WONDER WOMAN 1984
12A
Easily the best late Amazon delivery of the past year.
Patty Jenkins’ Wonder Woman sequel is set, wouldn’t you know, in 1984, the year of George Orwell’s cautionary dystopian novel and the decade when greed was considered good. You might say that 1984 – be it Orwell’s or Reagan’s – isn’t so very different from today: Big Brother surveillance, rampant selfishness, a gaping chasm between the rich and the poor…
What a relief, then, that this exuberant blockbuster opens on the island of Themyscira, with a young Diana being told that “no true hero is born of lies”. She is taught this lesson not on a blackboard, you understand. That’s no way to open an event movie. Rather, she’s taking part in a thrilling contest, the camera swooping and gliding as she scales vast obstacles, dives off a cliff, swims in the turquoise ocean, gallops on horseback across a white beach and fires arrows at targets. “This world is not ready for all you will do,” says her aunt-slash-trainer Antiope (Robin Wright). But we sure as
hell are; cut to 1984 (nearly 70 years on from the events of the first movie) and another rousing set-piece set in a mall, the antithesis of Themyscira’s towering mountains, lush pastures and shimmering seas.
Diana (Gal Gadot), it transpires, now works for the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. Another employee is socially awkward, downtrodden Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig, excellent), a talented geologist charged with dating a hoard of artefacts that have just come in – including a stone that she initially judges as fake, but soon discovers is of a worth that you cannot put a price on (not least as a MacGuffin).
BAD MAX
Max Lord (Pedro Pascal, equally excellent) certainly sees its value, though. This slickster might seem like an embodiment of the American Dream – he heads up oil company Black Gold, and his infomercial is forever playing on TV – but he’s broke and about to be reported to the FTC for his Ponzi scheme. Now if only he could get his hands on that peculiar stone…
Wonder Woman 1984 is pretty much the blockbuster we need right now. Like DC’s 2019 billion-dollar hit Joker, it plugs into all of the loneliness and disappointment and fear and rage that so many have harboured these last few years, but gives the heavyweight concept a positive spin to deliver a message of love and hope and connection across all borders. To say how, exactly, would be to give too much away, but there’s a purity to Jenkins’ picture that might have felt naïve five years ago, but now feels not only most welcome, but necessary.