--General Antiope, Wonder Woman 1984
The sequel to one of the only consistently praised DCEU films has finally arrived, only to be met with an abundance of unexpected criticism. From claims that Wonder Woman 1984 does not fit into the established DCEU to claims that none of the performances showed talent, some of the criticism in invalid. Wonder Woman 1984 is clearly connected to the first Wonder Woman, which is itself clearly connected to Batman v Superman, which is then directly connected with the DCEU films that followed. The idea that the Wonder Woman sequel is separated from the broader DCEU storyline is pathetic. While its connections to the DCEU and its genuinely important philosophical themes are obvious to those who look for them, there are genuine flaws to be found, many of which pertain to the way the first hour of the movie unfolds.
Production Values
One thing about the general structure of Wonder Woman 1984 needs to be said directly: this is not an action-heavy story filled with enormous amounts of CGI. It is one about characters and themes more than explosive action sequences. Action was one of the first Wonder Woman's many strengths, so this might bother fans of the original, but there are some key fights in the second half. What this means is that characterization and acting are forced to carry the slower first act. Chris Pine, Pedro Pascal, and Kristen Wiig give the best performances in the movie, even if the latter two play characters that are sometimes written to specifically act over the top.
The wildness and randomness of some early scenes with Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) and Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) do fade into genuine gravity and personal stakes as the film continues, so the intentionally, blatantly awkward dialogue given to Kristen Wiig near the beginning does not haunt every scene she appears in. Gal Gadot, Wonder Woman herself, has scenes of greater emotional intensity as the story goes on, and she thankfully has a much stronger presence in Wonder Woman 1984 than she does in Justice League. Her character has to navigate genuine weaknesses, mortality, and her own conflicting desires in a plot that explores more of her personal side than before.
Story
Some spoilers are below.
Diana Prince still sharply feels the loss of her romantic partner Steve Trevor decades after his sacrifice helped confine the destruction of World War I, even though she has taken up a new job to occupy her time. She engages in periodic vigilante acts in which she specifically avoids killing or brutally injuring her opponents. Her job at the Smithsonian Institution puts her in close proximity to an item called the Dreamstone, a gem embedded in an artificial base with an inscription about wishes that can alter reality. Diana unwittingly wishes for her boyfriend to come back to life, only to meet a sort of reincarnated version of him shortly after. Several other people become interested in the Dreamstone as well, including an insecure coworker of Diana's (Barbara Minerva) and a fraudulent television personality (Maxwell Lord).
Intellectual Content
The true feminism of the first film that treated both men and women as equally heroic and depraved returns in Wonder Woman 1984 as a core theme of the series. Once again, Diana never looks down on Steve for being a man or a human. Although the exact nature of how Steve's host body is inhabited by the resurrected pilot is left very ambiguous, meaning that Diana potentially sexually assaulted the host depending on how the consciousness Steve displaced was impacted, the relationship between Diana and Steve continues to be a countercultural example of how a man and woman can come together as individuals without concern for sexist cultural norms favoring men or women.
Since the genuine egalitarianism of the series was firmly established in the first movie, it does not have to be emphasized in the same ways, something that frees the sequel to focus on the dangers of yielding to all desires without exercising rationality and justice. It becomes clear almost as soon as inconveniences and disasters result from the wishes that the main thematic point is that the nature of desire calls for careful reflection, lest people who follow their own whims without concern for other matters create an avoidable hell for themselves and others. Like how God of War III gives a fictional example of what unrestrained desire for gratuitous vengeance could bring about, Wonder Woman 1984 shows physical representations of how even non-selfish desires can bring ruin if they are all a person looks to.
Also, like with the Infinity Stones in multiple MCU films, the Dreamstone could be used to bring about anything that is logically possible without having the power to alter the laws of logic, even though none of the characters in Wonder Woman 1984 ever do as much as hint at realizing this vital point. Movies tend to conflate scientific possibility with logical possibility when logical possibility is inherently fixed and immutable. The fact that this continues to get ignored in filmmaking reveals just how philosophically incomplete the ideas of mainstream directors and writers can be.
Conclusion
Wonder Woman 1984 is neither as tonally streamlined as the 2017 origin story or as incoherent as the shitshow Suicide Squad. For all of its pacing problems in the first half of the long runtime, it is far more thoughtful and thematically important than Suicide Squad or Justice League--Joss Whedon's utterly mediocre product hijacked from Zack Snyder, that is. This makes it stand above multiple other DCEU releases without climbing to the same overall cinematic heights as the 2017 Wonder Woman that so excellently blended action, comedy, romance, philosophical considerations about gender egalitarianism and human nature, and DC worldbuilding. There are certainly things that merit criticism in Wonder Woman 1984, but there are also plenty of things that merit praise. Audiences in general simply did not expect for a Patty Jenkins Wonder Woman movie to have such a mixed quality.
Content:
1. Violence: Wonder Woman physically fights several human or metahuman foes, and she gets wounded to the point of bleeding in some of them. The most ferocity is shown in her fights with Barbara Minerva when the latter gains strength while losing her "humanity," but the most intense of these clashes is not a bloody affair.
2. Profanity: "Shit" is uttered by Steve in one of the rare uses of profanity in the film.
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