I almost never check my Facebook messages, on account of that site helping to facilitate fascist costume parties at the Capitol building and such. I recently stumbled upon a note from a non-friend that had been sitting in my FB inbox for years. It simply read “Disney’s bitch” and had a link to my Justice League review. That is all the evidence I need for the following claim: Wonder Woman 1984 is a hoax.
It is a trick. A trap. A ruse. It is not an actual film. Warner Bros spent $200 million to waste 2.5 hours of everyone’s life as a small measure of revenge. “You think we’re dumb? We’ll show you dumb!” was the only studio note on the entire script, which doesn’t exist, because this is all fake. It has to be.
The alternative is that people actually thought the following would make for a good movie:
- Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) spends 60-plus years sad about a boy (Chris Pine). Despite shifting the balance of World War I, she’s so super bummed about dead boyfriend, she lets Hitler do whatever and goes to work at the Smithsonian. Presumably she spends her free time stroking dead boyfriend’s photo.
- A magic rock brings dead boyfriend back in 1984! But not in his own body, for reasons known only to the magic rock. Wonder Woman then has sex with that man’s body, which now has dead boyfriend’s soul in it or something. That’s not legally rape, but it’s not not rape.
- Magic rock becomes welded to Ronald Drumpf or whatever Pedro Pascal’s character’s name is. He then gets people to wish for things, which allows him to take things from those people. It’s like a monkey’s paw thing, and they didn’t even call him Monkey Paw.
- One of Wonder Woman’s colleagues (Kristen Wiig) at the Smithsonian wishes for Monkey Paw to turn her into “an apex predator,” which is such a clichéd wish, right? Like, genies pop out of lamps and instantly say “I know you want to be an ‘apex predator,’ but what do you want for the other two wishes?” Anyway, she becomes Dumb Dumb Tigger or whatever Jellicle name Taylor Swift didn’t use up.
- Wonder Woman appears in costume as Wonder Woman only 3-4 times and just once in the first hour and a half. During one of the bigger fight scenes, dead boyfriend has to save her a bunch. Also, he is the one that gets to fly the invisible jet, despite not being alive when radar was invented.
- The ending hinges on the idea that literal terrorists would surrender their wishes for global destruction if they were simply asked nicely. Oh, and those terrorists are all horrendous Arab stereotypes. The several scenes set in the Middle East are among the most racist things I’ve seen this side of the aforementioned fascist costume party.
I’m supposed to believe that all really happened? GTFOH.
In all seriousness, the film clearly aimed for campy, Richard Donner’s Superman–style shenanigans and missed. Badly. Nothing works here. Gadot is anti-charismatic. Cheetah is a half-finished effects nightmare that Dwayne Johnson’s Scorpion King had. Despite being purposefully set in the 1980s, there is no 80s music really involved. There are consent issues, racism, and, more than anything, mind-numbing boredom.
I don’t know that Wonder Woman 1984 is the worst movie I’ve ever seen. I do know that, in all sincerity, it made me like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice more, and Jesse Eisenberg gives Holly Hunter a jar of pee in that.
After being called a fat pig by Vincent Gallo for calling his film, The Brown Bunny, the worst film in the history of Cannes, Roger Ebert said “I may be fat, one day I will be thin, but Vincent Gallo will always be the director of The Brown Bunny.”
I may be “Disney’s bitch,” but the person who sent me that Facebook message will probably watch Wonder Woman 1984 more than once.
Grade = F-