I don’t buy it. It was a poorly written movie. It was slow paced. I did no rewinding, I doubt most people did.
I loved it. Norm as much as the first one but I was perfectly happy with it especially the first half or so.
The Amazon Olympics. The shopping mall caper . Captain Kirk and Wonder Woman canoodling in bed. They’re an adorable couple, very good chemistry.
Gal Gadot plays the role with the perfect combination of ancient wisdom and ability to experience delight.
The “introducing Steve Trevor to the modern world” sequence is absolutely adorable, and a nice parallel to the “introducing Diana to London” scene in the first movie
Finished watching it. I thought it was great. Exactly what I want from a superhero story—nostalgia, thrills, a moral center, light romance, delight. Gal Gadot and Chris Pine have fantastic chemistry.
The Cheetah character gets an interesting update and her origin is a version of the original Cheetah from the 1940s—she becomes the Cheetah because she is envious of Wonder Woman.
It has a funny/romantic sequence when Steve Trevor comes back to life.
It ends when the villain realizes his error and learns his lesson. (In the comic books, Wonder Woman ended up snapping Maxwell Lord’s neck, if I recall correctly.)
The main characters—WW, Steve, Barbara, and Max Lord, all have believable emotional arcs and performances are convincing.
And everyone was eventually saved by the power of love!
And in the “Casablanca” farewell, Steve Trevor gets to be Humphrey Bogart and Wonder Woman get to be an ass-kicking Ingrid Bergman.
I’m the end, WW’s encounter with Steve’s body double gives you hope that Diana will love again.
And of course the surprise cameo at the end. I wasn’t expecting it and it was a thrill.
I don’t look for this level of detailed explanation in a superhero movie, but she isn’t just a human with a few specific enhanced abilities. She is the daughter of Zeus and Hyppolyta. She is literally a demi-god, like Heracles.
These sorts of posts really irritate me. You liked it more than I did. That’s fine, there’s no reason we need to enjoy the same things, in the same way, to the same extent.
But this sort of stated-as-objective-fact take that you know what my reactions should have been and would have been is just arrogant.
I didn’t pause or rewind it, specifically because I wanted to take in the movie as it was. I waited until nightfall to watch it, so I could see it on a big screen in a darkened room. It’s true it wasn’t quite the same as a true theatrical experience. But it was still a bad movie, in my opinion, and I’m firmly convinced that if I had seen it in a traditional theatrical environment, I would still have thought it was a bad movie.
I’ve seen plenty of big budget action movies in the theater that I thought were bad, including most of the current DCEU movies, so I really don’t think seeing it at home was a major factor.
And just by the way, WW84 is actually playing in theaters. One of my local theaters is showing it (it’s a test program, where small groups can rent a theater to see a first run movie), and a group of my friends is going to see it that way today. So, some of the comments in this thread might actually be from someone who did see it in a theater, and still thought it was bad.
Lol. The theatrical experience matters. Get irritated all you want, but theaters turn shitty movies into overwhelming spectacles… but the movie is still shit. The superhero genre is especially ill-suited for first-release home viewing precisely because of their reliance on spectacle, meaning that lazy crap like WW84 can no longer past muster.
Sure, the theatrical experience matters, but it doesn’t matter to everyone else as much as you think it does. Would I have enjoyed WW84 more if I had seen it in a traditional theater? I don’t know…maybe? Marginally? But I really, really don’t think so.
Again, I’ve watched a lot of big budget spectacle movies in the theater. Iron Man was good. Man of Steel was not. In my personal opinion, of course, yours might well be different. But I saw both in theaters, with friends, in a crowd, and I still thought Man of Steel was a bad movie.
If you’re firmly convinced that you know more about how other people experience movies than they do, I doubt there’s anything I can say to change your mind. But maybe, just maybe, WW84 is just a genuinely bad movie, and some people would still think so, regardless of where they saw it? Is that possible?
What surprise cameo. Unless you are counting Steves 1984 body original owner.
He means Linda Carter towards the end of the credits.
Well, I haven’t stepped into a movie theater since the early '90s, so the theatrical experience doesn’t mean shit to me.
Lynda Carter as Asteria.
Nah. We watched it straight through and I’ve seen numerous superhero flicks in my living room that were much, much better. And I’ve seen crap movies in theaters that I realized straight off were crap or recognized their shortcomings.
This was just a bad nonsense movie.
I’ve posted before about how depressing and dull I found the whole Thanos arc in the Marvel movies. I watched Endgame with the attitude of “now I can be done with this.” (I did like Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and the two Ant Man movies a lot.)
Wonder Woman by contrast had what I wanted in a superhero movie. It wasn’t the greatest ever. Just like in the first Wonder Woman movie, the final battle bored me. But I have to search my memory to recall any thriller or action movie in which the final battle didn’t bore me. Raiders of the Lost Arc? Star Wars?
The problems with WW84 aren’t going to be fixed by seeing it 30’ tall. The pacing was slow and plodding so “spectacle” wasn’t going to keep anyone enthralled. The mall bit was actually pretty low action and low spectacle. The Egypt bit was okay (though it felt like they were copying Indiana Jones there), the White House bit was fine and the final Cheetah bit was frankly pretty boring and in muddled blue color tones. But none really felt like “spectacle!” and that’s four fairly short parts of a 2.5hr long movie. The film needed a much larger crutch than “Wonder Woman getting dragged by a truck but big” to paper over the issues.
If someone liked it, that’s cool. I’m not trying to convince them to not like it. I wanted to like it too – that’s why we spent a month’s worth of HBOMax and nearly three hours of our Christmas on it. And even if a movies scores a 20% on RT, that’s twenty people out of a hundred who liked it; not exactly unicorn hunting. (I have no idea what WW84’s score will shake out as; 20% presented as example)
If I’m at the theater and a fight scene starts and I get up to go to the restroom and then come back and the fight is still happening, then that fight scene was too damn long. Since I watched WW84 at home I didn’t get to use that metric on the final battle.
The one thing the ‘theatrical experience’ would have added to this movie?
Being pissed off at the amount of money I just spent to see it.
At least this way - it only cost me $14.99 - and I still want a refund.
Did think about fast forwarding some though!
True.
I liked it a lot more than most of y’all, but still didn’t love it.
THE GOOD: The initial Olympics sequence was just awesome. I would watch a lot more of that, and really wish it were big.
I liked Max Lord’s story arc pretty well, and appreciated that the final “battle” was more a hearts-and-souls battle than the CGI clusterfuck that ended the first movie and most superheroes movies.
Gadot and Pine and Pascal all did great, and Wiig was fine.
The eighties callbacks were pretty fun. We’re watching Stranger Things with my 11yo daughter, and it’s cool to see how two different stories do 80s nostalgia so differently.
The best superhero stories mix action and dialogue, and this one did that, too. The long sections without action weren’t a problem, except…
THE BAD:
The dialogue wasn’t great. I love that they made space for those quiet conversations, but I wish they’d been better.
Women are ugly losers if they wear glasses and can’t wear heels? Christ almighty, your movie is about the eighties, you’re not making it in the eighties.
The plot could’ve been much tighter. I really like the MacGuffin, but they should’ve explored it more fully.
Wonder Woman really should’ve angsted more over the dude whose body was being possessed by Steve.
MISTAKEN CRITICISMS:
Of course the plane was fueled, and of course Pine could fly it. He’s not a pilot, he’s a comic book character. Just as comic-book scientists are experts in every field of science, and comic-book librarians know the location of every tome in existence, a comic-book pilot can fly anything from a Van Gogh ornithopter to an alien spacecraft. And of course it’s fueled. Again, it’s comic-book physics. Planes are meant to fly, so they do. The only reason it would lack fuel would be if it was fun for them to crash on an island in the middle of the ocean–and in that case, nobody would notice the fuel was running low until a giant red “LOW FUEL” light began flashing ten seconds before the engines sputtered out.
Another pile onto this.
For some movies the theatrical experience is enhancing and can make good movie into “an experience”. For a very few viewers the wow of the immersion is the whole point. Like a carnival ride. But the theatrical experience does not save a shitty movie. It can only enhance what is present. Louder bigger shit just smells more intensely.
Yeah, that’s me exactly. If I’d spent north of $30 to see this, I’d have been pretty upset. As it is, the $14.99 is mixed in with all the other things I’m enjoying on HBO, so the incremental cost is zero.
As it was, I could enjoy the parts that were fun, laugh at the parts that were stupid, and distract myself with something else during the parts that were boring. That’s probably the only reason I enjoyed it.
Should somebody get HBO to see WW84? No. Should somebody who already has HBO spend an evening watching it? Sure, if you like super hero stuff, and aren’t going in with too high of expectations, it’s fun.