The winner takes it all, that has always been the motto in Hollywood. And if there was one group that had really cleared away in recent years, it was the Wonder Woman team. A superhero from the DC universe who instantly overtook her colleagues Batman and Superman in terms of likability and coolness, a director who became the most successful woman in the director’s chair, and a radiant leading actress who received producer rights and the power to fire men . Which she did then.
After the great success of the first part, which was released in the summer of 2017, there was no stopping Patty Jenkins and Gal Gadot. Warner ordered parts two and three of “Wonder Woman” on completely new terms, including the right to develop your own scripts. The two also launched a major “Cleopatra” project at Paramount, of course with Gal Gadot in the lead role, and Jenkins immediately signed the contract for a new “Star Wars” film.
Rapid rise, growing power, endless possibilities? Oh right, it’s the oldest story in Hollywood, played through a thousand times in film history, including hubris and cruel crashes. How great to finally see this saga with women in the lead role: What a kick! And, as for the part with the impending hubris: what a danger!
Rogues are only beaten with half the force
So curtain up for “Wonder Woman 1984”, the next chapter, finally unveiled in Germany on the pay-TV channel Sky, because the cinemas are just closed at the moment and Warner may see his future in streaming, but this story is being told elsewhere . The tension is great and you should say what’s going on, if possible in one word. That word is: Well.
Because you just notice it. You can tell that something went to the head of the still radiant Gal Gadot, which is difficult to define, but which has a strong influence on her performance as Wonder Woman. She hovers over everything. She hovers so overhead that she somehow only beats villains with half her strength, that’s all she needs, and although she still interacts with the other characters, she is no longer in the same world.
In the story, which, as promised in the title, takes place in 1984, Wonder Woman performs everyday child and women’s rescue services as well as rogue fighting in the neighborhood and swings around with her glowing lasso, actually exactly like Spider-Man, only in Washington DC in New York. She also has a job as an anthropologist at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. There she meets a new, initially rather inconspicuous colleague named Barbara Minerva, and becomes friends with her.
In any case, the film wants us to believe that, it would be nice too, women’s solidarity and such. It’s not easy, because Barbara is terribly one-dimensional and poorly written, every sentence and every gesture she draws as emotionally needy and complex, so that the really great Kristen Wiig fumbled terribly because she doesn’t even know how to play it. But no matter, Wonder Woman has to like this Barbara now according to the script and build up. And oh man, is that going to waste.
The fight scenes are no better than the friendship scenes either
There is a moment when we kind of get into it, at the end of the evening when the two women have become best friends and almost laughing, and that is said again to be on the safe side. Wonder Woman: “Wow. You are so funny! Nobody made me laugh like that in very very a long time! “Your whole body language and all the dynamics of this tormented scene unfortunately tell exactly, and unfortunately completely obviously, the opposite.
—Between Barbara (Kristen Wiig) and Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot) a friendship is supposed to germinate, alone, you don’t believe it.
(Photo: Warner)
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Okay, but is that important? Superhero films are notoriously weak at such scenes. Half the world is blown up, but in the interpersonal area often nothing ignites, you know that. Sure, of course! And that’s why Hollywood had to change so urgently. That’s why women finally had to get real power to do these things differently, especially those scenes between two women that are not about men … Oh, it’s a mystery. One had hoped for so much more.
From then on, nothing is surprising anymore. For example, that the two women accidentally discover a stone that fulfills all wishes. Wonder Woman wants her lover, who died in World War II, back, who actually drops by. Barbara wishes to become as radiant and strong as Wonder Woman and also an aggressive hybrid between woman and cheetah. The inevitable fight scenes between the two are unfortunately no better than the friendship scenes – mainly because cheetahs look rather unhappy in close combat.
But the biggest villain is a man after all: Pedro Pascal plays Maxwell Lorenzano, who borrows the wishing stone (yes, really, that’s not a euphemism for stealing) and then begins to fulfill all kinds of people’s wishes until he ends the world falls into chaos and Russians and Americans activate their nuclear arsenals. As a moral narrative from the heart of the Hollywood dream machine, that’s a bit absurd. Desires are bad, you learn here, you plunge the world into ruin if you insist on their fulfillment, and no one wishes for anything positive.
So you can find the strongest women’s team that Hollywood has produced so far, at the height of its strength and creative possibilities, with the key to the greatest fun playground of the present and all the stories that could only be told, and what is being preached? The power of renunciation, the heroism of renunciation.
It’s strange, but involuntary. And it just goes to show once more that no one who starts a great film knows exactly where it will end. And whether it all makes sense in the end. The winner takes is all, that’s not the only big truth in Hollywood. The other is, according to William Goldman’s never refuted dictum: Nobody knows anything.
Wonder Woman 1984, USA 2020 – Director: Patty Jenkins. Book: Patty Jenkins, Geoff Johns, Dave Callaham. Camera: Matthew Jensen. With Gal Gadot, Chris Pine, Kristen Wiig, Pedro Pascal, Robin Wright. On Sky Cinema and Sky Ticket, 151 minutes.
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