Damn, Wonder Woman 1984, what the hell happened?

While 2020 kneecapped Marvel’s starting lineup of Phase 4 content thanks to that pesky little coronavirus, DC managed to keep their content train chugging. Wonder Woman 1984 finally dropped on HBO Max on Christmas as part of a shared theatrical streaming run that Warner Bros. is doing to get people to subscribe to HBO Max and not have to keep delaying everything. Now having seen the movie, it is totally clear why they would punt this to streaming instead of insisting it stay in theaters like Tenet.

Note: This contains slight spoilers for Wonder Woman 1984.

The first Wonder Woman was a solid film I enjoyed a lot at the time, even if its third act fizzled out. With three and a half years having passed since then, 1984 should feel like it gives us new insight into Gal Gadot’s Diana and what she’s been doing in between the first one and Batman v Superman, or at the very least be entertaining period piece. Instead it feels like something they easily came up with immediately after wrapping on the first film.

Now shacked up in DC during the titular time period and doing the vigilante hero gig, Diana’s solitary lifestyle gets upended when a magic rock winds up linking her with Kristen Wiig’s shy bookworm Barbara Ann and Pedro Pascal’s Maxwell Lord. The rock is magic, you see, and for the three leads, it gives them everything they ever wanted; Lord starts to make it big as an oil tycoon and media mogul, Barbara becomes sexy and crazy strong, and Diana gets her dead boyfriend Steve Trevor back, because spending decades pining after someone you only knew for a handful of weeks is what ageless superheroes apparently do.

On paper it all sounds fine, but the execution is extremely messy. Reworking Maxwell Lord into a Donald Trump alike seems clever, until you realize that they’re just going to hit all the classic bullet points you’d expect for a Trump analogue in 2020, from con man and Russia jokes to literally stealing the life force of others to stay alive. Lord is a mess, but it’s Pascal who keeps him engaging; after watching him be so subdued on The Mandalorian for two years, it’s a riot just watching this guy play a scumbag who gets even shittier as the film progresses. But it also feels like they wrote the movie to fit around him being a Trump stand in, which leads to some…interesting nuances involving his son that will feel jarring given the last several years.

And speaking of jarring, boy it’s weird that Steve Trevor is in this! Not that Chris Pine isn’t appreciated, because he’s a good comic actor, but if director Patty Jenkins was serious about saying that she couldn’t imagine this movie without him, I wish she had at least tried. The method used to resurrect him raises several questions that the film doesn’t entirely know how to answer, and his resolution feels weird like they weren’t sure how to end it.

Still, both of them get off better than Wiig, who is to this movie what Jamie Foxx’s Electro was in Amazing Spider-Man 2. She’s doing a lot with a film that only seems to keep her around because they needed another recognizable woman for Diana to interact with that fans would recognize. When she finally goes full Cheetah, she may as well have looked like she was kicked out of Cats. The showdown between her and an armored up Diana towards the film’s end looks like you’re watching a fist fight between a furry and a dedicated Final Fantasy cosplayer break out during Comic-Con weekend.

Wonder Woman 1984 is messy and tries to go big in a way that’s fascinatingly wrongheaded after the self contained nature of the first movie. Everything about it feels like it was transplanted from at least two decades ago, from its view on 80s geopolitics to the frequently bad CG. It’s the actors who manage to keep it from being a total wash, along with maintaining the sincerity of the first film, even as it strains to do so as with its odd pacing during the 2.5 hour runtime. It’s not the game changing sequel it could have been, but it’s a decent enough watch for the month it’ll stay on HBO Max.

At the very least, its third act and conclusion was better.