‘Wonder Woman 1984’ (dir. Patty Jenkins)

 

With a title like that the filmmakers could so easily have given us an Orwellian superhero dystopia (‘Gin soaked tears poured down his face. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Wonder Woman’). But, alas, they decided to go a different way.

The story for this one is centred on a magic wishing crystal, a cluster of coloured plasticky lozenges that grants you, thanks to the sublime and plot-needful Powers of Arbitrarium, just the one wish. In Aladdin the Robin Williams genie prefaces his wish-offer with some qualifications and exceptions: you can't bring anyone back from the dead, you can't make anyone fall in love with you, and ‘ix nix on the wishing for more wishes’. Nobody in Wonder Woman 1984 wishes for anyone to fall in love with them, but the movie gaily violates the other two restrictions. Indeed, WW herself wishes her old boyfriend back from the dead. This is accomplished by having his spirit, or something, occupying the body of a character listed on IMDB only as ‘Handsome Man’. Since every time Diana looks at him she sees the face of Chris Pratt, Pine, Hemsworth (whichever one it is, they all look alike to me) this seemed to me a missed equal-opportunity moment. Speaking as an individual notably challenged in the pulchritude department, would it have been so hard for them to bung Steve in the body of an Ugly Man? We exist too, you know.

Anyway, the more obvious of the film's two villains, Pedro Pascal in a shiny 80s suit (a sort of Bernie Madoff/Young Donald Trump confidence trickster quote-unquote ‘businessman’ type) gets round the ix nix on wishing for more wishes by wishing literally to become the magic wish-granting crystal. His wish is granted, which leaves him afterwards looking like Pedro Pascal in a cheap suit and not, as I would have preferred, the crystal itself, perhaps with some googly-eyes stuck on. This new identity, by a sleight-of-screenplay, enables him to coax people into wishing for things on him so that he can, as it were, take his cut. I mean, it's hard to see how this is supposed to work, but alright.

At any rate it makes Pedro  super wealthy, powerful and leads to a showdown in which he broadcasts to the whole world from a secret TV studio that has the power (presumably somebody at some point wished for this) to override all other TV broadcasts. He offers everyone one wish, thereby skimming the 15% of topslice wish, or however that works, becoming more and more powerful as he does so. Given this opportunity, people say things like ‘I wish to be king’, ‘I wish my nagging wife would drop dead’ and ‘I wish I had nuclear weapons’—loads of people wish for this latter, actually, which puts the nervy people in US and Russian nuclear command in the situation of having to fire off their national stock of the things. Armageddon beckons.

Diana, weakened by having her Chris-wish granted, repudiates it, sending her former boyf down, we assume, to Hades (it's worth remembering that the Greek underworld, which is presumably the one Greek warrior Diana believes in, is a most unappealing place: dark, dreary and entropic. When Odysseus encounters the dead Achilles down there and asks him what it's like, he replies ‘I would rather be the meanest slave of the poorest pig-farmer on earth and be alive, than be king of all the lands of the dead.’ But Steve seems happy enough to expire, or re-expire).

Giving up her wish boosts Diana's Wonder-power, such that she can now fly, like Superman, which I'm pretty sure she couldn't do before. She also gets some impressive new golden armour, which I'm sorry to say made me go ‘Golden Wonder!’ and to snigger. That's just me, though.

The second of the film's villains is Kristen Wiig's Mousy Librarian Woman, although in this film she's Mousy Museum Woman, but you know: same difference. Her wish is to be as strong, powerful and sexy as Diana Prince, which wish is granted. For a while you think she's on the side of good, but then (hail, holy Arbitrarium!) it turns out she's not, and has thrown in her lot with Pedro Pascal. Then she gets a second wish, which surely violates the terms of the wishing-crystal contract, but there you go. This new wish is: to turn into a thundercat, a sort of half-woman-half-cheetah creature, which is just a fucking odd thing to wish for. Each to their own, I guess. Funky Feline and Wonder Woman have a fight, all the while Pedro is granting more and more wishes globally, spreading chaos further and further and precipitating the ever-impending nuclear apocaylpse.

My problem with this frantic, shrieking climax, all wind-machines and Pedro P over-acting villanous glee, is this: does literally everyone in the world wish for dead wives and nuclear weapons? Does literally nobody say ‘I wish this geezer had never had these powers’, thereby reverting the world to normality? Even if such a wish doesn't occur to any of the [does quick calculation on fingers] 6 billion people in the world, wouldn't it make sense for Diana to make such a wish? You might say: ah but she had her wish, when she wished for the bliss of a kiss with her Chris. But Kristen Wiig got a second wish. In the event, WW has to use the Lasso of Truth as, I think I'm right in saying, an antenna of some kind to hijack his broadcasting operation, and tell all the peoples of the world that they should repudiate their wishes and return to the authentic disappointments and thwartings of their old lives. Surprisingly, literally every single person on the planet, with no exceptions, agrees to this. Statistically unlikely, but hey: it's comics.