Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

Okay AT&T and WB, you got me – I paid $15 to become an HBOMax subscriber so I could watch “Wonder Woman: 1984” (2020) from the comfort of my couch.
That price tag cost me less than two movie tickets, plus I was allowed to drink alcohol in my pajamas and pause the movie when my cats decided to start screaming at each other – Alamo Draft House wouldn’t let most of that fly.
Win for me, win for the studio.
Not a win for the movie theaters, those guys are probably toast when we come out of this.

Anyway.

“Wonder Woman 1984” was such a breath of fresh air.
There hasn’t been a superhero movie this year, because the pandemic that we’ve all been dealing with has caused every studio to push their release dates back, most of them somewhere into 2021. There’ve been no Marvel, no DC, no blackhorse/third-party productions to blow our socks off, or at least show us super-powered people doing super-powered things while we keep our socks on.
It’s been over a decade of comics-to-movies flicks. You may or may not be feeling burned out with the superheroics, but they have been the norm, and normal is comforting when everything else feels so nightmarish.
Also: 2020 ends in 3 months.

Pleasantly, “WW84” wasn’t a direct sequel to anything. Obviously, it followed the 2017 origin story, but because the first movie took place during World War I and this was in 1984, there wasn’t a lot they needed to worry about keeping ties with. New villains, new setting, new plot devices.

Like the first movie, this opened with a scene of Diana during her childhood on Themyscera, the fictional Greek island, training to become the Amazonian warrior we’re familiar with.
She was in a competition where she tried to bend the rules so she could win. It’s a trope we’ve seen often in movies, especially in training montages, to show how a character is witty or sly as a fox, and that behavior is almost always rewarded, and somehow leads to them outsmarting the villain in the third act.
Here, it wasn’t. She was immediately pulled from the competition by her mentor, General Antiope (Robin Wright) and admonished for cheating, with emphasis that the truth was the only thing that mattered, and that victory by anything less is not honorable or worthy.

An important lesson to teach kids in the audience – and audiences as a whole – but especially poignant for a movie that was written, filmed, released during the scandal-ridden Trump presidency.

The movie’s plot device was the Dreamstone, a mysical macguffin that functioned with the monkey-paw premise: get what you want from one wish, but something is taken from you too. You don’t get to choose what’s taken, it just is.

The Dreamstone was being sought-after by criminals who wanted to use its power for nefarious deeds. When that first came up, I wanted to laugh it off and call it stupid – how could such an item exist that mere mortals were looking for so casually?!
Then I remembered that “Captain America” (2011) happened because a sect of Nazis found the Tessaract, so I had to reign in my incredulity.

Meanwhile, Maximus Lord (Pedro Pascal) was a failing businessman.
Not just failing – failing hard.
He was very good at putting on a greasy smile and massaging his way through conversations to get investors, but he was very bad at actually doing something with their money. It wasn’t a Ponzi Scheme, because then at least he would have had money.
Instead, we were shown that he was so desperate for even a glimmer of success that he joined the hunt for the Dreamstone.

Dr. Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) was a gangly, socially-inept geologist for the Smithsonian, who happened to receive the Dreamstone as part of a cataloging program the FBI asked the institute to conduct. As Diana had apparently started working at the research museum at some point too, she ran into Barbara and bonded over the weird rock with the Latin inscriptions. Barbara was wooed by Diana’s suave coolness and had some aggressive reservations about her own social failings.

Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) died in the first movie, but this one has a magical wish-granting rock, so I’ll let you put two and two together on his return.
There was a magnificent montage of a man from the 1920s being reincarnated 70 years later.
Fortunately, they didn’t play him for a dunce who was dumbfounded by “modern” stuff; instead, he was reasonably competent at adapting to the world of ‘84, most of which was him marveling at the way technology had progressed and flourished.
Kudos to director Patty Jenkins for that scene of character development.

The movie did a good job establishing its own rules. The major one felt like it was explained abnormally late, but even in retrospect it was followed throughout.
One of the villains straight-up said “I don’t like following rules” and then broke one of said rules, which solidly qualifies as cheating from the script writers. It was serious lamp-shading*, but considering that I let “Avengers: End Game” (2018) get away with some egregious time-travel shenanigans, this issue is small beans.

I was actually kinda disappointed with the special effects. There were too many scenes where the CGI was obviously CGI. Most of it involved Diana’s movements – her lasso of truth catching someone, using it to swing from a ledge, or throwing bad guys around.
I know WB has enough money to render everything flawlessly, and this movie was 100% supposed to come out in theaters, so I’m not sure why there was a problem here.

The music, on the other hand, blew me away.
WB upgraded from Rupert Gregson-Williams, who scored the first flick, to Hans Zimmer.
I’m not disparaging Gregson-Williams in any way – the soundtracks he writes are spectacular – but Zimmer is my generation’s John Williams; everything he writes is gold.
He revived the Wonder Woman main theme that we’ve heard since “Batman v. Superman” (2016), wrote some gorgeous new pieces to place around the movie, and even managed to include an incredibly emotional number that I’ve only heard in one other movie (“Kick Ass” (2010) – mostly by Henry Jackson) and can never find on any album anywhere.
If for no other reason, go see this for the soundtrack alone.

This movie ended with a renewed focus on truth, and that no lie, no matter how comforting, is worth it. It took great pains to emphasize that lies only serve to make you happy in the moment and will take their pound of flesh, and that sometimes the pain of reality is necessary – a happy lie isn’t a happy life.
Please don’t think too hard about this moral – there were some horrifying implications when I thought about it after the credits.
That said: it’s a movie, not your personal Jiminy Cricket.

There wasn’t nearly as much outrun in this movie as I would have liked, considering that it took place in the 80s, which is the source of everything outrun.
In fact, I’m not actually sure why the story took place in 1984, other than to guarantee it didn’t have to deal with a post-9/11 world. There was nothing inherently 80s about the plot, the setting, or the characters, and even adding modern smartphones wouldn’t have changed anything.
Now that I think about it, modern smart phones probably would have worked out even better for the third act than the 80s-tech we saw… but then Jenkins would have to deal with the grim-dark dumpster fire that WB let Zach Snyder barf up for the rest of the DC cinematic universe, so that’s definitely a strong vote against the modern era.

I absolutely recommend you see this too.
Not only was it great in its own merits, but it was a solid return to normalcy that we could all desperately use.
4-Claws – I would have loved to see this in theaters.

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PS: the first scene set in 1984 took place in the Southfield Mall, which is an entirely fictional locale.
How do I know for sure?
Because it was set in Fairfax County, Virginia, where I spent a lot of time going to the movies with my friends growing up, and I’m quite familiar with the malls and theaters there.
The actual facility they filmed in was the Landmark Mall, in Alexandria.

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*I don’t think I’ve talked about lamp-shading before, so here it is: usually used in comedies, parodies, or satires, it’s when the characters in a story actively call out a reference to something, instead of just letting the reference exist as part of a joke or visual.
As an audience member, you’ll usually get the vibe that for some reason the writing staff doesn’t think you’re smart enough to pick up on the joke they’re trying to lay down and they want to smack you in the face with it. The recent “Animaniacs” (2020+) reboot did this a lot, especially when poking fun at the current administration.
But it’s not always about jokes: In the context of this movie, the character broke a very clearly defined rule, and then called attention to it by saying they don’t like rules.