This review contains spoilers.

“Wonder Woman 1984” is the sequel to the 2017 film “Wonder Woman.” 1984 is directed by Patty Jenkins and is written by her, Geoff Johns, and David Callaham. This film follows Wonder Woman A.K.A Dianne Prince as she deals with a villain who has stolen an artifact that grants the users any wish. I enjoyed the first film except for the ending. I disliked this film except for the ending. 

My first issue with this movie is the uninteresting opening sequence. It sets up the theme of how taking the easy way out is bad. Along with being boring, it doesn’t work with the character of Wonder Woman because this movies isn’t about her as much as you may assume. This opens another issue is that this doesn’t feel like a Wonder Woman movie. It feels more oriented to Pedro Pascal’s character, Maxwell Lord. Lord has the ability to grant anyone’s wish, that he attained from a magical rock, and he uses it to become successful.  I was also interested in the character of the Cheetah but I will come back to that. The opening scene of this movie should have been when Lord gets embarrassed in front of his son. It shows his motivation and we have sympathy for this character through this scene. Seeing Dianne lose a race because she cheated does nothing for me. Why would I want her to win? Dianne losing the race is connected to Lord embarrassment because they both learn something. Dianne sees that taking a short cut isn’t fair or right while Lord sees short cuts as a way to fame.

This film is boring. The action in this movie is quite sparse for a superhero movie. A majority of it is people walking around and talking. This is a problem I had with The Black Panther. What makes it worse is that Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman is uncharismatic while her villainous counterparts have more compelling actions and emotions than her.  We see Dianne in the Wonder Woman suit about three times. I’d much rather see the titular character as their alter ego more than often then as a civilian.

Dianne uses the same rock as Lord to wish for her boyfriend to come back to life. This causes her wish to be granted through another man, however, she sees the man as her boyfriend brought back to life. The hero of our story takes over another man’s life to fulfill her own interest. Although she realizes this is wrong it is still a terrible thing to do. The man had no knowledge of what happened to him.

Now the character of Cheetah was just a woman whos wish was to become very desirable. Her breaking bad moment was of her beating up a sexual predator. Compared to Wonder Woman this isn’t bad at all. Instantly I was more drawn to this character as her newfound confidence was taking form. This being used as a breaking bad moment isn’t good because it is not a worse act than the titular characters. I felt no desire to see her taken down as a villain. Instead I was more interested to see how else she would use her wish. However, her character is quickly negated to someone who protects Maxwell Lord so her attractiveness doesn’t fade. This was a wasted opportunity of a character more interesting than the hero. To make Cheetah an unlikeable villain they should have had her beat up someone who isn’t attracted to her. The entire movie she has been portrayed as someone who is insecure and her wish made her irresistible. Someone cracking her ego and causing her to lash out simply because she couldn’t attain their validation would cause the audience to want Wonder Woman to stop her. Instead she becomes a cgi character used as a roadblock for Wonder Woman in the defeat of the main villain. 

The special effects in this movie were bad and the green screens were obvious and it looked fake for a blockbuster film. This movie has no excuse to have simple flying scenes look like they came out of the original Superman film.

I enjoyed Maxwell Lord. He was an entertaining villain who we had empathy for. His selfish actions cause him to separated from his young son. At the end of the film when he is reunited with his son I felt genuine emotion during this scene because Lord was seeing his wrongdoings and how it terribly affected others.  In the final scenes we see Lord’s son calling for him helplessly. When he is finally reunited he apologizes for everything he’s done and self-depreciates himself. His son tells him this doesn’t matter because he loves him. This was a good end to Lord’s character arc as it shows when you only think about yourself and become greedy you lose sight of what is right in front of you. 

Wonder Woman 1984 was a disappointing film. It is hard to even consider it a Wonder Woman movie due to the lack of her character.  It was boring and cheap looking with its only redeeming quality being its villains. Combine this with Gal Gadot’s poor acting this movie is bad.