Wonder Woman 1984

The Price of a Wish

Early on in Patty Jenkins’ *Wonder Woman 1984*, Diana Prince skids across a mall floor in shining red-and-blue armor to rescue a grinning little girl, and the movie more or less declares its terms. This is not the mud, smoke, and moral weight of the No Man's Land sequence that defined the 2017 film. It's a candy-colored 1980s fantasia, bright enough to sting your eyes and broad enough to feel like an ad campaign. Jenkins is clearly refusing to repeat herself. I'm just not convinced the swap from World War I gravity to mall-pop excess pays off.



Everything hangs on the Dreamstone, a magical object that grants one wish and then exacts a price. It's monkey's paw storytelling blown up to blockbuster scale. Diana (Gal Gadot) wishes Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) back from the dead. Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), a socially invisible gemologist, wishes to be just like Diana. And then Pedro Pascal's Maxwell Lord gets hold of the whole thing and turns the movie into something stranger and sweatier.

Pascal is on an entirely different wavelength from almost everyone else here, and honestly the film gets more alive every time he barges into it. After years of cool operators and stoic tough guys, he gives Max Lord no armor at all. This isn't a criminal mastermind. It's a failing TV salesman, drowning in debt and paternal inadequacy, trying to grin his way past collapse. Watch the way he moves: pacing, lunging, face twitching like he's psyching himself up backstage before a meltdown. Pascal has mentioned he channeled early Nicolas Cage for the role, and you can feel it in every frazzled, desperate beat. Max becomes a walking embodiment of 1980s greed, but there's enough panic in the performance to keep him sad as well as monstrous.



The film gets itself into real trouble with Diana's wish, though. Steve comes back by taking over the body of a random, non-consenting man, and the script treats that setup like a cute inconvenience on the way to a fashion montage. It's an astonishingly sloppy choice, one that muddies Diana's ethics in a way the movie seems blind to. *The New York Times'* Manohla Dargis captured the tonal confusion perfectly: "In 2017, when Wonder Woman was done saving the world, her horizons seemed limitless. I didn’t expect that her next big adult battle would be at the mall."

The craftsmanship starts fraying too once the movie reaches for spectacle. Diana and Steve flying an invisible jet through a canopy of exploding fireworks is supposed to hit that old-school Richard Donner note of romantic wonder, and for a moment it almost does. The colors sing, Hans Zimmer swells, and then the whole thing drifts off because none of it feels physically present. Gadot has screen magnetism to spare, but by the time the finale becomes a dim CGI clash with Wiig's fully rendered Cheetah, the character's heft is gone. The grounded physicality that once made Wonder Woman feel tangible slips right through the movie's fingers.



Maybe that is simply the price of the kind of camp Jenkins is chasing. I do admire the ambition. Superhero movies rarely ask audiences to accept giving up what you want most as the central heroic act. The problem is that *Wonder Woman 1984* tries to carry that big idea on top of too many other things at once. By the end, it doesn't feel like one movie with a shape. It feels like several interesting drafts left out in the neon until they softened and ran together.