Wonder Woman 84
Dec. 27th, 2020 08:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
talkswithwindLike many, I saw the movie on HBOMax Friday (after a fight with DRM; they turned off Linux support so we had to watch it on a tiny screen). This is my review.
Content warnings:
I've mentioned before about a style of film-making I'm calling impressionistic, because it relies on surface impressions rather than deep reasoning. You can tell a movie is impressionistic if the worldbuilding barely survives a single question, and absolutely falls apart if you ask the second question. It's all surface, you are not intended to dig into what does it all mean, and it's mainly meant as a way to provide spectacle. Let's dig into the trope-palate that writers of WW84 used to paint their movie:
This impressionistic take is not a surprise for me, since all the DCU movies were impressionistic to some extent; having WW84 follow in the same footsteps is entirely expected. The MCU doesn't do that to the same degree, which is why the US movie-watching public is having a serious uncanny-valley reaction to the DCU movies. This is a valid way to tell a movie-story, but it's one with a clear ceiling on its critical acclaim.
The impressionistic set-dressing leads to a complete lack of intersectionality. Such as:
About the story
Americans like morality plays, and this is a morality play. This takes the well trod path of examining the moral pitfalls of a wish-machine, with the twist of the Big Bad Guy becoming the wish-machine. There is no such thing as a free lunch, what you wish for never is just what you wanted, and hubris leads to its inevitable fall. Amen. Time for hotdish and communion in the basement.
Really, that's the plot. There isn't much in the way of B or C plots in this thing. We get the origin story of Cheetah, one of Wonder Woman's well known opponents. WW gets some closure regarding Steve (immortals hold candles way longer than mortals, it seems), and picks up a new trick in the process (flying, which we saw her do in the Justice League movies). That's about it.
Early in the movie we see Wonder Woman stopping a heist of antiquities in a mall. In one of the Justice League movies, Bruce Wayne has to go all Super Detective to learn anything about Dianna Prince. Busting up a mall seems to go against that worldbuilding, mmm? Impressionistic story telling again, combined with the shortcuts the comic-book medium requires. WW knocked out the security cameras before busting up the mall, which we're intended to see as acknowledging that she is taking pains to hide her identity. This is totally something an artist would do in a few panels to save pages in a monthly comic book, and doesn't translate well to the screen.
DCU are comic-book movies.
MCU are movies about comic-book characters.
There is a pretty major difference in how those stories are told, and why MCU has made mega-billions from the movie-going public. DCU is making the same mistake that the Bladerunner 2049 people did when they gave the director a $200M budget to make a movie with an addressable market w-a-y smaller than that budget would suggest. The movie-going public isn't looking for comic-book movies, and you don't get critical acclaim from impressionism. WW84 is another $200M movie, one that would struggle to earn out in spite of the pandemic. BR2049 earned out, eventually, but not the 10x that investors like to see. WW84 has pandemic headwinds that will make earn-out take longer, but it will eventually earn out the budget.
My Bladerunner 2049 review ended with a nostalgia-fest that actually did work well.
Content warnings:
- 80s style racism
- Nuclear war reference
This is a fairly entertaining impressionistic romp, so long as you don't walk in expecting tight storytelling, and fully integrated themes (see also: impressionistic). If you come in expecting a DCU movie and all that implies, it's not a bad version of the genre. If you watch expecting tight storytelling, faithful representation of the 1980s, or holding it up next to the MCU movies, you will be rage-posting your reviews right afterwards.I closed out my review of Bladerunner 2049 with:
Anything doing an homage to a problematic period like the 80's We're all going to die style of story-telling is going to have limited critical and intersectional appeal. You can definitely play in the after-the-fall setting using the modern story telling, and Handmaid's Tale,The CW's 100, and Greg Rukka's Lazarus comic are doing just that. But doing it in 80's style? There will be problems. And like re-reading those old classics, you have to remember the time.I mention that closer because Wonder Woman 84 is also an homage to the 80s, but unlike Bladerunner it wasn't done with any kind of storytelling skill. Where BR2049 is all about We're all going to die, which is absolutely a late 70s early 80s kind of story, WW84 is all about the 80s set-dressing and unsubtle morality-play. This is also an 80s style of story, but a kind a lot of people are missing because why would they remember that? Where BR2049 was actually faithful to the genre-defining original (which made it a terrible story to tell in the 2010s), WW84 heavily relies on tropes to dress the setting of the morality play.
I've mentioned before about a style of film-making I'm calling impressionistic, because it relies on surface impressions rather than deep reasoning. You can tell a movie is impressionistic if the worldbuilding barely survives a single question, and absolutely falls apart if you ask the second question. It's all surface, you are not intended to dig into what does it all mean, and it's mainly meant as a way to provide spectacle. Let's dig into the trope-palate that writers of WW84 used to paint their movie:
- The 80s were the time of The Mall. Waldenbooks! B. Daltons!
- Jazzercise!!
- The beautiful actress who has her first scenes in big glasses, bad hair, and falling off her heels will have an amazing glow-up at some point.
- Regan really loved nukes.
- We are all 20 minutes away from nuclear war.
- Star Wars (the Strategic Defense Initiative kind, not the "You are my son, Luke," kind)
- Non-white people are supporting characters only, or evil.
- Arabs are after all of the oil.
- Mayans were lost to the past.
- The 80s were all about greed.
This impressionistic take is not a surprise for me, since all the DCU movies were impressionistic to some extent; having WW84 follow in the same footsteps is entirely expected. The MCU doesn't do that to the same degree, which is why the US movie-watching public is having a serious uncanny-valley reaction to the DCU movies. This is a valid way to tell a movie-story, but it's one with a clear ceiling on its critical acclaim.
The impressionistic set-dressing leads to a complete lack of intersectionality. Such as:
- Arabs are after all of the oil leads directly into anti-Arab racism. A very 80s kind, where it was about resource exploitation rather than the early 2000s terrorism-based kind.
- Mayans were lost to the past combined with Arabs are after all of the oil to make for a solidly colonialist bias to everything. The same impressions that lead to the Indiana Jones movies.
- Casting an Israeli actress in the lead of a movie without fighting the Arabs are after all of the oil trope is the kind of fucked up that would go completely unnoticed in the 1980s but is definitely noticed in the 2020s.
- Non-white people are supporting characters only, or evil leads into a very 80s kind of unthinking racism. Yet another impressionistic take of 80s style story-telling.
- The lead bad-guy is directly Non-white people are supporting characters only, or evil.
- There was absolutely no homo in here, so they didn't touch AIDS at all. Again, an accurate 80s kind of story-telling that most folk will see as anti-queer bias rather than a faithful reproduction of the time. Doesn't mean it's not anti-queer.
About the story
Americans like morality plays, and this is a morality play. This takes the well trod path of examining the moral pitfalls of a wish-machine, with the twist of the Big Bad Guy becoming the wish-machine. There is no such thing as a free lunch, what you wish for never is just what you wanted, and hubris leads to its inevitable fall. Amen. Time for hotdish and communion in the basement.
Really, that's the plot. There isn't much in the way of B or C plots in this thing. We get the origin story of Cheetah, one of Wonder Woman's well known opponents. WW gets some closure regarding Steve (immortals hold candles way longer than mortals, it seems), and picks up a new trick in the process (flying, which we saw her do in the Justice League movies). That's about it.
Early in the movie we see Wonder Woman stopping a heist of antiquities in a mall. In one of the Justice League movies, Bruce Wayne has to go all Super Detective to learn anything about Dianna Prince. Busting up a mall seems to go against that worldbuilding, mmm? Impressionistic story telling again, combined with the shortcuts the comic-book medium requires. WW knocked out the security cameras before busting up the mall, which we're intended to see as acknowledging that she is taking pains to hide her identity. This is totally something an artist would do in a few panels to save pages in a monthly comic book, and doesn't translate well to the screen.
DCU are comic-book movies.
MCU are movies about comic-book characters.
There is a pretty major difference in how those stories are told, and why MCU has made mega-billions from the movie-going public. DCU is making the same mistake that the Bladerunner 2049 people did when they gave the director a $200M budget to make a movie with an addressable market w-a-y smaller than that budget would suggest. The movie-going public isn't looking for comic-book movies, and you don't get critical acclaim from impressionism. WW84 is another $200M movie, one that would struggle to earn out in spite of the pandemic. BR2049 earned out, eventually, but not the 10x that investors like to see. WW84 has pandemic headwinds that will make earn-out take longer, but it will eventually earn out the budget.
My Bladerunner 2049 review ended with a nostalgia-fest that actually did work well.
I'm talking about the 2012 Dredd movie that starred Olivia Thirlby and Karl Urban. This movie was an homage to the Judge Dredd comics that got their start in 1977, and was set in a post-nuclear megacity dystopia. It was a modern telling of an old style of story, in a deeply problematic setting. It was fucking amazing, and it was sold as just that. I think it did $20M total box-office, which earned out its production costs and some profit. If you have any love for the original material I endorse the hell out of this movie. If you haven't and are at all squeamish about splatter, stay the fuck away.A Wonder Woman movie can't pull the same trick Dredd did, because she is such a well known character who has existed in some form or another for eight decades. To pull off a Wonder Woman movie set in a specific historical period where lots of people have direct memories of it you have to do far more work to make it worth using a character with such visibility. 80s nostalgia is a thing right now, but they were problematic as fuck and any media that fails to acknowledge that is going to get panned. Like WW84 is getting panned right now.
