It is the only question that haunts all Americans when turning the page in a terrible year: Why is “Wonder Woman 1984” so bad?
Why this long-awaited follow-up to the delicious 1917 “Wonder Woman” – starring the same impressive Gal Gadot and directed by the same Patty Jenkins and released for our home show on HBO Max as a Christmas gift to its subscribers – has to smell like based on how no comic book movie has made since “Howard the Duck” in 1986?
You know things are going wrong in the beginning, when we found Diana Prince, Wonder Woman’s alter ego, working at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in 1984.
In the comics and on TV, Diana worked for the Department of Defense, which made sense, because she is considered the greatest warrior in the world.
But in 2020, Hollywood, with President Trump in the White House, no film with a heart on the right – that is, the left – could place our heroine close to U.S. militarism. Because, of course, bad Pentagon! Bad weapons! (“I hate guns,” says Wonder Woman as she kneads one, which is generous on her part, since she has magic bracelets that deflect bullets.) Oh, and as we are in 1984, every third scene shows someone walking by there with a “No Sign of nuclear weapons.
Bad Ronald Reagan!
Yes, Gipper is in this film, although in a strange way; the actor who plays the 40th president doesn’t really look like him, but has a hairline and suits. And because this is Reagan’s hectic Hollywood fantasies, he wants more nuclear weapons.
It doesn’t matter whether Reagan actually hated nuclear weapons and proposed his complete abolition in his first face-to-face meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. The “Wonder Woman 1984” Reagan wants hundreds of new nuclear weapons in the presence of a super-leveraged reality show entrepreneur – guess who he should remind him of – who has turned into an evil genius.
No, I’m not kidding.
There is a stone that grants wishes. He ends up in the back room of a jewelry store – who knows why. The Trumpy guy wants to become the rock and all of a sudden, he’s Barbara Eden giving Reagan nuclear missiles that Reagan really didn’t want.
Look, I know that 1984 was 36 years ago, and I know that Hollywood is full of illiterate idiots, they know nothing and self-infatuated who can spend $ 250 million on a movie so horrible that it makes “Cats” look like ” Figaro’s Wedding, ”but, um, maybe do a Google search, Patty Jenkins?
Would that have been so hard to do in one of your pauses to swim in your Uncle Scrooge pool filled with the $ 10 million you received to co-write and direct this atrocity?
Can I talk about more surprising things? Wonder Woman wants her dead boyfriend to come back to life, and he does, in the person of Chris Pine, who is the best thing in the movie. He’s been gone since the First World War, so the 1984 world fills him with admiration – especially when she takes him to the subway and he marvels at the passing of the train.
Hey, Patty Jenkins? His first film “Wonder Woman” took place in Europe in 1917. There were subways on the continent at that time. In fact, the London Underground made its debut in 1863. It is probably fair to say that if a man in 1917 suddenly woke up in 1984, the only thing that would not impress him would be. . . a meter.
How about the incredible and brazen plagiarism here? Kristen Wiig transforms into a lonely and clumsy person who transforms into a feline supervillain named Cheetah. If that sounds familiar, it’s because you saw, beat by beat, in 1991’s “Batman Returns” – in which Michelle Pfeiffer turned into a lonely, clumsy person who turns into a feline super-named Catwoman.
To sum up, “Wonder Woman 1984” is just horrible. And still . . . I kind of loved it.