Him even knowing what switches to flip and look for make no sense - WW1 planes have a guy outside that turns the prop to start them and , what 1 or 2 controls inthe cockpit.
“It seems to run on some form of electricity” -
Here’s an idea: Diana’s the hero of this movie and has been in Man’s World for 70 years. Couldn’t they have, like, let her learn to fly a jet at some point in last the 7 decades? Show that she’s led a life. Let Steve be the damsel in the passenger seat while she displays some competency?
The problem isn’t rejection of comic book logic. It’s just a dumb scene.
They will be making a third movie:
There’s enough movie franchises where the second film is a dog that I’d be willing to give No. 3 a chance (pending reviews, perhaps) but I find the circumstances a bit odd. Enough people were starved for some new Hollywood magic that I’m sure a lot of people saw it on Christmas but not many seemed to think well of it. Extrapolating that into “Well, guess we should make more” feels like a leap unless they plan on keeping us all locked in our houses for a year before this one comes out as well.
I realize this if flogging a dead horse at this point, but…
Some friends wanted to watch it “together” in a socially distanced group watch, so I just re-watched it. A couple of things that kind of passed me by on the first watch, but stood out in the re-watch:
When Barbara and Diana first meet, Barbara lists her areas of expertise: “Geology, gemology, lithology…and part-time cryptozoology.” That last one was just really random. It sort of makes sense as just part of setting up Barbara as a weird nerd, but considering she is going to eventually turn into a cheetah-woman, it seems like it might somehow tie into that…but it doesn’t. It’s never mentioned again. As I mentioned upthread, it really seems like there are bits and pieces of previous drafts of the screenplay left over in what actually made it to the screen, but devoid of their context.
Diana never actually wishes for Steve to return. She’s holding the Wishstone when Barbara asks her what she would wish for, Diana gets a distant look on her face, and we see that breeze that blows through when wishes are granted. She’s clearly thinking about Steve and mentally wishing to have him back. But it’s a plot point, called out explicitly in dialogue twice later in the film, that you have to actually say your wish out loud. It doesn’t work if you only think it. Except when it does, that one time and only that one time.
Also, when Wonder Woman discovers she can fly…She’s just doing that kind of randomly. There’s no actual reason for her to be flying around at that point. But while she’s flying, she somehow hears Max’s global broadcast and the replies. How did she do that? Did she know she could do that? She goes back to her apartment to get Asteria’s armor, and then just kind of shows up at the comm center. How did she even know where it was? Did she track the transmission? How?
You know what, I’ll actually give the movie that sequence. At that point, she’s just Silver Age Superman, and manifests random powers, depending on what would be useful for her to do at any given moment. Except…that’s not how her powers work in Batman v Superman or Justice League.
That and all of the other continuity issues lead me to a headcanon. In the CW’s The Flash TV series, the multiverse exists, including multiple parallel universes. The DCEU Flash actually had a brief in-continuity appearance, so the DCEU is officially part of a multiverse. My headcanon: WW84 doesn’t actually take place in the same universe as Batman v Superman and Justice League, or even Wonder Woman. It exists in a parallel. Possibly the same universe as the Christopher Reeve Superman movies, but I think more likely a parallel of that universe, the same one as Superman Returns.
WW1 German Cockpit -
F111 cockpit -
The Marvel movies aren’t all perfect (the whole thing with Thanos eliminating half of all life in the universe never made any sense) but in general, Disney/Marvel seem to do a much better job of making fun movies that tie together in an overall universe. Warner Bros/DC have a really good set of characters but their films aren’t as much fun and don’t gel as well overall.
You cannot fill plot holes, weak character development, and lackluster special effects by putting it on a larger screen with bigger speakers.
“I forgot to tell you about ‘radar’”
Yes, and while you’re at it:
- Turbofan jet engines
- Heads up displays
- Fly-by-wire controls
- Retractable landing gear
- Avionics
- O2 systems
- Supersonic flight
- Turning the navigation lights on and off
Basically, all the shit did didn’t exist on airplanes in 1918.
Heck, that’s not even really how it works in WW84 where she explains that she’s been practicing some divine trick to make things hidden and only got it to work once so far. But instant flying, hey, why not.
Have you seen any of the Christopher Nolan Batman movies? There are zero “real world practicalities” that are given any respect. The Wonder Woman movies are not “grounded” in any way. They’re pure fantasy in which the Classical gods are freaking real and play a part in human affairs.
A couple of Superman/Batman/Justice League/Suicide Squad movies were “gritty” and “dark” and more violent but in no way were they “grounded” in “real world practicalities.”
Aquaman, Shazam, Birds of Prey, and Wonder Woman are completely comic book movies that operate on comic book rules (i.e., almost no rules).
In a gritty comic book version of Wonder Woman, the conflict ended when Wonder Woman murdered Maxwell Lord. In this movie version of Wonder Woman, she doesn’t kill anyone, even if she flings them through the air and they land on a car in a way that would have killed someone in the real world.
Quibbling about jet fighter controls and fuel really is risible. How many viewers have any clue how jet fighters work or how far they can fly? And those who do know … why should they care? I have never seen anything in my profession or area of knowledge portrayed with “real world practicalities” in a fantasy movie like this one is.
Yes, why not? Flying an airplane is easier than magic. It certainly is in real life.
I was referring to WW suddenly learning how to fly because Steve once said “You just gotta feel the air!”
I mean, a bunch of people in this thread alone found it weird. A thread in GQ about it backs up that it’s ridiculous. You don’t need to be an air force pilot to recognize that cockpits changed a bit between 1916 and 1984
That whole scene was such a pile of shit I had to pause the movie and pour myself a drink. Even something as simple to us as knowing where the throttle was and how it operated (something we’ve all see hundreds of times on TV and in movies) would be totally totally mystifying to a WWI aviator.
Yes I laughed when Steve Trevor figured out how to fly a jet. It was amusing to me and it fit the tone of the movie. It didn’t “take me out of it.” I thought “yep that’s exactly what the spirit of Steve Trevor inhabiting the body of a guy with terrible clothes would figure out to do.”
Yes I can sit there and point out things that wouldn’t happen for the fun of it, but it’s entirely appropriate that they happen.
This is my DC movie ranking list
- Birds of Prey
- Wonder Woman
- Shazam/Aquaman (tied)
- Wonder Woman 1984
(There were moments in all five of the above movies in which I found myself spontaneously laughing, clapping, or cheering, even WW1984, which I watched on my laptop.)
(Biiiiiiiiig gap)
- Batman versus Superman
- Justice League (ranks lower than BvS because it was so unremarkable I can’t remember a damn thing about it except there was a villain I dish that give a shot about. )
- Man of Steel (just kill me)
(Biiiiiiiig gap)
Dead fucking last: Suicide Squad. What a miserable fucking movie.
I mean, congratulations on knowing all these things I guess?
I was a journalist for 25 years. Should I make a list about all the things that make J. J. Jameson an unrealistic newspaper editor and Peter Parker a terrible photojournalist? I guess I could but why would I want to?
These are the scenes in WW84 I rewinded to watch a second time—
- Amazon Olympics
- Shopping Mall heist
- The gala where Steve appears
- Diana and Steve canoodling in bed
- Fashion montage
- Steve discovering the modern world
- Casablanca farewell
- Diana meeting “Steve”
- Lynda Carter
Heck that’s a good chunk of the movie.
The issue centers around the concept of suspension of disbelief. Everyone has their own line to this concept, and when a movie maker crosses it, we are unable to enjoy the work. WW84 pushed this concept pretty hard in some places. In other places it was just inconsistent, unnecessarily so. When you have to avoid critical thinking, make logical allowances, over and over and over during the movie it wears on a viewer. Particularly if it is a different thing to suspend disbelief over each time.
When you review the work and think that your concerns could have been alleviated with minor changes to the script, it feels like the movie makers were lazy.
Your list of 9 things you liked have something in common. No link to the plot. Every one of those scenes could have been lifted and redeposited in a WW movie with a completely different plot. Or, said another way, none of them needed to be discarded to tighten up the plot and make it more realistic and internally consistent.
What was up with the first part of the movie when Diana was stopped from ‘winning’? I get that she cut some corners, but not sure I fully agree with her getting stopped before the end. I think they should have let her finish the race, think she had won, and told her no she didn’t because she didn’t get all of the targets and she took a short cut. It’s not like we were told the rules, so when she took the short cut I was thinking how smart she was for doing something on the fly. They showed the flags for each target so I figured she would get a penalty for that.
I didn’t really care for the movie all that much. The fight scenes are getting too long, and really aren’t that interesting. I think they should have spent more time on Wiig’s change to a worse person. They showed a bit of her getting powers, then her beating/killing that guy, and then, just evil.
I think I’ve said my piece about suspension of disbelief. At this point, if someone wants to insist that their threshold for suspension of disbelief is the only correct one, and mine is wrong, and my subjective opinions are not just wrong, but I’m wrong for expressing them or even having them…shrug.
Back to the movie:
This came to me literally, and appropriately, overnight. Josh Gates in the tweet I quoted above compares the plot to dream logic. My new headcanon (replacing the headcanon I posted upthread):
The movie literally ran on dream logic. There’s even an internal clue in the dialogue. I’ve been calling the Magical Plot Device “the Wishstone”, but in the movie, everyone just calls it “the Stone.” Except for one line of dialogue, when Max wishes to become the Stone, he calls it “the Dreamstone”.
That seems like yet another inclusion from an earlier draft of the screenplay, where the Stone made dreams come true rather than granting wishes, but it actually makes a lot more sense internally. The Stone is actually a Dreamstone. As it grants wishes, its power grows, and more and more of reality takes on a dream-like quality, until everyone is living in a collective waking dream - that becomes a collective waking nightmare.
At the end, when the power of the Dreamstone is broken*, the whole thing collapses, and everyone wakes up. Just like a dream, their memories of events are hazy and inconsistent, and fade with time. The events of the movie take place on or around the 4th of July. By the time of the coda, at roughly Christmastime, everyone has pretty much forgotten all the weirdness, and even physical evidence has faded away.
Diana’s flight sequence is in itself, I think, pretty strong internal evidence for the dream hypothesis. The way her flight works is a lot more consistent with the way flight works in dreams than it does in comic books.
At the end, Diana is 1) a central participant in the events, 2) an immortal demigod, and 3) has the Lasso of Truth, so she may retain more memories. She might also realize the whole thing was a sort of waking dream, so she never even tries to use her dream powers again. Or maybe everything fades away for her as well, so she doesn’t even remember being able to fly, except maybe as a dream fragment.
*It might not have been necessary for literally everyone in the world that had made a wish to renounce it. At that point, Max was the Dreamstone, so by renouncing his wish, that alone might have been enough to break the Dream. Or a critical mass of wishers renouncing their wishes might have been enough. Or some combination of those factors. Or, because Dreamstone, the whole thing followed dream logic, and trying to suss out a consistent logic is a fool’s errand.
Suspension of disbelief isn’t some genetically determined trait. You can choose to regard it or not.l and re-adjust it for the work in front of you.
For example, the Harry Potter setting makes zero sense in any ways if you give it a moment’s thought. But look at the setting. The work doesn’t care about creating a logically ordered world. I can choose to be adamant and complain about it or I can just accept that the work doesn’t care about that thing and enjoy it for what it is.
As I said above I have never seen journalism portrayed realistically in a fantasy movie. Is that going to break my suspension of disbelief? It’s within my control to decide whether the thing I notice are “unrealistic” will affect how I watch the movie.
Maybe you can, but I certainly can’t.