The amazing thing about the era of filmmaking that ended with "Wonder Woman 1984" is that a script that dumb and joyless could get past dozens of people without anyone pumping the brakes before a firehose of funding was sprayed over the project.
The most entertaining thing about WW84 is the press tour where the filmmakers pretend to be creative geniuses who learned *so much* from the failings of the vastly superior original film, especially its climactic showdown.
"The studio forced us to wrap the first movie up with a loud, cartoony CGI smackdown!" they cried... then delivered a sequel that ends with an even more cartoony and pointless CGI smackdown, followed by half an hour of Wonder Woman explaining why cheating and selfishness are bad.
How do you come off a surprisingly popular, breezy, entertaining movie that began the turnaround for a flagging zillion-dollar franchise and decide the sequel should be a first-grade morality lesson with the logic of a Care Bears cartoon that's longer than a Tolkien film?
Presumably it's because everyone involved decided they had something Very Important to say about the hellish 80s Decade of Greed that would be Highly Relevant for modern audiences, even though many people involved in the production are too young to remember the 80s.
They were all too busy congratulating each other for being insightful, stunning, and brave to notice the script they crapped out was dumber than a stump, boring as hell, bloated beyond belief, and nonsensical even by the low standards of comic book movies.
I heard someone say WW84 was meant as a tribute to the Richard Donner Superman movies. No, it's very much in the spirit of Superman IV, right down to giving Wonder Woman nonsensical new powers on par with Superman's rebuilding-the-great-wall-vision.
Superheroes had a renaissance because the films were made by people with genuine affection for the source material and some insight into their cultural impact. Likewise with the boom of 80s nostalgia from people who love and understand the 80s, like Stranger Things.
There could have been all sorts of fun stories to tell about Wonder Woman's life in the shadows from WW1 to the modern day. This is all they could come up with? This silly, preachy, plodding mess that steals subplots like Tim Burton's Catwoman and does them WORSE?
The worst thing is that the writers were clearly determined to "improve" on the first movie's climax by having Wonder Woman save the day through wisdom, empathy, and strength of character instead of muscle - and THIS is the best they could come up with. /end
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