I think part of the problem is that it’s a scene totally divorced from the rest of the movie. Besides the issue with the chronology from the first movie, it’s quite long and doesn’t really tell the viewer anything. Even the “message” at the end doesn’t really pay off. Being DQed/DNFed for leaving the course or missing a checkpoint is part of competition, not some super-important teaching moment.
Checking in just to say I fell asleep as they were stealing the aircraft and WW was using her power to make it invisible. Awoken by the screams of the (I think?) villain for his child at or near the end. Did not feel compelled to rewind and rewatch, or even keep on watching through to the credits. Had already determined the writing was shit and I did not care about the characters or the stakes.
Just watched and I share the disappointment of most of the posters.
I agree with many of the comments above – this movie just gets worse and worse as you think about all the parts that individually don’t work and connect in ways that don’t work.
The only thing I want to say that’s different to other posters’ comments is: I didn’t like Pedro Pascal either.
Many people are saying he was the only good thing, but I just couldn’t figure out how we were supposed to take that character. I get that real people are complex, but it just seems his mind didn’t seem to be working in a consistent way at all.
Wishing to be the stone (rather than wishing for its power or whatever), as has been pointed out, was nuts, but even given that, ISTM he could have been successful enough with essentially one wish. Trying to get everyone to wish doesn’t make sense (yes later, because he’s sick he needs people’s health, but a) that was only after granting a bunch of wishes, so it was a rod for his own back and b) it’s unclear why it takes billions of people’s health just to nurse him back to health).
Plus he saw first hand the damage his wishes were causing to the world…yes I get it’s an allegory but within the logic of the film it’s unclear why and when he stops caring about destroying the world. You just have to take it that lust for power has made him craazzzy pretty much from the get go.
I haven’t seen it, but I’m willing to bet that many action scenes were slowed down so you could fully appreciate the intensity.
But the audience isn’t told the rules until she’s disqualified. We see her miss a target, but it doesn’t appear to be intentional.
When Diana decides to slide down the hill, nothing in the movie suggests she is making an ethically questionable decision. It is, in fact, presented as being a cool, clever way for her to catch her horse, and then the race (which goes on far too long and really shouldn’t have been in the movie at all) proceeds with heroism and awesomeness, and THEN suddenly we’re rather abruptly told that the cool MacGyver thing she did was cheating. It was not good filmmaking.
Worse (more evidence of bad filmmaking) it’s an overly long sequence to drive home a simple point: cheating is bad, and karma is an Amazon.
It was claimed on REd Letter Media that the studio pressured Patty Jenkins to remove one of the two opening scenes - the other being the mall scene - and she simply refused, and stubbornness won.
The studio was unquestionably correct. There is no reason to have two opening action sequences (and the race is obviously the one that should have been dumped. In fact, it should never have been filmed.) The movie is too long anyway.
Dumping the race would have been a definite improvement. It was visually decent (although, another side quip on the couch was “If these Amazons put as much effort into anything else as they do into their gold stadium mechanisms, they’d have iPads by now”) but added nothing to the plot. Even if you want to generously tie the “don’t cheat” lesson into Steve’s return, Diana doesn’t actually make that connection herself and we shouldn’t really need to be explicitly told that Wonder Woman shouldn’t cheat. Cutting it would have shaved a significant chunk of time off a too-long film.
Really? Because I thought it was obvious immediately that she would win and then be disqualified since they showed her missing the targets. Why include target shooting if they are not part of the race you have to complete?
Game designer Robin Laws posted the following capsule review:
In the era of pastel shades and high-cut leotards, a lonely Diana Prince (Gal Gadot) deals with the fallout when a wishing stone falls into the hands of an awkward pal (Kristen Wiig) and a wannabe tycoon (Pedro Pascal). Jenkins takes DC movies full circle to the lighthearted tone of the Donner/Lester Superman flicks—bringing with it their disjointed storytelling. Over time WW84 may come to be appreciated for its sincere dedication to weirdness, which is two thirds attributable to picking scenes and set pieces and trying to shoehorn them into a narrative, and one third from the freaky ghost of William Moulton Marston manifesting into the material.
He rated it “Good” (on a scale of Pinnacle/Recommended/Good/Okay/Not Recommended), which is higher than I would have, but I mostly agree with the review otherwise. I was actually just thinking along the same lines, that I think I (and others) may come to appreciate the movie more as time passes. It does have a loopy sincerity, and while it had a lot of faults, I never found it boring, aside from the Amazon Penthathlon (I know a couple of posters in this thread did). Also, I think he’s dead on about the movie largely consisting of disconnected scenes and set pieces that it tries to shoehorn into a narrative (and I would add, unsuccessfully).
I’ll give you one better. Dump both “opening scenes” and start the film with her ordering alone in the restaurant. A cold opening, followed by a scene or two of “Diana in everyday life.” Not WW, mind you, but Diana. Enough to see how she’s developed as a character since we left her. I don’t see any development at all in either (a) cutting back to before we left her, in her childhood, or (b) showing her stopping common criminals whose crime is coincidentally linked to the plot. Neither of these scenes added anything to the character. Neither really gave us a meaningful “update” from where we left off.
The mall scene gives the movie a lot of its goofy, comic book feel right from the get-go. I loved it, and would absolutely have left it in, though having it AFTER a few of the “Diana alone” bits would have been cool. It also paces the movie better, since there is no other action, except for the opening action scenes, for over an hour to start the movie.
All the scenes in Thermoscyria (sp?) are boring. They’re boring in this movie and they were boring in WW, too. People in weird old school costumes doing parkour and karate is just so goddamn old in superhero movies, and shoehorning in Robin Wright, Connie Nielsen et al. to say vague maxims in weird, unplaceable accents adds nothing to the movie but cost. WW84 should have been entirely set in 1984.
I’d be willing to concede on the mall scene if–and they very well could have, if they’d committed to it–they had made it so that Diana being the one to stop the thieves in the mall had been essential. As in, only Diana could have done it, or Diana only got access to the stone because she was there. As written, the same sequence of events could have been kicked off by the police making the apprehension. Because either way, it ends up at her place of work.
Which, come to think of it, kind of fits with the idea of making the “mall scene” (as one of two openings) expungable on studio demand: because it was something that the studio might have forced her to drop, the writer/director pretty much had to make it so that the whole thing could be removed as a standalone scene. Integrating it into the story would have made it too essential to drop, meaning if push came to shove the scene with little Diana would had to be dropped.
I guess the only thing worse than the studio calling the shots is the studio maybe (possibly) having an option to call the shots, depending on how forceful they want to be when it comes to the final cut, but then ultimately not doing so, even as the writer/director hedged for the possibility, leaving the overall production rudderless. Which I think sums up the faults with this overly long endeavor well enough: a rudderless production.
I hated it as a worse Wonder Woman, but kind of liked it as a better Batman V Superman.
What I mean was that BvS was trying some interesting ideas* , but the execution was so bad that it was completely lost. WW84 similarly has some good ideas that were somewhat botched. I think the whole wishstone/Max Lord thing was meant as a parody/reference to the “Greed is Good” 80’s culture, and for the main characters, it did a reasonably good job of bringing properly consequential punishments for their greed. The botching is that for most of the side characters, the punishments weren’t ironic or just consequences, they were punished just for not knowing the right magic words/rules of the stone, which muddies the theme of the stone.
*Superman is an uncanny-valley alien, how can we trust him? Oh the Martha scene is showing his connection to humanity is a good basis/resolution to their conflict, but Lex Luthor causing the fight by extorting them deflates that reason, and the reason behind Martha didn’t come through
I like that, how about this for a re-cut:
Start with lonely Diana pining for Steve. But! the restaurant is in the mall, so she jumps up to save the day.
After finding out that items from the robbery are going to the Smithsonian, Diana is curious, so she goes to the artifact room and meets pre-Cheetah. Cheetah is delighted to have the glamorous Diana come and be curious about stuff.
Change the folder dropping scene from a meet cute, to later. Now Diana and Cheetah have a connection because of their shared interest in the artifacts, and folder dropping leads to their dinner and the start of their friendship.
As long as I’m redoing things, the movie theater in the mall should have been showing a Raiders and Temple of Doom double feature. Then the Egypt truck scenes become an homage, not weird deja-vu.
I agree. The mall scene was just as problematic and it doesn’t paint her in a good light. Once again it seems like they made a conscious choice of giving the robbers an extra dimension by having them stop their escape to try to talk one of their own out of hurting the little girl. And once again that goes nowhere as WW just beats the fuck out of all of them equally. Then to top it all off she destroys a cop car for no reason and if we are being even a tiny bit realistic they should be super dead after that drop.
Huh. My wife, who pretty seriously disliked the movie, loved the opening sequence. She said if it’d just been two hours of baby Diana competing in Amazonian Olympics she’d have been there for the whole thing, instead of getting up and wandering off halfway through.
I also really liked that sequence and considered it a highlight of the movie.
I quite liked the opening sequence too, although having just rewatched the first WW it did bug me that it contradicted when her training started in that movie. Maybe it would have worked better as a purely athletic race, without the bow & arrow, so nothing to do with combat.
Also I thought it might have been useful to mention the trickster god during the opening, as it kind of comes out of nowhere later on. Make a little speech about the competition symbolizing their opposition to the ideals of the trickster, Ares, etc.
The mall scene was fine enough, but dropping the crooks onto the car felt totally out of place.
I like that. If I could add some notes:
Diana initially sits by and doesn’t interfere with the robbery (because century of being cut off from humanity). It’s only when the little girl gets grabbed and it looks like Dumb Panicky Robber is going to drop her that she intervenes. She spots the security cameras and disables them first, then intervenes, out of costume, using the general panic and mayhem as cover - “accidentally” super-strength hip bumping a robber out of the way, and so forth. One little girl does clearly see her using her powers, and Diana sees her, and gives her a wink.
It’s only later on that we see her in costume, and it’s a dramatic reveal that she still has all of her gear.
I don’t like to tut-tut other people’s professions that I’m sure are very difficult and all that, but these right here make me think even less of the WW84 screenwriters. Or maybe echoreply and gdave are just super good.