WONDER WOMAN 84

*SPOILERS* (but don’t worry, they don’t spoil the film half as much as the screenplay, plot and direction do)

Good grief. WONDER WOMAN 84 is appalling. 

It’s as though DC, Geoff Johns and Patty Jenkins took the Richard Lester antics from SUPERMAN 2 and 3 as their tonal influences and married them to a story inspired by SUPERMAN 4. In other words, it does everything wrong for a superhero movie. And it insults our intelligence.

Pedro Pascal and Kristen Wiig are forced to pantomime their characters and put the goodwill we have towards their acting careers at sharp risk.

Gal Godot looks excellent as Diana... but that’s about it.

There is too much stupidity, too much dumb. 

I had to shout at the screen a couple of times. We all - as a family - shouted at the screen when Diana used her lasso to hitch a ride from an RPG fired by Steve to speed her on her way to save some children in the path of a thundering convoy of armoured vehicles. It just looked silly and further compromised our respect for the character and thus the film. And were the children deaf, could they not have just stepped to one side?

Another example. Diana and Steve (Chris Pine) need to get to Cairo from Washington. They race to an airfield and find a Tornado jet on the runway. They enter the jet and take their seats. The jet has suddenly transformed its cockpit into a side-by-side seating arrangement (two-seaters were configured one seat behind the other, so as to preserve the streamlining of the nose). Steve - a pilot from the First World War - fires the engine and they fly off, away from their pursuers. I’d have more chance of flying that plane than Steve. Let’s allow that the craft would have been left fully-fuelled and ready to fly, and that Steve could master its controls without any training. Shortly after take-off, Diana renders the plane “invisible” so as to be unseen by radar, but making it invisible to the eye would not make it invisible to radar. You know, so what if WW in the comics has an invisible jet - that always was daft. You don’t have to bring it into a real-world film! It gets sillier. They use the plane to fly to Cairo, land safely, have an adventure, take-off again and fly back to Washington without refuelling. No jet fighter plane can do that. It’s why we have aircraft carriers. Everybody knows this. But it’s something the film-makers thought the audience would let slide because it’s only a superhero movie. Just unplug your brain and have fun. Well, no. I never unplug my brain and I resent any film that asks me to do such a thing.

It’s all one heap of nonsense. I’m not going into the bad guy’s power and how he does what he does, nor why it ends up with cows on the grass in the US capital, or a London cafe owner requesting that “all Irish bastards go back to where they come from”, or an “Emir” being in a position of military power in Egypt wishing for a Trumpian wall to keep out the “heathens”, but the simplification of his power and its representation and effect on screen is staggeringly awful. 

And, why, at the end of it all, was it deemed good enough that Kristen Wiig’s character steps in to fight Diana looking as though she had just come from a failed audition for CATS?

And that GODAWFUL Easter Egg cameo during the end credits. Trying to win us over. Ouch.

Step away from the screen, DC. You have blown it once again. Stop now. Enough.