Wonder Woman 1984 (2020)

It’s a big, dumb movie, not an arthouse adaptation of essays by Mary Wollstonecraft. Still, the fact it’s so bad isn’t only disappointing but enraging. It’s not merely that the script is terrible and that in the first half of the movie, after an encouraging opening scene, hours seem to go by in which nothing happens. It’s not that, for long stretches, Gadot has nothing to do but look passively into space, pining for her dead boyfriend. It’s not even that WW 1984 commits the ultimate sin of engaging Robin Wright, jamming her into gladiator gear, then dispensing with her services in the first five minutes of the film. It’s that all of these fails are presented with the smug, dishonest air of a movie that purports to be critiquing the very thing it is selling us.

Hilariously, towards the end Wonder Woman 1984 delivers an anti-capitalist message – as if trying to launder a largely conservative movie through a quick liberal spin cycle. The problem with the US and the world, it suggests, is that nobody wants to work any more, they just want to snap their fingers and see their dreams come true. Wonder Woman herself learns this lesson the hard way when, for a brief spell, she wins her heart’s desire – no, not world peace, a cure for cancer, or as in the first movie, the defeat of an evil overlord, but the return of the dead boyfriend. Here is a woman who can stop bullets with her wrist plates but oh, hi, let’s give the guy with no powers not only two-thirds of the movie, but most of the fight scenes and the job of saving the superhero. On top of everything else, it makes no sense.

The worst thing about Wonder Woman 1984, however, is probably the role occupied by Kristen Wiig. I’ll keep it vague to avoid spoilers, but her heart’s desire involves transcending the shame of being a dowdy nerd men ignore to becoming more in line with someone who looks like Gadot. The movie punishes her relentlessly for harbouring this shallow, misguided dream while promoting the hell out of the notion that for women, male attention is the only metric that matters.