Wonder Woman 1984 Review

The opening on Themyscira is lovely and the mall sequence is deliberately, knowingly cheap in a way that promises a lighter film. Then the wishing stone arrives and every rule collapses. Steve Trevor returns by possessing the body of a living man, whom the film never names, never frees and never treats as a person, and Diana sleeps with him; the movie presents this as a romantic gift and asks for tears when she gives it up.

Pedro Pascal is committed and Kristen Wiig is trying, but Maxwell Lord is a shouting infomercial and Cheetah is a late stage computer generated cat fight in the dark that looks worse than work done a decade earlier. The invisible jet is introduced through a rule about invisibility Diana suddenly possesses. Golden armour appears and is destroyed within minutes. Two and a half hours pass and the climax is a speech broadcast to the world asking everybody to renounce their wishes. The first film believed in people; this one just tells them off.