A Not as Wonderful Sequel: Wonder Woman 1984

Sydney Crum, J1 Reporter

After the success of 2017’s Wonder Woman, its sequel was a highly anticipated release. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to live up to the previous film.

The movie begins with a flashback of Diana/Wonder Woman, a young child  (played by Lilly Aspell.) Diana is participating in a competition against other warriors that live on her island. We then switch to seeing modern-day Diana (played by Gal Gadot) who is balancing working as an archeologist and saving the world as her superhero alter-ego, Wonder Woman. 

Enter Barbara, (played by Kristen Wiig) a new employee at Diana’s workplace. Barbara is portrayed as a shy and somewhat awkward character with low self-confidence. She finds a stone that is said to have the ability to grant wishes. Without taking it very seriously, both Diana and Barbara make a wish. Diana wishes that her boyfriend Steve (played by Chris Pine) was still alive and Barbara wishes that she was more like Diana. The stone actually turns out to really work, and their wishes are granted. 

Later, a wealthy businessman named Maxwell Lord (Played by Pedro Pascal) gets his hands on the stone and wishes to literally become the stone, giving him the ability to grant people wishes. This causes chaos all over the world so Diana and Steve have to try and stop him. 

It seems like the message the film is trying to get across is to be careful for what you wish for. The target audience seems to be Wonder Woman fans or just superhero content in general. Younger girls who like movies with action or big fans of Wonder Woman’s character would probably enjoy this the most.

Some of the high points of the movie were the action scenes and the actors. I thought that the fight scenes were well-done and entertaining to watch. And even though the script and movie as a whole could have been better, the actors did an amazing job especially at the emotional scenes. You can tell that they put a lot of effort into their performances. 

Some lower points were that the overall story was mediocre and not anything new or special. The tone of the movie also seemed weird and inconsistent. At the beginning, it seemed to be more comedic in a way which is a lot different than the first film. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with having a more playful tone, but it didn’t always seem to match what was going on. Later in the film, the tone seems to switch to be more dramatic, which fits better with the onscreen events and action.

Overall, Wonder Woman 1984 is nothing memorable. The mostly uninteresting story has good moments, but isn’t anything I would go around recommending to most people. I think that this movie deserves a 5/10 rating for being an unoriginal yet still entertaining film.