And the contrivance that WW gets involved in this whole story in the first place because she’s, for some reason, foiling a mall jewelry story heist like some sort of overqualified Paul Blart mall cop.
The wish stone things gives you one wish, unless the plot requires you to have a second wish, like Barbara. And it takes away that which you love most immediately, or at some later point, or gradually depending on the plot requirements. And it takes away what is most valuable to you, unless it takes away what Max Lord deems is most valuable to you depending on the plot requirements at the time, unless it doesn’t take anything away from you like when Cheetah gets her second wish that she for some reason gets.
I have no idea what the watch had to do with anything except as some sort of visual clue that this man that Diana has apparently spent the last seven goddamn decades pining for is coming back or something.
And Diana is such a good friend to Barbara that after saving her from an assault in the park, she just sort of walks away and inexplicably leaves her alone there.
In my very lengthy critique above, I didn’t get around to this, but, yeah, that part didn’t make any sense. How did Max Lord even know about the artifact at all? How did he track it down? Why would he even think it would work, much less have a plan on how to exploit its wish granting? And that plan was just…I mean, the way he phrased his wish, why didn’t he just become a stone? He didn’t wish for its power, he literally wished to become the Wishstone.
And the stone just happens to randomly be in a black market antiquities dealer’s stash (which is operating out of a mall?) at the time of a robbery that Wonder Woman just happens to foil? And it gets sent to the Smithsonian for identification (which in itself is ok), but the artifact is sent to the…geologist? And not the cultural anthropology and archaeology expert? Why? Who cares what the stone itself is? And why would she have all of the other antiquities as well? And good thing Wonder Woman just happened to befriend Barbara the exact time their boss just happens to tell Barbara about the artifacts (which, again, why isn’t she asking Diana, the cultural anthropology and archaeolology expert who’s standing right there, to identify them?).
At first I assumed it was going to be some super-weird magical space rock or something. Then they look at it and say “lol citrine” which seems like the sort of thing you could learn by using a Boy Scout Rock Identification manual and not really need to get the Smithsonian involved.
ISTM that the intention, by referencing 1984, was to homage the Richard Donner / Superman style. Much like other works nowadays try to mimic the Spielberg '80s style. If you look back at Donner / Superman, it was kinda crap, in terms of coherence and motivations and villains. I felt that the Pedro Pascal hammyX10 acting was right in line with Donner work of that era (to cite another example, look at Bill Murray in Scrooged).
So, taking that in mind, if you don’t try to really make sense of any of it, it was fine, as in “just OK”. As for Wiig, I share the general disdain for her - her gifts fit into a narrow lane for me, and I don’t blame her performance for what were script / directing choices. But it really could have been anybody cast in that role. I was a little disappointed in the lack of representation / diversity - couldn’t they have found a POC for cheetah?
As to this - her second wish was his sharing his price for the others’ wishes with her. As he took one person’s health he also gave another’s rage etc to her.
It would have been “okay” if it wasn’t so long. I can turn my brain off but asking me to check out like that for 2.5hrs is asking a bit much if the movie isn’t engaging. I’d even suggest that some of the “But that’s stupid” moments wouldn’t have been that egregious if they were surrounded by an otherwise entertaining movie. There’s nonsensical moments in all superhero movies because superheroes are innately nonsensical but, when the movie is good, you don’t have the attention to waste worrying about them because fun stuff is going on. This failed to capture my sense of fun and left me with two and a half hours to spend trying to make sense of the plot holes and loose ends.
No, her second wish was to become “an apex predator. Like nothing this world has ever seen.” Either way, it’s still a second wish, even though it was specifically called out in dialogue multiple times that each person can only ever get one wish.
At a stretch, maybe Max counts as a different Wishstone, so the one wish per customer per Wishstone rule applies, which would actually be consistent with what the movie depicts, but at this point we’re putting more thought into figuring out how the Wishstone works than the movie ever bothers to do.
I think you’re right about it deliberately evoking the 80s Superman movies, and for that matter, Supergirl. But instead of evoking Superman and Superman II (the cheesy but entertaining ones), it evoked Superman III and Superman IV (the ones that were just plain bad).
Yes. Set the rules for the mechanic however you want and lay them out for me before using them so that I understand what’s going on, and I’m right there buying into it. But, if you’re just going to break the rules later, then figure out a way to lay out the rules differently in the first place. I can’t be expected to understand the plot of a movie when the rules are explained after they are already being used, and then change later on anyway.
When Max wishes to become the wish stone, we don’t have any idea what that even means, and it wouldn’t matter if we did because it changes as the movie progresses.
I agree that it’s never explained how he know about the stone and what it could do. The portrayal of the 1980s was amusing, particularly when Steve was trying to find a not-ridiculous outfit to wear.
I have no desire to defend anything of this dreck but it was the same go around that gave Max so many more of his wishes. His named price for granting others their wishes. I’d ask you to replay the scene but no one should have to watch any of this a second time!
I don’t think that’s what happened. The Wishstone always extracted a price for a wish. When it was the Stone itself, the price was supposedly “whatever you value most”, and it usually wasn’t clear what exactly that was until later. When Max became the Wishstone, he apparently set his own price, which was apparently whatever he wanted from the wisher, and he got it immediately. But, apparently, granting wishes was draining his lifeforce.
Or something.
The whole point of using the technomagic McGuffin comm system was to grant wishes to basically everyone in the world, and take as his price their strength and health and lifeforce.
Actually…I buy that. It’s a cursed artifact. It arranges to “coincidentally” appear where it will cause maximum chaos. Which is actually entirely consistent with how it works early in the movie, before the movie throws out all of the rules.
I feel like what we saw on screen was a heavily and clumsily revised screenplay, with a lot of bits and pieces of earlier drafts still lingering, cut off from their context. If they had some dialogue (maybe with random-Mayan-shaman-guy) lampshading just how weird all of the coincidences up until then had been, and attributed it to curse magic, that would have made a lot more sense. I genuinely wonder if something like that was actually in an earlier draft.
Auction house. Antiques dealer. Private museum. Import/Export warehouse. Anyone involved in any sort of import business. Those all make more sense, and fit into 80s genre conventions. But a random mall jewelry store? (This is, by the way, probably the least of my problems with the movie’s plotting.)
Terrible movie in many ways, already mentioned. It hit so many wrong notes, and was tonally all over the place - I don’t know why they didn’t hire a competent writer. And I couldn’t get past the fact that she was basically raping the guy throughout the movie, which was okay because … what, she’s hot? He won’t remember it? Reverse the genders and try the same movie and it’s a horror-show.
Huh. Ok, I missed that. I guess that doesn’t count as a second wish, then, it’s part of the price he’s extracting, which…he can funnel to other people? That’s…ugh, the whole thing is just a convoluted mess.
It occurs to me, the whole movie is a sort of meta-Monkey’s Paw. I for one did wish for another Wonder Woman movie, which I got, but at the price of everything that made the first one so good…