I loved the movie Wonder Woman when it came out three years ago and was expecting to like the sequel, which debuted Christmas Day on HBO Max. I wanted to like it. When I saw the headline of Manohla Dargis’s review in the New York Times, “She’s Still Big, It’s the Script That Got Small,” I refused to read it. I didn’t want Ms. Dargis planting negative perceptions in my head before I’d seen the film.
So Jennifer and I sat down to treat ourselves to Wonder Woman 1984 the day it came out. She bailed on the movie half-way through; I stuck with it until the end, but it didn’t get better.
The first movie was thrilling. The new one is cartoony, and even by the standards of superhero movies, entirely implausible. Johnny Carson had a line: “If you buy the premise, you buy the bit.” That’s part of what made the first movie work. If you can accept the premise that a colony of Amazons who have been charged by the gods with protecting humanity (and one of whom is half a god herself, although she doesn’t know it) has been living for thousands of years on a hidden island in the Atlantic Ocean, then the rest of the story happily follows.
By contrast, the new film layers one outlandish premise on top of another in head-spinning succession. Its plot would have had Stan Lee rolling his eyes. But that’s not its only problem. Virtually anyone watching Wonder Woman three years ago became invested in its protagonists. They were heroes in the best sense of the word. In the sequel these same characters spend most of the movie bewildered and flailing while the world spins off its axis, and it frankly hard to care.
Jennifer and I may be in the minority. As of this writing, RottenTomatoes.com gives WW84 a Tomatometer Score (based on ratings by professional reviewers) of 65% and an Audience Score of 72%. That’s nowhere near the 93% and 84% that the earlier movie earned, but well into “Certified Fresh” territory nonetheless.
But I can’t help it. I was more than ready to love this movie, and I just didn’t.