Wonder Woman 1984 - Waterboarding would have been more pleasurable and insightful

Even zero intelligence is insulted

There are usually three lines of defense people use for the objectively terrible genre that is superhero movies: “you’re not supposed to take it seriously”, “it does x for y representation”, or “it’s an homage”. Wonder Woman fails so massively on every single one of those levels on top of horrible CGI, a moronic, incomprehensible plot, and soulless dialogue that goes on for far too long. The only standardized test any of these writers passed was a Bechdel test, and the allegory is so blatant that it feels like 4 years of Washington Post/New York Times narratives haphazardly cobbled together with no depth or insight (Oh, who would have thought the villain in “1984” looks exactly like a young Donald Trump?)

This isn’t to say that Trumpian references are inherently off limits, but it does mandate that if you are going to attempt to hurdle the lowest bar of cultural relatability, you have to be that much more creative about what you have to say. Whatever base narrative about the excesses and emptiness of capitalism is obfuscated to the point that even “capitalism bad” would have been an improvement on the thematic elements of the movie. The lead ‘empowered female’ is so irrelevant to the actual resolution of a plot that someone with superhuman abilities is mostly reduced to beating up petty criminals around young girls and stalkers who try to harass women. The resolution of the plot (I think?) is simply… having people undo their wishes?

The entire problem with the superhero genre of movies is that they are essentially utopian feel-good arguments about society being extrapolated to have mass appeal and thus rendering them insipid at best and downright insulting at worst. Wonder Woman is firmly in category two. The most generous feminist narrative you could give this movie is “women and girls exist in things” and “here’s some visual catharsis on beating up catcallers”. There is some pointless opening scene about “playing fairly” that makes zero sense in the larger context of the movie going forward. Apart from this, Wonder Woman is shown to be… enamored with a man and part of a completely vapid montage of 80s things that every autogenerated show includes as a cheap invocation of nostalgia? Instead of pointed references to exemplaries of the movie’s supposed “theme” like Michael Milken or Carl Icahn, we get fanny packs. If everyone gets the reference, it’s about as interesting as drinking water. Universality and entertainment value are somewhat inversely correlated - this is why art that requires some understanding to process tends to be more consistently high quality. Why not have Wonder Woman - who literally was created as an empowered female icon - involved in any of the feminist movements that led to the progression of society throughout the entire 70 year gap between World War 1 (the first movie) and 1984? Instead we get cheesy PG whipping-kink action that doesn’t even look rooted in actual physics. How does a movie with a 200 million dollar budget have such floaty, awful action?

Part of me hopes that this went direct to streaming precisely because the studio realized how bad this movie was. But Wonder Woman isn’t an outlier - it just failed negatively in all the ways that superhero movies typically do, making it the worst of the worst. What results is a movie that is so bad that it is insulting to the intelligence of “Lenny” from Of Mice and Men. Whatever source material from “the original comics” is co-opted so formulaicly that you can see the dialogue and extras checking the boxes in real-time. It’s incredibly blatant! I would prefer to be waterboarded instead of watching this movie again - a novel experience not worth having is preferable to having to violate my eyeballs for 150 minutes for no purpose.