Review: Wonder Woman 1984
I’ll never forget my screening of 2017s Wonder Woman. I was with my grandma, mom, sister, aunt, and girl cousins in a crowded theater. Every generation who enjoyed the character of Wonder Woman was present at that screening and there was something moving about that fact. Gal Gadot had big shoes to fill. Lynda Carter helmed a three season, 60 episode character that embodied what was possible for women for a whole generation of girls who excitedly turned into their television sets to watch the female-led superhero.
I think it’s safe to say Patty Jenkins’ and Gal Gadot’s Wonder Woman met all of our expectations. Aside from chunky pacing and a weak ending, the charming naivete of Gadot’s performance and heart-pumping action sequences (I mean, the No Man’s Land scene, come on!) made for a good time at the movies, but more than that, it carried a legacy of what women are capable of.
Whether it was fair or not, those were the expectations I went into Wonder Woman: 1984 with. The experience was probably compounded by the fact that after nine long months, we were still sequestered to our homes to enjoy movies from our couch. Tonally mismatched from the first film, the story took on a cartoonish quality with fumbling villains and corny lines. There were points in the story where I was completely lost, and characters didn’t have any meaningful development or satisfying conclusions.
I’m not sure how things went so awry with the Gadot/Jenkins duo running the show in the follow up to a movie that made such a big splash in 2017, but it’s a real shame that a beloved property wasn’t handled with more deftness by a team who clearly had the potential, but ultimately just dropped the ball.