Life is good, but it can be better! I wish they used that philosophy for the movie too.

Score: 2.5/5

Wow, well, that was a mess, wasn’t it? A well-financed, moments of fun mess. I have a lot of random thoughts to say about this movie, but let’s take it back for a minute. Wonder Woman 1984 is the sequel to the solid first 2017 entry. The first movie’s strength, in my opinion, was the fun back and forth between Gal Gadot and Chris Pine. The Fish Out of Water story with Pine’s Steve Trevor bringing Gadot’s Dianna up to speed on what World War I life was like was fun. Her fighting to save everyone from Ares was cheesy at times, yet had moments of inspiration. It was a solid movie. The ending was just okay. The villain was boring. Overall, it was a decent superhero movie.

Wonder Woman 1984 has that same fun chemistry between Dianna and Steve, more Wonder Woman action scenes, and this time, one villain that is entertaining in every scene. Yet this movie can’t hold a candle to the first, mainly because the plot feels stuffed. Some moments are just slightly nonsensical, even for superhero movie logic, and the lesson that Dianna learns throughout the movie is one that they tell you in an opening sequence of scenes. In that short film, seven minutes or so, you get the entire point of the movie right there.

You know, if the whole movie can be summed up in the opening scene of the film, I kind of wonder why they tell that story at all. But stepping aside that quickly, I want to give props to Pedro Pascal playing Maxwell Lord. Pascal plays this guy as if he’s hopped up on cocaine or coming off of it the whole time, and it makes his character super amusing to watch whenever he’s on screen. Between him and more Chris Pine riffing off of either Dianna or the 1980s, that was what made the movie fun. Some action scenes were excellent and looked very colorful compared to the very dark-looking first film, but none of the scenes felt anywhere near as impactful as Wonder Woman charging through No Man’s Land in the first. There’s fun to watch in this movie for sure, but understand it’s longer, and not as smooth of an experience.

Now that I have discussed the good let’s get to the bad. I won’t go spoiler-heavy, but when the plot can be summed up at the movie’s start, it just makes the rest of it seem pointless. So much so that it made me even more interested in what the villain was going through versus the protagonist. Then, because with sequels, more is better (which is ironic since that is one of the main things Maxwell Lord keeps preaching), why not have more? The movie is trying to tell why that isn’t a good idea even though the film itself does that very thing. Why have one villain when you can have TWO? If you can’t correctly develop one of them or just rehash the old, socially awkward person who gets power and turns evil twists, maybe you shouldn’t run with that idea of more.

I get it, though. They wanted someone for Wonder Woman to have superhero fights with. That’s fine, but don’t shrug off this antagonist to the side every chance you get if you don’t want viewers to not care one way or the other if they are around. This is all to say there is a lot of stuff in this movie that doesn’t feel like it’s given proper time to grow and sink in with the viewer. It’s happening, it’s surface level, and it never goes deeper than that.

I could talk about the very odd way that Pine’s Trevor is back and the questions it begs you to ask because of it, but I’m sure you have read about it. Without spoiling things, I feel like I can’t do justice discussing that. A couple more nitpicks that bugged the hell out of me. First was an uplifting scene towards the later half of the movie that plays music that I have heard way too many times for some dramatic moment of learning something or a renewed sense of purpose to fight. It was lazy, and for me, it took me out of the scene and left me disappointed in the score. Second, the whole use of the ’80s, when I said the score was lazy, it didn’t even take the fun route of using ’80s music. They mostly used the ’80s for fashion, and that was about it. Seemed very strange to me to put the year in the title of the movie if they weren’t even going to use that era to its full extent.

Alright, I’m done, I’m done! Wonder Woman 1984 was okay. I feel like if I saw it in theaters, though, I would have been a tad more annoyed. So thanks, HBO Max!