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I remember very clearly, three years ago, going to the cinema to see Wonder Woman. It was an afternoon showing and the entire experience – slinking off work while the kids were at school, paying extra for the posh seat, walking out on to the street two hours later confident that, if push came to shove, I could probably bend metal – reminded me how transporting big movies can be. Superhero franchises are, for the most part, made by men for men, but this movie, directed by Patty Jenkins, felt like a rare exception. It was almost pitiful: how gratifying – moving, in fact – it was to see a woman at the centre of a $150m (£108m) movie.
Sentimentality for a commercial beast of that size was probably always misguided, like celebrating the “empowerment” of women pole dancing in clubs run by men. If Wonder Woman didn’t feel cynical, it was still formulaic and subject to the usual requirements; it is hard to imagine Batman fighting crime in a suit that ended at the bum-line. And yet, it seemed to me, you could tell there was a woman in charge. If the fight scenes at the top of the movie had a slightly porny aesthetic, the intended audience was other women. For once, it wasn’t about the men.
Cut to the release, on Christmas Day in the US, of Wonder Woman 1984. Because of the pandemic, the movie opened simultaneously in cinemas and for streaming on HBO Max, and while the budget had gone up to $200m, most of the other details were consistent with the first movie, with Jenkins directing, Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman and Chris Pine, looking more like Tom Hollander with each passing year, as the love interest. A lot of women I know, particularly those with young daughters, sat down that afternoon ready, once again, to lose their hearts and vaguely wonder if they should start weight training.
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.
Who cares, right? If the extra $50m on the budget pushed a filmmaker who has, in the past, been mildly interesting back into formula, why should anyone be surprised – and it’s at least in line with the conventions of the genre. The aggravating thing is that by using faux feminism and other tropes of social justice in the service of a reactionary movie, the insult is far worse than if Wonder Woman 1984 was bad in the regular ways – although, oddly, it does make it a movie very much in the spirit of the age. Pure and simple, it’s gaslighting.
