Back to the Present. Wonder Woman 1984: Back to the Present
By: Allen Matsumoto
Tags: Wonder Woman 1984, Movies, Wonder Woman, Movie Review

Back to the Present

(Spoilers ahead.)

Max Lord, the Ian Flemishly-named villain of Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman 1984 is a cripplingly insecure fraud — a failure in business whose every act is driven by his desperate need to win respect and to be admired.

His empty shell of a business empire, built on lies and all gold-leafed and palatial on the outside, is crumbling from the inside and propped up only by his charismatic TV presence — his only real skill being mass deceit. By the time we are escorted through his laughably ostentatious Roman bath of an office lobby, it is clear that his carefully swept locks of golden-ish hair bear a not-accidental resemblance to another titan of 1980’s business failure masked by gilt facade. (It is just with a perverse twinkle in her eye that Jenkins chose to make Max Latino.)

But as the walls are closing in on him, the central MacGuffin required by every comic book movie saves him. For this tale, that’s in the form of an ancient stone, created by Dolos, the Greek god of mischief. Each time the stone appears in historical records, the civilization that held it (Mayans being only one recent example) came to mysterious and sudden end. That does not bode well for the stakes our heroine will face. The stone, it turns out, will grant one wish to anyone who touches it — with the standard money’s paw catch of a dark price, of course.

The twist is that Max chooses to use his wish not for power, or money, or love, but rather to turn himself into the living embodiment of the stone. So now, he can grant anyone else’s wish, and need only appeal to their worst instincts to persuade them to wish for something that ultimately benefits Max.

One might hope that being hit this directly in the face with a metaphorical hammer might penetrate the numbest moviegoing audience, but who can say anymore? I for one won’t blame Jenkins for playing it safe.

This ability to suspend the rules of reality for anyone blinded by desire for the unreal quickly sweeps him to the Oval Office, bypassing untidy formalities like electoral process. From there it is only a short hop to leverage secret US military experimental broadcast technology to let Max take this devil’s bargain offer to the entire world: Whatever you wish for — no matter how cruel, selfish, fear-induced — can be yours at the unbeknownst cost of your life force transferring to Max. All those damned Irish? Back where they belong. Russians threatening? Just need more nukes. Waitress rude? She can drop dead.

Unintended consequences quickly spiral to the brink of an apocalypse the Mayans couldn’t have imagined, and feels really just way too fucking familiar looking back on 2020.

Jenkins’ choice to place Wonder Woman 84 not just chronologically but stylistically in the 1980’s, initially feels ill-conceived, and ultimately puts a ceiling on whatever aspirations a superhero movie might have as art. It’s aesthetically more akin to the Wonder Woman TV show of that era than it is to its own beautifully-rendered World War I-era predecessor, 2017’s estimable Wonder Woman. But it permits her to hit us with that metaphorical hammer again and again with just enough camouflage to strip it of all the superficial cultural details that we’ll always associate with Our Most Hellish Year Ever (no Twitter, TicTok or Faux News), while reminding us that the roots of the year’s nightmarish political tableau really germinated some two decades ago.

Gal Gadot as Diana Prince (aka Wonder Woman) and Chris Pine as Steve Trevor, Diana’s WW I-era pilot flame (remember, there’s a magic wish-fulfilling stone, so shut up) reprise their roles solidly, but mostly feel very carried along by Jenkin’s allegorical plot. As with those two, it’s hard for me to objectively review Kristen Wiig’s turn as villainess, due to a serious case of fandom for all three. So, I’ll just say they’re always 10 out of 10, your mileage may vary. Pedro Pascal delivers a compelling if possibly too sympathetic proxy for The Worst ̶P̶r̶e̶s̶i̶d̶e̶n̶t̶ Person Ever. All in all, the movie holds up under its own terms, whatever you may think of those.

Of course, along with the requisite MacGuffin, each superhero movie has within its DNA, a plot resolution that the cynical among us may find to be more of a fantasy than kryptonite, radioactive spiders or magical lariats. In the end, our salvation arrives via an appeal to our shared humanity, since heroes (super or not) are never really our saviors but merely the voice of our own collective conscience. Like George Bailey pleading with his neighbors in Bedford Falls to bind their fates in the commonweal, Gal Gadot’s Diana just gives voice to what we all know in our deepest hearts. By literally bypassing Max to use his electronic connection with everyone in the world, our heroine makes the direct appeal to the mob tearing that world asunder — you can see what getting your wishes is doing to the world, you have to relinquish those wishes, and live in the truth, if we are to survive.

To those put off by Wonder Woman 1984’s neo-cheesy 80’s kitsch, that collective self-rescuing of our own souls may feel like just an extra helping of corn. But at the turn of the decade — and one hopes, at the apogee of a pendulum that seems to gain energy with each swing — it’s still a welcome callback to the four-letter slogan of another, infinitely better leader than Max. It’s hard to argue with the reality that it really it is incumbent upon us to set aside our fantasies, stop bending reality to fit our worst impulses, and live in truth for things to work.

So corny or not, I’ll take the hope.