“I need to find a way to touch a lot of people at the same time.”
So… making Pedro Pascal into an ugly Daniel Plainview meets The Genie with an e-boy blonde wig, ghastly light-blue suit, and a crack-addict’s persona is not what I meant when I asked for the DCEU to be a little more colorful. Y’all did Daddy dirty.
The Joel Schumacher Batmans came back from the dead to haunt Patty Jenkins, yet this time around with neverbeforeseen awkward dialectic pauses — a glaring hallmark of Wonder Woman 1984’s screenplay dementia. In other words, this movie is speechless from its performers to its narrative, rarely knowing what it wants to be besides an obvious throwback to 80s comic-book cheese and a place-mantel for “cringiest thematic motif-pusher of 2020.” Our bleeding obsession with nostalgia has finally taken us to a place where we’re willing to rope together a movie hellbent on recapturing the overrated magic of a Saturday night cartoon while simultaneously on mutating into a convoluted f**kstorm of plot-mania drama. There’s a fine difference between purposely making something s**ty because you’ve run dry on ideas and making something s**ty because you simply aren’t capable of obtaining a 200-million-dollar budget or a potential-driven two-and-a-half-hour runtime. It especially plagues at the end of the day when half the lines written or delivered here feel like first takes and the rest seem automated by either a royalty free A.I. scripture or a reddit fanfiction server.
As a final comment, I’d also like to say that Birds of Prey did the “COLOR!!! LOOK AT ALL THIS COLOR IN A DC MOVIE!!! WHAT???” gimmick better. Fusing mm film with god-awful CGI just looks… so grotty. Sheesh, I also owe Suicide Squad an apology too. But not you, Justice League. F**k off.
Verdict: D-
“Wonder Woman 1984” is now available to stream on HBO Max and is now playing in select theaters.
Burning the Celluloid 
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