world (“I’m the future, I’m the truth, I’m the gold rush”) is the film’s argument about what the 1980s were and why they were wrong. The film offers that as settled moral fact, and I find the smugness of it exhausting.
The Steve Trevor body-swap is the film’s most-debated individual element and the clearest demonstration of how its politics broke its judgment. Diana wishes Steve back. The film grants the wish by having Steve’s soul possess the body of another man. The man (played by Kristoffer Polaha) has no idea this is happening. Diana then has sex with Steve in this other man’s body. The film treats this as romantic. The other man can’t consent because he’s not present.
The script frames Diana’s wish as innocent love, not as what it would be called if a male protagonist did this to a woman.
The contradiction sits at the film’s center. The script’s politics are explicitly progressive on gender and consent.
The script’s plot requires the protagonist to commit non-consensual sex through magical means and feel no moral discomfort about it. The film can’t see the contradiction because the contradiction would require examining its own protagonist with the same standards it applies to its antagonist. The double standard is the writing’s failure.
Nobody in the film, Diana included, ever stops to ask about the man whose life got borrowed, and that silence made me angrier than anything Maxwell Lord does. This is the choice that sinks the movie for me.
For Writers
When a script’s politics produce a blind spot about its own protagonist, the audience sees the blind spot before the writers do. Wonder Woman 1984’s Steve Trevor body-swap was written as romance. Audiences read it as assault because the script’s own ethics demanded the reading. The lesson is that political commitments apply to the characters you like as much as to the characters you don’t. A villain doing what the protagonist does is a villain.
A protagonist doing what would be villainy if anyone else did it hasn’t been excused by virtue of being the protagonist. The audience will run the test.
The Lecturing
The film’s third-act resolution is Diana broadcasting a message to the entire world asking everyone to renounce their wishes.
The speech is a sermon about the costs of wanting. It describes Lord’s offer as a deal with the devil and the wishers as victims of their own desires. The film argues that human ambition itself is the disease and self-renunciation is the cure. Diana’s posture throughout the speech is a teacher addressing students who have done wrong.
The sequence is the film’s most visible misjudgment.
Audiences didn’t come to a Wonder Woman film to have the film lecture them about the dangers of wanting things. The 2017 first film worked because Diana fought a war and learned about humans through doing so. The 2020 sequel has Diana lecture the audience about its appetites. The structural choice positions the hero as moral instructor and the audience as subject. The audience didn’t respond well to the film framing them as the problem.
The speech is where my irritation turned into eye-rolling. Nobody shows up to a Wonder Woman movie hoping to be scolded for wanting things, and the patient-teacher posture makes the sermon even harder to sit through.
For Writers
A protagonist who lectures the audience produces a film the audience doesn’t want to be in. Diana’s renunciation speech treats viewers as people who need correction. The reception was predictable. The lesson is that drama works through identification. The audience experiences the story through the protagonist’s perspective. When the protagonist’s perspective is “you’re wrong and I’m right,” the identification breaks. The audience stops being inside the story and starts being inside a sermon. Sermons rarely produce repeat viewings.
The Barbara Minerva Waste
Kristen Wiig’s Barbara Minerva is the film’s most-wasted element. Wiig is among the most skilled comedic performers of her generation and a capable dramatic actress. The character is introduced as a shy, awkward Smithsonian researcher whose wish on the Dreamstone makes her confident, attractive, and eventually superhuman.
The arc is a 1980s makeover plot mapped onto a superhero origin. The character could have been the film’s emotional center. The script abandons her for the Maxwell Lord plot in the second half.
The Cheetah transformation in the third act is a brief CGI fight that doesn’t give Wiig material to play. The character’s villainy is asserted instead of developed. Her last meaningful scene is wishing back her old self. The audience has no investment in this choice because the film never developed the character enough for the renunciation to mean anything. Wiig deserved a film built around her. She got a Maxwell Lord film with a Cheetah cameo.
Wiig is the part of this film I’d salvage. Her shy-researcher scenes have a spark the rest of the picture lacks, and watching the script trade her for another Maxwell Lord scene is the most frustrating thing in it.
For Writers
A villain who could have been the protagonist is a villain the script underused. Barbara Minerva’s arc had the emotional shape of the main story. The script chose a less interesting antagonist for its center. The lesson is that secondary characters who have stronger arcs than the antagonist signal a structural problem. Either promote the secondary character or rework the antagonist to hold the story. Strong material in the wrong slot is wasted.
Craft Note
The opening Themyscira sequence is the film’s strongest individual passage and a textbook example of a cold open that has nothing to do with the rest of the film. The young Diana’s truth-telling lesson is well-staged, well-shot, and emotionally clean. The sequence belongs to a different, more confident film. The disconnect between the prologue’s craft level and the main feature’s struggles tells you the production knew what good Wonder Woman material looked like and couldn’t sustain it across two hours and thirty-one minutes.
Should you skip Wonder Woman 1984?
3/10. The Themyscira prologue is excellent, and Wiig’s early scenes hint at the film this could have been. Everything else lost me: a body swap nobody questions, a villain built as a lecture about the 1980s, and an ending that points its finger at the audience. The pandemic hurt its box office, and I lay the critical collapse squarely at the script’s feet. Watch the 2017 first film and skip this one.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Wonder Woman 1984 (2020), The Numbers
- Wonder Woman 3 reportedly dead at James Gunn and Peter Safran's DC Studios, The A.V. Club
- Patty Jenkins Explains What Happened With Wonder Woman 3, MovieMaker
- Wonder Woman 1984 (2020), IMDb
