For those of you who are wondering, my mom lived through the actual 1980s, so I asked her what she thought of the period setting. Mom said it did remind her of the 80s in a few ways, but the hair and the shoulder pads weren’t big enough.
Me? I have never been a big fan of the 80s. Hate the hair, hate the fashion, hate the aesthetic, not my first choice on a time-traveling trip even if it saves the time-travel agency seamstress some grief. I know that the 80s aesthetic has been making a comeback but so far I have not had much reason to interact with it.
The 80s were anything but my ideal setting for a Wonder Woman sequel. I wanted to have Diana and Etta Candy and the squad from the first film having an adventure in the 1920s. From the announcement, the promo posters, and the trailers, WW84 looked like it was going to be a tacky 80s period piece. But, lesson learned, never judge a movie by its trailer. WW84 actually turned out to be a beautiful and emotional film.
In a lot of ways it’s even better than the first film, and compared to a lot of other PG-13 action flicks in this day and age it’s relatively lighthearted (emphasis on relatively, there are still a few dark moments). I suppose that’s thanks to the 80s aesthetic.
A policy I am considering adopting is seeing the film/show twice before writing the review. When it comes to the big screen, though, that might be a stretch because the nearest movie theater is twenty miles away. That being said, my mom and I made the twenty-mile trip to see WW84 on the first Monday of January. It was my first time at a movie theater since The Rise of Skywalker came out, obviously because of the pandemic. It was just me and mom and a handful of other people that sat well away from us in the theater.
And let me tell you, seeing WW84 on a big screen was WORTH IT. It’s a great movie on it’s own, but it definitely deserves a big screen.
This post is addressed to people who have already seen the film, as it will be a discussion of my thoughts about the film with spoilers. If you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading here and go watch it.
Welcome to the 1980s
WW84 is set in Washington DC, seventy years after the first film, and a character that was close to the protagonist comes back from the dead–sound familiar? I admit, the first half of WW84 felt ~sort of~ like Captain America: The Winter Soldier, and it was easy to draw parallels, the same way the first film was similar to the first Captain America movie. If you sit back and just enjoy WW84 for what it is, it isn’t that overt a comparison in the first act.
Then in the second act the story veers well away from any obvious similarity to CATWS and becomes a race to discover the truth behind and possibly destroy a mythological artifact. While the first Wonder Woman film was more grounded in mythology, with an Amazon warrior actively hunting a god, the mythological macguffin is introduced with more subtlety against the 1980s setting.
I’m going to take a second to address the prologue. The intro is a flashback to Diana’s childhood on Themiscrya. The setting is an athletic competition between the warrior Amazons. It is a departure from the first film’s gritty and very real female warrior training. The games here against their CGI backgrounds and with the CGI-enhanced stunts were a lot more fantastical, along the lines of “we’re goddesses, look what we can do” as opposed to “we are the most hardcore female warriors to ever exist, deal with it.”
Young Diana, whom we know from the first film was being trained in secret by General Antiope, appears to compete in the most challenging event of the Amazon games. However, she takes a shortcut to get a lead in the horse race portion of the event, and so Antiope pulls her back from victory for cheating.
It isn’t clear how this opening sequence relates to the rest of the film until after further reflection. Young Diana’s childhood cheating hijink, a mark of cleverness rather than strength, is a parallel to Maxwell Lord in 1984 corporate America trying to get ahead by seizing an ancient relic that grants wishes. Maybe the flashback also underlies the wish that the adult Diana, superbly played again by Gal Gadot, makes when she encounters the relic in her anthropology work at the Smithsonian. The message here, perhaps, is that cheating isn’t the best way to get what you really want, nor is it right to cheat in order to get your heart’s desire. I can jive with that.
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You don’t think of Diana Prince/Wonder Woman having to deal with personal problems–or at least not the confident scholar/superheroine that we see in the first few minutes of the film. Superman has his relationship with Lois Lane, Supergirl’s CW series devolved into petty drama, and I shouldn’t have to elaborate about Batman. From what little I have heard and seen about Wonder Woman in other DC media, she isn’t the kind to stress about close friendships or love interests because she’s a confident hardcore warrior.
As it turns out, for this timeline Diana in 1984 hasn’t really moved on after the death of Steve Trevor in 1918. To be fair, Steve’s death was kind of last-minute and maybe there were some things left unresolved between them. Not to mention Diana is a demigoddess, which could mean she processes grief differently. And there’s also the fact that she was raised by a culture made up entirely of women…so depending on how old she was when she left Themiscrya (several hundred to maybe two thousand years old?) she hasn’t completely adjusted to the outside world yet.
WonderTrev are Still a Power Couple
We knew as far back as when this film was in production that Chris Pine as Steve Trevor was going to…somehow…come back. I figured there was going to be some kind of catch. The way the Dream Stone relic works in the film, you can have your dearest wish but you lose something important in return. In Diana’s case, after Steve comes back she begins to imperceptibly lose her superhuman strength.
The time that Diana and Steve do get to spend together–not more than a matter of days–is endearing to watch. His sudden return to life in consequence of Diana’s wish is adequately explained. He does get the obligatory five minute montage of being a lost puppy as he discovers the future some seventy years after his death (and it is also a somewhat new experience for people who didn’t live through the eighties). But beyond that Trevor is still a confident soldier and spy, able to hand nearly anything that comes his way.
Diana and Steve are a great team in this new setting, both as a battle couple and as an investigator couple (and now I really want a WonderTrev detective series).
The most magical part of the film is easily the Invisible Jet scene. Also, side note, the musical score for this film is transcendent.
But when Diana and Steve attempt to keep Maxwell Lord from…destroying…the world with his new powers granted by the Dream Stone, Diana gets trashed by Barbara Minerva/Cheetah. It’s shocking and depressing for the audience to watch the normally unstoppable Wonder Woman lose. Steve doesn’t take it well, either. He tells Diana to renounce her wish to have him back, because she is going to need her powers to stop the bad guys. If certain viewers are uncomfortable with the heroine having to sacrifice her boyfriend in order to be strong, I don’t blame them.
So unlike other movie heroes, Wonder Woman doesn’t get to have her cake and eat it too, even if she wishes she could. I was kind of hoping that Steve would get to stay with her and live out his life (and probably pass away sometime before Batman vs. Superman). However, with his last words Steve tells Diana that it’s okay for her to move on and find happiness with another man (at least it was implied), and maybe there’s a hint in the finale of the film that she will. Having Steve back in her life so briefly helped Diana to find closure. The farewell scene is beautiful and touching but as a fan I’m like HOW DARE THEY?
Kristen Wiig as Cheetah: Sad Girl to Savage
In the wake of the disappointment that was both Avengers: Endgame and Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker, maybe Warner Brothers and DC DID get the memo about happy endings. Both of the film’s antagonists Barbara Minerva and Maxwell Lord get to live and get redeemed–which after the intense attachment we develop to them was a relief, especially for Lord.
Let me talk about Barbara Minerva first. She only gets to be in her full “Cheetah” form for her battle against Diana in the finale. The film does a stupendous job showing Barbara’s humanity being undone to that point.
(I am a little relieved, it must be said, that we weren’t shown her final transformation. I don’t think I could have sat through that.)
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For the record, I have seen Kristen Wiig in a movie before: The Martian, to be specific.
I felt kind of bad for Barbara at the beginning because she’s a geologist and a single woman who’s getting up in years, kind of like myself but also kind of like a former roommate of mine that was a geology major and I will probably feel bad for when she gets to see this movie (if I’d been a little less scared of hard sciences I might have gone into geology myself).
Barbara at the start of the film is unattractive and unpopular and unhappy. Diana is the only person who likes Barbara for being herself. But it doesn’t take glasses for Barbara to see how attractive and well-liked Diana is in comparison.
After nearly being assaulted by a drunk while walking home, Barbara goes back to her office in the dead of night and uses the Dream Stone to wish for everything she wants: popularity and power. While Diana never notices the cost of her wish until it’s too late, Barbara doesn’t care if she loses anything in return, and is willing to keep her newfound powers at any price.
For the first part of the film, even while her powers are growing, Barbara is still somewhat friendly to Diana and she even helps her and Steve with their investigation into the Dream Stone. But when Diana and Steve suggest that the stone may potentially have to be destroyed, thus cancelling the effects of everyone’s wishes, Barbara turns against them and allies herself with Maxwell Lord.
After the whole catfight (pun intended, probably) between Wonder Woman in that awesome golden armor and Cheetah, Barbara reverts to her human form. The last scene of her is sitting on the edge of a cliff looking out at the sunset. There really isn’t any closure for Barbara beyond that. Maybe she will resume her friendship with Diana. But will she really be happy going back to being boring old Barbara? Maybe. With a little more help from Diana.
Pedro Pascal as Maxwell Lord Almost Steals the Movie
Now for the good part: Pedro Pascal as Maxwell Lord. As a side note, the character Maxwell Lord was in the first season of Supergirl. However, DC has pretty much accepted that their live-action media is going to have to be a multiverse (but that’s what comes of rebooting Batman twice, going on thrice). Lord in Supergirl was sneaky and sarcastic and invested in technology. WW84’s Lord is flashy and showy and more than a little ruthless.
Keeping in line with modern Hollywood’s standards of social justice and representation of minorities, the Chilean-born Pedro Pascal, breakout star of The Mandalorian, seemed a natural choice, especially since without the facial hair Pedro can pass for a white guy and easily fills the role of an evil capitalist. However, the Maxwell Lord we see onscreen in WW84 is Latino in-universe, and passing for a sleazy rich white man to mingle with sleazy rich white men is his day job. The accent he uses for the character fits the New York City-based tycoon persona (but at the same time it sounds vaguely familiar, like he is imitating an accent or classic actor I have seen or heard before but I can’t put my finger on it).
And then, the story gives this iteration of Maxwell Lord a young and obviously Latino son. This adds tension to his character arc for the viewer because we KNOW Lord is the bad guy and he will probably suffer a painful death at the end that he will likely deserve. The character of the son, Alistair, changes Lord from a common capitalist into a struggling (possibly immigrant) father who promises his child everything and will do anything to succeed for their sake. The flashback to Lord’s childhood in an abusive and impoverished Latino household plays up that angle even more.
However, at the same time the rich tycoon side of Lord fits the trope of the rich Caucasian father that is ambitious and willing to spoil their child while ignoring what their child really wants. Lord’s character in WW84 is familiar and innovative at the same time. Other small elements of political correctness that the film serves were more benign, but making Maxwell Lord a Latino in-universe doesn’t just work, it actually gives the film depth.
The fact that Lord survives his stint as a supervillain, and that his son Alistair survives the madness Lord creates, is a huge relief, especially considering the bittersweet note that season two of The Mandalorian ended on (but that’s another story).
Pedro Pascal’s suit, mask, and voice acting for The Mandalorian is great, don’t get me wrong. However, without a mask or a suit of armor Pedro’s full range of expression is fully exposed, and he puts this exposure to good use as he plays a character that descends into madness and then bounces back by the skin of his teeth. His performance leaves the viewer breathless.
If the film has a villain at all, it was the ancient being that created the Dream Stone in the first place.
Worldbuilding Critique
Funny thing about WW84: it was supposed to come out last June. Instead, COVID-19 closed down the world’s movie theaters, and then several major US cities experienced intense protests and riots. In retrospect, WW84’s scenes of riots and anarchy in a world gone mad are almost familiar to the 2021 audience. Serendipity.
Other than that, WW84 does not feel overly like a political cartoon of today’s politics, but it is a warning about what happens when individuals at any level of social power let their individual desires take priority over the greater good.
An optimistic, politically conservative take on the film’s not-very-eighties social justice elements are that some of them might be painted with a little nuance. Barbara Minerva’s flaunting her super strength to peat potential attackers (read: rapists) to a pulp isn’t exactly painted in a good light, to give one example. One hopes that Patty Jenkins and others who worked on the film were using Barbara’s story as a critique of toxic feminism.
There are some throwbacks to the politics of the late Cold War era: in fact, the sky full of nuclear missiles at the film’s climax are a chilling reminder of how close things did get to nuclear devastation. For me, who was born literally days before the Soviet Union collapsed, that part of the film made the nuclear nightmare a lot more real.
The U.S. President in the film was never named. I wouldn’t call him a carbon-copy of Ronald Reagan, at least appearance-wise. There was also a reference to the ‘Star Wars’ nuclear deterrent program in the scene where he appeared, so I’m not sure how open the film’s POTUS is to interpretation. Just remember, readers, that the current political left hates Reagan.
Another fun political reference is Diana Prince’s apartment at the Watergate complex. The Watergate scandal would have still been fresh on everyone’s minds in the eighties.
There are a couple of literary references, too. One of them talked about openly in the media is the short story “The Monkey’s Paw”, the titular object of which has powers comparable to the Dream Stone in the film. I read ‘The Monkey’s Paw’ in middle school, and I also got to go on a field trip to a local university to see a theatrical adaptation of it. The other English major Easter egg I won’t spoil here.
Another great thing about this film? The mid-credit scene. That was mind-blowing.
Conclusion
Wonder Woman 1984 is simply a joy to watch. Gal Gadot, Kristen Wiig, and Pedro Pascal’s performances are very human and relatable, astoundingly so. The story is fantastical and nuanced and overall the film leaves you feeling pumped. I can’t wait to see it again. I also really need to rewatch the first film.
In addition to WW84, the Black Widow movie was also delayed after a release scheduled for last summer, and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier mini-series which would have featured the return of Agent 13/Sharon Carter also had a production delay of several weeks that significantly pushed back the release.
But things are now looking up. Pandemic or no pandemic, Black Widow will come out this May. Falcon and Winter Soldier comes in March. Last week the Marvel miniseries WandaVision came out, so my other favorite superheroine Scarlet Witch is back in action. 2021 will be the year of female superheroes. While most of them will be Marvel heroines, DC’s Wonder Woman 1984 sends it off to a great start.
Read More:
Pascal’s Maxwell Lord Actually Isn’t Donald Trump
How WW84 Was Filmed On-Location at the Smithsonian
Why the 1980s Is the Perfect Setting for Wonder Woman (from a leftist standpoint)
The Apprentice Chronicles 
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