"Be careful what you wish for."
Hello everyone!
That's right people, we're going to the 80s!
Now obviously, people who've actually lived through the decade probably have a different view on what this movie showed, but at the same time you have to give some credit where credit's due: they took what people PERCEIVE the 80s were and made it funny, or as funny as they could possibly make it in that moment.
And well, most of the time it worked!
Plus I mean, there's just something about 80s fashion that will either make you laugh or cry your eyes out at the absolute disaster on screen.
Add in Perdro Pascal in a blonde wig and you probably know what movie I'm talking about here.
Look to the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane!
Nope. It's Wonder Woman 1984.
I have a few links related to Wonder Woman already so you'll find them at the bottom of this page, but if we briefly recap what happened to Diana in the first movie:
during World War I she leaves the secret island of the Amazons to go find the God of War, Ares, and stop him from spreading chaos and death across the world. In the process, she meets and falls in love with Steve Trevor, played by Chris Pine, but loses him when he sacrifices his life to save millions. She ends up defeating Ares, of course, and going on with her life as an immortal demigod (or what exactly is she? Some sources say she's Zeus' biological daughter, others that she was made of clay and life was given to her).
In a flashback, we first see a young Diana competing in what looks to be the Amazon Olympics - but as she cheats, she's taken out of the competition and taught that all things come to those who wait, because patience is a virtue. And shortcuts never work.
Now in 1984, Diana Prince works at a museum and moonlights as Wonder Woman, and somehow no one has ever been able to connect the mysterious brunette woman rescuing civilians and stopping crime to the anthropologist and archaeologist.
Superhero stuff, y'all. And probably the 80s too.
At work, Diana befriends Barbara, who's a clumsy, socially awkward and just a bit shy employee at the same museum, but BRILLIANT with a bunch of degrees, and Diana ends up really liking her so they start hanging out together. Barbara is asked to look into some artifacts the FBI drops for them to investigate, and she and Diana wonder over what looks to be a simple sort of stone with citrines, and a weird inscription along the rim.
Unknowingly to the pair of them, both of them make wishes on said stone, but they don't know that they've actually come true until much later.
Besides, at this point, Pedro Pascal enters the scene.
Maxwell Lord owns an oil company, and his slogan is that you can always be better. The trouble for him is that he's a simple con man who's been searching for exactly the stone Barbara currently has in her office, so of course he shows up to charm her (cheesy and sleazy, anyone?). At this point, Barbara's wish has started to come true - she wished to be more like Diana - and she finds her confidence to be a bit more outgoing.
Diana, on the other hand, is as impressed with Lord as I would be with paint drying on the walls - which is to say, not so much.
She also suspects he wants that stone for more than he's revealing, and while she's trying to hunt him down at a museum gala, she gets stopped by a man she's never seen in her entire life before - but he takes off his watch and says the words Steve told her right before flying off to die, and she realizes (as the actor morphs into Chris Pine, mind you) that somehow, Steve Trevor is BACK.
Forget about Lord. FORGET EVERYTHING.
And allow yourself to enjoy Chris Pine playing a gleeful WWI pilot getting to know the 80s. It might be one of the best montages in the movie - yes, Steve, that's a trash can.
Real life doesn't just stop though, no matter how much you might want it to, because at this point in time, Lord has actually gained access to the Stone - and made a wish to BECOME the stone, so the thing has disintegrated. But the problem with these wishes is that the more he grants, the more his physical health deteriorates, though first his company experiences a surge, and things start happening that garner everyone's attention.
Diana and Steve learn about this and head to the office building where she sees a second part of the inscription on the rim, on the inside, and backs away in terror because it's the language of the gods. She explains that there used to be many gods, and the artifacts they made don't always do good.
This proves true after she and Steve reach Egypt (in a stolen plane he somehow knows how to fly even though I'm fairly confident a fighter jet will have a bit more on the dashboard than an WWI plane, but, you know, let's enjoy them flying through 4th of July fireworks in the meantime). Lord has since granted a wish to an Emir which brought to life a wall that divides the poorer areas from water, so naturally the area suddenly explodes into chaos.
More importantly, however, at least in this movie, is that Diana starts to stumble in her fighting while she and Steve try to take Lord into custody, and Steve - knowing full well what she can do - is worried. Naturally so, given a gunshot wound isn't healing and she dropped from the Lasso of Truth.
They go back to the US where Barbara, on Diana's request, has been researching the Stone and revealed that it's popped up throughout history, always with the same consequences: total chaos and destruction for the nations who had it. Together, the trio visit a Mayan descendant where Diana finally uncovers just who made it: and wouldn't you know it but it's the Duke of Deception, because why couldn't it be one of those mostly harmless gods, right?
With Lord in the White House taking power from the POTUS (and wishing a hell of a lot more nukes into existence which prompts the Russians to respond, NATURALLY), it's a race against the clock (and against having Steve shoot or stab the Secret Service so he has to resort to walloping them with a silver platter instead). However at this point, Barbara has sided with Lord because she doesn't want to go back to who she was before.
See, the only way to reverse the effects of the Stone is to either destroy it, or renounce your wish, and Diana isn't prepared to do that since the Stone gave her Steve - and Barbara won't let her harm Lord, which results in a fight Wonder Woman loses, for the first time, because each wish comes with a price, taking from you what you love most to give you what you desire.
In Barbara's case, it's her humanity.
For Wonder Woman, it's her powers.
Steve knows this - he's known this for a while - and he convinces her that he lived a great life, but the world will always need Wonder Woman. So, because we didn't suffer enough in the first movie the first time he died, we have to let Steve go AGAIN as Diana renounces her wish, regains her powers, and flies off after Lord and Barbara, using the lessons Steve gave her about flying to master the air currents.
Why can't some superheroes have surviving love interests?!
Lord, meanwhile, has hooked himself up to a satellite array covering the Earth and is granting wishes all over the place, but what he doesn't tell the people making them is that he's also taking their health and lives from them to restore his own, wanting more, more, more.
Diana arrives to put a stop to this, wearing the armour of the greatest Amazon warrior, Asteria, which she showed Steve earlier in the movie (she found it while searching for Asteria herself, but she's nowhere to be found after sacrificing herself so that Diana's mother could take her people into hiding - I also suspect she was MORE than happy to ditch the armour because man that thing looks uncomfortable, and if a woman designed it, I'm a crocodile). She takes on Barbara again, but Barbara is now Cheetah in full, an apex predator at the top of the food chain. She's still no real match for a demigod though, and Diana shocks her with electricity in the water before heading in to Lord, where she uses her Lasso of Truth to speak to the world and show them what their wishes have started: basically a nuclear war since the US and Russia have both launched missiles, and the regular people are caught in between.
Hands down one of the best parts of the movie is the regretful and fearful faces of the generals on either side as they give the order to launch, specifically the Russian one, showcasing they know EXACTLY what the price will be for what they've just done.
But Diana reaches through to the people just in time, speaking to them with her own pain about losing Steve, and they renounce their wishes - as does Lord, who hears his son calling to him in desperation, and he runs off to find the boy. It's revealed he had a miserable childhood with an abusive father and only ever wanted MORE because he never had it before, but turns out what he needed was always right in front of him: as his son says, he doesn't have to deserve that he'd be proud of him, he already is. He's his dad.
I'm not crying, you're crying!
With the renounced wishes, the nukes also disappear and the world can return to some semblance of normality just in time for the holidays, where Diana gets pelted by some snowballs and runs into none other than the guy Steve took over for the short time his soul was returned to Earth. And he's even wearing an outfit Diana put together for Steve, but Steve nixed!
The two share a short, cute conversation, and the guy is obviously taken with her - and for the first time, after seeing Diana prefer solitude in the beginning of the movie, we see her now accepting the chance that, maybe, something - someONE - else is out there.
Just like Steve told her to do.
And with that, Wonder Woman flies out to save another day!
Just as her predecessor ... who shows up to stop a beam from falling on a young woman with a stroller, and it turns out to be none other than Linda Carter, the OG Wonder Woman, this time in the role of Asteria, hiding among the common folk and living a quiet life.
But it's continuity, because the world WILL always need a Wonder Woman - and she passed the mantle on with her armour to Gal Gadot.
With that wonderful wrap-up to the movie it's time to say farewell to this sequel, and I have to say that, while I can see why people dislike it - it has the 80s campiness to it that might be a bit too much and doesn't take itself too seriously like superhero movies usually do - I kind of enjoyed it. Sure there were things that made very little sense (Steve automatically knowing how to pilot the new plane, the Lasso of Truth suddenly able to harness lightning, etc), but at the same time it's two hours of escapism and tugging on your heartstrings, teaching us that letting go is hard, but important.
Because in the end, just as Wonder Woman says: it's the truth that's important. Truth is beautiful, even when it hurts (as it so often does). And no matter how many shortcuts you take to achieve your goal, often they'll reveal themselves to be meaningless in the end. The path is hard and winding, but perseverance and hope are two things humanity has in abundance.
Something we should never forget.
Up, up and away!
xx
*images and video not mine
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