It’s the only question that haunts all Americans when they turn the page in a terrible year: Why is “Wonder Woman 1984” so bad?
Why he eagerly watched the delightful 1917 “Wonder Woman” – with the same amazing Gal Gadot and directed by the same Patty Jenkins and released for our HBO Max viewing at home as a Christmas present for his subscribers – smells like no did you make any comic book films from “Howard Duck” in 1986?
You know things go wrong at first, when we find Diana Prince, the alter ego of the Wonder Woman, who works at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in 1984.
In comics and television, Diana worked for the Department of Defense, which made sense because she is supposed to be the greatest warrior in the world.
But in 2020, in Hollywood, with President Trump at the White House, no film with a heart on the right – by which I mean the left – could install our heroine near US militarism. Because, of course, the evil Pentagon! Bad weapons! (“I hate guns,” says the Wonderful Woman as she crushes her, who is generous with her, since she has magic bracelets that deflect bullets.) Oh, and since 1984, every third scene features someone walking by. with a “No Sign Nukes”.
Ronald Reagan bad!
Yes, Gipper is in this movie, though weird; the actor who plays the 40th president doesn’t look much like him, but he has his hair and costumes. And because this is Reagan of Hollywood’s strangest fantasies, he wants more nuclear bombs.
Regardless of whether, in fact, Reagan hated nuclear weapons and proposed their complete abolition in his first face-to-face meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. Reagan from “The Wonderful Woman 1984” wants hundreds of new nuclear weapons in the presence of an overworked businessman – guess who should remind you – who has turned into an evil genius.
No, I’m not kidding.
There is a stone that gives desires. He ends up in the back room of a jewelry store in the mall – who the hell knows why. The Trumpy guy wants to become the rock, and all of a sudden he’s Barbara Eden giving the Reagan nuclear missiles that Reagan didn’t want.
Look, I know 1984 was 36 years ago, and I know Hollywood is full of illiterate, idle, self-infatuated idiots who can happily spend $ 250 million on a movie so awful that it does. that the movie “Cats” looks like “The Marriage of Figaro”, but, um, maybe you Google, Patty Jenkins?
Would it have been so hard to do on one of your swimming breaks in your $ 10 million Scrooge McDuck pool that you were paid to co-write and direct this atrocity?
Can I tell you more amazing things? The wonderful woman wants her dead boyfriend back to life and he does, in the person of Chris Pine, which is the best thing in the movie. He’s been missing since World War I, so the world of 1984 has filled him with amazement – especially when she takes him to the subway and he marvels at the passing train.
Hey, Patty Jenkins? Your first movie “The Wonderful Woman” took place in Europe in 1917. Then there was the subway on the continent. In fact, the London Underground began in 1863. It is probably fair to say that if a man from 1917 suddenly woke up in 1984, the only thing that would not have blown his mind would be. . . a subway.
And what about the amazing and bewildering plagiarism here? Kristen Wiig makes a change as a single midwife and awkward person who undergoes a transformation into a feline supervillain named Cheetah. If this sounds familiar, it’s because you saw it, rhythm for rhythm, in the 1991 “Batman Returns” – in which Michelle Pfeiffer made a change as a lonely, awkward lonely person undergoing a transformation into a supervillain. feline named Catwoman.
In short, “Wonder Woman 1984” is just awful. And yet . . . I kind of liked it.