Thread by @ReviewsPossum

I guess I'm gonna watch Wonder Woman 1984 now.

The music during the opening credits makes it sound like a Christmas movie.

Kid Wonder Woman goes to some arena where all the Amazonians are doing tricks and shit, but they're all doing different things at the same time, so it's like if you went to the Olympics and every game was happening at once.

Kid Wonder Woman is competing in some kind of race through an obstacle course with a bunch of adults who are twice her height. She's the only kid, and somehow, she stays ahead through the whole race until this one part where she falls off a horse.

But then she finds a drain pipe, so she slides down it, effectively using it as a shortcut, and catches back up to her horse, but then she loses the race anyway because she skipped past this thing she was supposed to shoot with an arrow so Mentor Lady knows she cheated.

Mentor Lady tells Kid Wonder Woman about heroes not telling lies and the value of truth and all that shit, so I guess that's going to come back as a big thematic element at the end.

But what I'm wondering is why everyone's wearing helmets that don't protect their heads.

After the title and a change in aspect ratio, we cut to the year 1984, where some teenagers are speeding in a car and nearly run over some lady, but we see Wonder Woman's foot kick the car out of the way, causing them to spin out and potentially causing an accident.

So I guess it's a montage of Wonder Woman rescuing people while some guy on TV talks about some company called Black Gold Cooperative. It's cheesy, but I assume that's intentional. It reminds me of the '70s Superman movies.

Some guys steal a bunch of old shit from the back room of a jewelry store in a mall, and as they're walking away, one of them drops their gun. Some woman sees it and screams, and a panic and chase ensues.

One of the crooks grabs a kid and threatens to drop her from a balcony, but then Wonder Woman comes swinging in with her magic lasso like Tarzan and ties him up. One of the other crooks runs, so Wonder Woman throws her tiara thing and breaks all the security cameras.

After defeating the crooks, Wonder Woman winks and makes a "shh" gesture at a kid as if to say "don't tell anyone", as if a kid wouldn't tell anyone they saw a fucking superhero. I guess she's trying to keep her existence a secret, even though there's hundreds of witnesses.

Wonder Woman just violently drops the crooks on top of a police car from high enough to completely cave the roof in, but they're fine.

She caused thousands of dollars in property damage to stop these guys from stealing, what, a few antiques?

We cut to Wonder Woman's apartment where we see a bunch of World War I photos, then we see Wonder Woman fuck around in her street clothes downtown for a while. She sees an airplane which I guess reminds her of Chris Pine's character from the first movie.

We cut to some building where some nerdy lady named Barbara drops her papers and some dudes walk by and don't help her because men bad. But then Wonder Woman helps her, so Barbara asks her if she wants to get lunch, but Wonder Woman tells her to fuck off.

But then Barbara's boss lady walks up and tells Barbara about the jewelry heist Wonder Woman stopped. The store was a front for a black market business trading stolen jewels and art, and the FBI is going to bring some to Barbara so she can identify something.

Later, Wonder Woman shows up to bother Barbara while she's looking at the shit the FBI brought her, and Wonder Woman recognizes a crystal thing with Latin writing. Some dude walks up and tells Barbara he wants coffee, as if telling her to get him some because men bad.

The crystal thing says some shit about granting wishes. Wonder Woman asks Barbara out for dinner, then we see Chris Pine's watch in Wonder Woman's apartment start ticking while whimsical music starts up.

At dinner, Wonder Woman and Barbara suck each other's metaphorical dicks with back-and-fourth complements, Wonder Woman tells her about Chris Pine, then Barbara walks home alone at night and gets grabbed by some guy, but Wonder Woman saves her from the evil, disgusting male.

Barbara goes back to her laboratory, picks up the crystal, and wishes she could be "strong, sexy, cool, special" like Wonder Woman. The next morning, Boss Lady introduces her to Mr. Lord who wants a tour of their facility. He looks at the crystal like he knows what it is.

Mr. Lord is the rich guy on TV at the beginning. Barbara introduces him to Wonder Woman, and I don't know if it's just Gal Godot's acting or what, but she kind of looks at him like he's an asshole and kind of fake smiles her way through the conversation.

Mr. Lord goes back to his office. He's some kind of oil tycoon or something. He gets pissed off looking at bills, realizes he has his kid who looks nothing like him for the weekend, then he runs into an investor named Simon who tells him he has 48 hours to pay him back.

Back at the lab, Wonder Woman realizes the crystal is missing. We cut to Barbara trying on some outfit at a clothing store, then we see Wonder Woman showing up at Mr. Lord's party. I guess I missed a line or something because I don't recall anyone mentioning a party.

Or maybe it's not Mr. Lord's party. I don't know.

In any case, Barbara runs into Mr. Lord and he asks her if she wants to take him to her office so they can fuck, but really, he's planning to steal the crystal off her desk and he slips it into his pocket while they make out.

While Wonder Woman runs around the party looking for Barbara, some guy follows her around and she gets annoyed, but then he says "I wish we had more time", and she looks at him. The camera spins around and he turns into Chris Pine.

So I guess when Wonder Woman picked up the crystal, she wished for Chris Pine to come back to life. Chris Pine explains he doesn't remember anything after his plane blew up, then he just woke up on some guy's futon.

Chris Pine takes Wonder Woman back to the guy's apartment and it becomes apparent he just somehow took over the body of this guy who was living here, and he even sees that guy's face when he looks in the mirror, implying he looks like that guy but Wonder Woman sees Chris Pine.

Mr. Lord takes the crystal back to his office and wishes to become the stone itself. I don't know why, he could have just wished for money if that's his motivation.

We then see Barbara waking up and accidentally ripping the door off her refrigerator. I guess her wish came true.

We then see Wonder Woman wake up in bed next to Chris Pine, implying they fucked. Wonder Woman says, "I should probably go and figure out how a stone brought my boyfriend back in someone else's body."

They basically used this guy's body as a conduit to fuck without his consent.

So after glossing over the fact that Wonder Woman pretty much just raped a guy, we cut to Barbara at the gym lifting heavier and heavier weights while all the muscly dudes stare in awe.

Mr. Lord goes to Simon and tricks him into wishing for something. Suddenly, some government guys show up and arrest Simon for tax crimes, and this puts him in charge of his company for some reason.

So I guess Mr. Lord has become the villain from Wishmaster.

We cut back to Wonder Woman and Chris Pine, and Chris Pine, being from the 1910s, doesn't understand '80s fashion, so we get one of those cliché comical montages where a character tries on a bunch of different outfits while another character disapproves of each one.

Wonder Woman shows Chris Pine around town and he marvels at all of the modern shit like escalators, subway trains, and mohawks, and for some reason, Voi Che Sapete by Mozart is playing in the background, and I can't imagine why the director did this. Why not use '80s music?

Mr. Lord returns to his office and his secretary tells him all of their oil wells have struck oil. Then Wonder Woman and Chris Pine go to Barbara and ask her about the crystal and she says she let Mr. Lord borrow it even though we blatantly saw him steal it.

Wonder Woman and Chris Pine break into Mr. Lord's building and find the ring that was around the crystal before, but the crystal itself is gone, so she can see writing on the inside of the ring in some god language. She calls Barbara and tells her to find out where it came from.

Wonder Woman realizes the crystal is some kind of magical artifact but doesn't know what it does yet, but they also find a plane ticket and realize Mr. Lord is going to Cairo. Since Chris Pine doesn't have a passport, they decide to just steal a jet so he can fly it.

So because Chris Pine could pilot a World War I plane, he's somehow able to figure out how to fly a vastly more complicated passenger jet from seven decades later.

Actually, no, it's not a passenger get. It's a fighter jet, and they steal it from an airforce base. Military guys chase them on the runway, so Wonder Woman does some magic shit that makes it turn invisible.

So that's how she got her invisible jet. She stole it.

So after stealing a $20 million war machine from the taxpayers, we get a whimsical moment where they fly the jet through some fireworks because it happens to be Independence Day. Then Wonder Woman makes some comment about wishing she could fly.

Then we see Barbara doing some shit in her lab, then she runs down the street and every man she passes catcalls her because men bad. She runs into the guy who grabbed her at the park, and he's obviously drunk, but she beats the shit out of him.

Mr. Lord meets with an Arab prince or king or something in Cairo and tricks him into wishing for the "heathens" to be expelled from his land. Mr. Lord says he'll take his oil in exchange, but the guy sold it, so he takes his body guards instead, and a giant wall appears.

The guy wished to keep the "heathens" off his land, so I guess that made a big wall appear around the city or whatever.

So I guess Wonder Woman and Chris Pine somehow flew a fighter jet all the way across the Atlantic Ocean from Washington DC to Cairo even though that distance is well beyond the maximum range of a fighter jet given the size of their fuel tank.

Wonder Woman and Chris Pine just happen to be in a taxi when they see Mr. Lord driving by, so they buy their driver's taxi and follow him. But then Mr. Lord sees them and tells the body guards who are now under his mind control to run them off the road.

The guards shoot at them, so Wonder Woman gets out and runs faster than their trucks to catch up to them and rips one of their steering wheels off. A bullet flies past Wonder Woman and is about to hit Chris Pine, but she uses her lasso to catch it mid-flight.

During the chase, Wonder Woman gets on the hood of Mr. Lord's car and asks him where the stone is, and he says he is the stone. Action movie shit happens, then Chris Pine drives an armored truck in between two other armored trucks to stop them from crushing Wonder Woman.

They see some kids playing in the road up ahead, so Chris Pine fires a rocket from the side rocket launcher thing which he just somehow knows how to operate, Wonder Woman catches it with her lasso, and uses it to fly to the kids who are too dumb to just get out of the way.

I actually laughed out loud.

But then Wonder Woman loses her grip on her lasso while trying to swing away with the kids and they land in the path of the trucks, but Chris Pine manages to stop the one he's driving on a dime right in front of them, and Mr. Lord gets away.

So this is the movie's mid-point action scene. It should be noted that this is the first big action scene since the mall fight which was more than an hour ago.

Yeah, the military chased them at the Air Force base, but nobody got hurt so it doesn't count.

Some TV news guy says the wall is cutting off the poor people of Cairo from their water supply, and that Mr. Lord has taken over half the world's oil reserves, so I guess we finally have some stakes now 87 minutes into the movie.

Wonder Woman calls Barbara who explains the stone has been seen all over the world throughout history but doesn't know where it originated. She says she's planning to meet with some guy who happens to know about it.

The next day, Barbara goes to the guy's hideout and Wonder Woman and Chris Pine just show up. The guy turns out to be some descendant of the Mayans and he shows them a book written in Maya glyphs which, of course, Wonder Woman can read.

It turns out the wish granting crystal thing was given to humans by an evil Mayan trickster god and it does a sort of Monkey's Paw thing where it grants your wishes but at a huge cost, and the movie explains this is how the Maya civilization collapsed.

So in order to keep your wish, you have to give up whatever is most precious to you, or renounce your wish to keep bad shit from happening. Barbara refuses to renounce her wish and kind of disappears when no one's looking.

Back at Mr. Lord's office, we get a montage of him bringing powerful business leaders in and getting them to wish for stuff so he can use the rules of the stone to take their shit. But he's coughing and his ears are bleeding, and apparently, he can only grant one wish per person.

Mr. Lord's kid comes in and wishes for his father to have greatness before he can stop him. He goes and tries to get one of his employees to wish him an audience with the President of the United States, but he already granted that guy's wish the previous day.

There's chaos in the streets because Mr. Lord has just been granting wishes to everyone in town.

Back at Wonder Woman's apartment, Chris Pine tries to talk Wonder Woman into rescinding her wish for him to come back to life before something bad happens, but she refuses.

Wonder Woman uses the magic lasso to show Chris Pine a flashback to when her island was attacked by filthy, nasty men back in ancient times, and some hero lady sacrificed herself to save the Amazonians.

But then they see Mr. Lord's car headed to the Whitehouse on TV.

Wonder Woman and Chris Pine go to the White House and there's some guy there Wonder Woman happens to know so they can just walk right in. But they're too late to stop the President from wishing for more nukes as leverage against the Russians.

In exchange for the President's wish, Mr. Lord takes all of the power and authority of the President for himself and makes himself immune to all laws, even though the President can't do that.

There also just happen to be diagrams in the Oval Office illustrating plans for a top secret satellite thing that can hijack the broadcast systems of any country, and this is convenient for Mr. Lord's plans because they send out particles which touch things.

I guess I should have mentioned that in order for Mr. Lord to grant wishes, he needs to be physically touching whoever is making the wish. So the satellite thing sends out particle beams which can "touch" anywhere in the world, so this would enable him to grant anyone's wish.

Yes, it's stupid because, by that logic, Mr. Lord should be able to grant wishes just by shining a light on people because the photons he's sending out would be "touching" them.

Wonder Woman tries to stop Mr. Lord in the hallway, a fight breaks out, and Wonder Woman grabs a guy's gun, ejects a round from it, then smacks it with her hand so hard that it travels like a bullet and hits a vase, and this somehow causes Mr. Lord to fall over.

But before Wonder Woman can catch Mr. Lord, Barbara suddenly shows up and stops her. I guess she just somehow knew Wonder Woman would be there. Barbara wished to be like Wonder Woman, so she has her powers now, and she doesn't her wish undone, so she fights Wonder Woman.

Since Wonder Woman wished Chris Pine back to life, she has to lose something, so she's gradually losing her powers, and this enables Barbara to beat her in a fight, so she and Mr. Lord escape.

Then the President is told the Soviets detected their new nukes and have declared war.

The President doesn't have a name, by the way. Everyone just calls him Mr. President. I guess they didn't want to put Ronald Reagan in their movie.

So in the five minutes since the President wished for more nukes, the Soviets declared war, and instantly, there's panic in the streets.

Chris Pine convinces Wonder Woman to undo her wish so she can get her powers back, and she does it, but he's off-camera so we don't see him disappear or anything. Then Wonder Woman runs down the street while sad music plays, and she jumps into a terrible green screen effect.

So I guess Wonder Woman can fly now, and I just realized they're unironically playing that overused "Adagio in D Minor" song which you might recognize from Sunshine.

We see Mr. Lord and Barbara on a helicopter, and Mr. Lord explains that he's dying because his organs started to fail after he made his wish to have wish-granting powers, but he plans to get around this by granting wishes and taking the organs he needs in exchange.

Barbara then wishes to not be like anyone else, to be an "apex predator". But she already had her one wish when she wished to be like Wonder Woman, so that doesn't make sense.

Mr. Lord arrives at the military facility where they have the controls for the secret satellite thing which he didn't know existed before he started putting his evil plan into action and it just happened to be convenient for it, and starts broadcasting himself to the world.

So Mr. Lord tells everyone around the world to make a wish, and even though he's only broadcasting in English, I guess everyone around the world just magically understands him and goes along with it. Bad things happen.

So in exchange for all the wishes made by people around the world, Mr. Lord takes their strength, power, and "life force".

Wonder Woman shows up at the military facility wearing a bird costume, I guess because she just somehow knew where to go.

I guess it's supposed to be the armor of that hero lady we saw in that flashback earlier, and Wonder Woman just had her armor in her apartment for some reason.

Then Barbara shows up to fight her, but she's a furry now, and she looks terrible.

They break some shit during the fight, causing a big electrical cable to dangle above some nearby water which they fall into. Wonder Woman holds Barbara's head underwater just as the cable falls into it, and even though they're both underwater, only Barbara gets electrocuted.

Barbara's still alive, but she can't fight anymore, so Wonder Woman flies out of the water carrying her and just leaves her on the ground while she goes to face Mr. Lord. But now Mr. Lord is too powerful for her to fight him, and he tries to get her to wish for Chris Pine back.

Wonder Woman starts lecturing Mr. Lord about truth and shit to tie it back to the lecture she got as a kid. But it turns out she was actually talking to the whole world using the satellite thing, and I guess every single person on the fucking planet was convinced by her speech.

While that's going on, Wonder Woman has the lasso wrapped around Mr. Lord's ankle, causing him to have flashbacks to when he was a kid getting abused by his father and picked on by other kids.

Meanwhile, both the US and Russia launch their missiles.

The lasso shows Mr. Lord his kid is about to be vaporized by nukes, so he renounces his wish, and so do everyone else in the world, so all the nukes disappear and everything goes back to normal.

Yes, every single person in the world who made a wish was convinced to renounce it.

You know there had to be at least one guy who wished for the world to end, right?

Mr. Lord runs into a field and just happens to find his kid wandering around and they hug in what's meant to be a big emotional moment, but the movie hasn't earned it because we've only seen this kid in, like, three scenes before and we don't know much about their relationship.

Some time later, we see Wonder Woman walking and there's Christmas decorations. She meets the guy who's body Chris Pines possessed.

It being Christmas doesn't add anything. It just makes it feel like the scene was tacked on, like they had to change the ending at the last second.

Wonder Woman kind of looks at him like she's thinking about fucking him again, only he would be conscious this time, but then she doesn't do it.

We see her fly up into the air, and then the movie ends.

There's a mid-credits sequence where the hero lady from the flashback saves a kid from being hit in the head by a falling pole. She's played by Lynda Carter, who played Wonder Woman on TV in the 1970s, and she literally winks at the camera.

So that's Wonder Woman 1984.

It's trash.

If I didn't already know about Wonder Woman raping a guy before I watched it, I would have been more offended.

You know how the first Wonder Woman tried to have a theme about how good and evil are the result of people's actions and nothing is black-and-white, but then they undercut it by revealing an evil deity was pulling the strings the whole time, and that's why World War I happened?

Well, Wonder Woman 1984 doesn't even have a fucking theme. It just pretends to by having people talking a lot of shit about "truth" at the beginning and end with little to nothing connecting the subject to the events of the story.

There's a lot of goofy bullshit in the movie, like when Wonder Woman lassos a rocket and uses it to fly. It's like a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. But then it tries to have these big, unearned emotional moments. It's like if Sharknado tried to be serious for a couple scenes.

You can have goofy shit in your movie if that's the tone you're going for, but then they expect me to cry when Chris Pine decides he doesn't want to be in the movie anymore.

I literally just watched the movie and I can't remember Chris Pine's character's name.

By the way, that ain't what a pre-Columbian Mayan book looks like.

And if it's meant to be a modern book about the Mayans, I would think it would have translations in it.

By the way, this guy doesn't even have a name. He's just called "Handsome Man" in the credits, so he practically isn't even a character. He's basically just a flesh vehicle for Chris Pine to inhabit and Wonder Woman to have sex with.

Don't ever say men don't get objectified.

I don't recall there ever being any explanation for why this guy in particular is the one who gets possessed, or why Chris Pine even needs to possess anyone at all.

The President wishes nukes into existence later, so if the crystal can just materialize nukes, why not a body?

Really, this whole possession thing doesn't seem like it's necessary for the story. It wouldn't have made any difference if Chris Pine just magically materialized out of nothing, except that wouldn't have the unfortunate implications of Wonder Woman fucking an unconscious man.

I guess it's a good thing Chris Pine's soul just happened to end up in the body of a guy who's good looking. We wouldn't want Wonder Woman to make out with a toothless hobo with a lazy eye.

We don't really see Wonder Woman's powers weakening. People just kind of say that's happening, but we don't get any real indication. She's still super strong and able to deflect bullets during the fight with Barbara, so it feels like Chris Pine sacrificed himself for no reason.

If they wanted to drive the point that Wonder Woman was losing her powers, the fight with Barbara should have been extremely one-sided, or had her avoid fighting Barbara and made it a chase, but they seem pretty evenly matched until Barbara manages to get the upper hand.

It lessens the intended emotional impact of Chris Pine's sacrifice because, the way it's executed, it makes it seem less than necessary.

But the scene had sad music and I guess that's all it takes to make the bulk of this movie's audience feel anything other than boredom and confusion.

"Well, so what if the plot doesn't make sense? How did it make you FEEL?"

It made me feel boredom, confusion, a little bit of disgust, and I laughed at a couple things which I don't think were meant to be funny. That's the fucking emotional reaction I had to this utter schlock.

So Wonder Woman has the power to turn things invisible by touching them, and I don't recall there being any stated limitations on this ability, so that just raises the question of why she doesn't do this all the time, or why she can't turn herself invisible.

One of the big problems with #WonderWoman1984 is that it never feels like Wonder Woman is in any real danger because she's just so powerful, so there's never any real suspense (and yes, this is a problem with a lot of superhero movies).

Even when we're told her powers are weakening, she's still immensely strong. Even when she loses the first fight with Barbara, it feels like a fluke because they're so evenly matched, and it's not like Barbara's trying to kill her anyway.

But then you have things that are so ridiculous that they make it impossible to take anything seriously afterward, like the rocket lassoing scene, and the fact that she keeps pulling new powers out of her ass like the ability to turn things invisible or fly.

Even in a fantasy movie, you need to have at least some regard for physics because, if literally anything can happen, that undermines the tension of any action scene not just because they become comically farcical, but because we know they can be saved by out-of-nowhere nonsense.

So when I'm watching Wonder Woman fight a bunch of henchmen, I'm not wondering if she'll get out alright. I just end up wondering what bullshit she's going to suddenly pull to write herself out of a corner.

I mean, once you establish that Wonder Woman can lasso a fucking bullet in mid-flight and fling it with enough force to pop a truck tire, you just end up wondering why she doesn't do that all the time.

It's not clear why Wonder Woman loses her grip on the lasso. Were the kids too heavy? Because she just flipped an army truck a minute before then, and the rocket she lassoed didn't yank it from her hand.

It's almost like her strength varies based on the needs of the scene.

So one of the major plot points is that Wonder Woman loses her powers, right? But it barely comes across in the movie that she's losing her powers at all.

It would have raised the stakes if she actually lost her powers completely and had to be a hero without them.

During the opening prologue, Kid Wonder Woman gets lectured about not "taking the short path" to greatness. So they could have done a thing where she has to earn her powers back and had it tie into the theme more concretely than just having people spout platitudes about truth.

But that's not what they did. Instead, they had Wonder Woman gradually weaken as the price for Wishing Chris Pine back to life (even though everyone else paid the price for their wishes almost instantly), and she got her powers back in an instant by just renouncing her wish.

I get that they were trying to have a big, sad moment where she has to sacrifice her boyfriend to save the world, but as I explained, the emotion of the situation falls flat because of how cartoonishly farcical and tonally uneven the rest of the movie is.

So I guess this attempt at a "muh emotions" moment which falls completely flat comes at the expense of a story that could have been more interesting and thematically coherent.

The more I think about Chris Pine inhabiting another man's body, the more fucked up it becomes.

Wonder Woman doesn't seem to care at all that some poor guy essentially had his life taken from him while her boyfriend is in his body. The moral implications don't even occur to her.

It's like this guy is completely disposable and it doesn't matter because our hero needs a body for her boyfriend so they can fuck.

The fact that neither Wonder Woman or Chris Pine are bothered by the implications tells me writer/director Patty Jenkins thinks this is moral.