This review contains minor spoilers for Wonder Woman 1984.

Patty Jenkins’ 2017 adaptation of Wonder Woman was one of the better superhero movies of the decade and showed that Diana Prince had a lot of good stories to tell on the big screen. Unfortunately, the sequel Wonder Woman 1984 has too many of them to tell and no idea how to do it. The movie has some great ideas about our current moment and rooting them in the excess and avarice of the Reagan 80s, but the plotting is an absolute mess that frequently forgets Diana in favor of confusing villain machinations. All too often, Wonder Woman 1984 becomes a victim of the very excess and shortcuts it seeks to critique even as it tries to uphold truth and sacrifice as central values we must celebrate if we’re to survive.

Diana (Gal Gadot) is living in secret in Washington, D.C. in 1984. She works at the Smithsonian as an anthropologist as Diana Prince while still doing some Wonder Woman heroics on the side, but her existence is pretty lonely. She strikes up a friendship with fellow historian Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig), a shy, awkward woman that no one really seems to notice. They both come into contact with a mysterious stone, which is being tracked by fraudulent oilman Max Lord (Pedro Pascal). The stone claims it can grant wishes, and Diana and Barbara secretly try it out with Diana wishing for the return of Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) and Barbara wishing for Diana’s strength. Both wishes are granted, but the stone, which has a Monkey’s Paw-like twist to all of its wishes, becomes even more dangerous when it merges with Lord and allows him to be the wishmaster, trading wishes for more power. As the world begins to unravel, Diana must decide whether she wants to hold on to her wish or restore balance to the planet.

Gal Gadot and Chris Pine in Wonder Woman 1984
Image via Warner Bros.

Jenkins makes no secret to what she’s aiming for with her movie. Set in the 1980s, she depicts a world of excess, self-entitlement, and indulgence, and Lord is a distinctly Trumpian figure with his reliance on mass media and conning others to amass more power (although Lord differs from Trump by genuinely loving his child and not just seeing his offspring as an extension of his own vanity). Wonder Woman is the antidote to this excess by showing that this offer of “more” is always based on a lie, and the only way forward is through truth and sacrifice. Diana herself is tested through her relationship with Trevor, and it shows that in order to save the world she has to give up Steve since the tradeoff for her wish are her superpowers.

All of this makes sense, but the execution is atrocious. The film starts off with a prologue set in Themyscira where a young Diana runs a race with the other Amazons but takes a shortcut and is disqualified. Her aunt Antiope (Robin Wright) lectures Diana that shortcuts must not be rewarded and that the only true win is one based in honesty. Rather than building on this prologue, the rest of the movie simply reiterates it, so the entire Themyscira sequence is part of the excess that the film seeks to critique.

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Image via Warner Bros.

The movie doesn’t fare much better with Barbara. Wiig is surprisingly great in the role by conveying the awkwardness and shyness that curdles into resentment and anger, but the movie then reduces her conflict with Diana down to “The stone made Barbara evil, and we need a physical foe for Wonder Woman.” And that’s how you get awkward scenes like Diana and Steve showing up to the White House to stop Max from obtaining total authority, but then Barbara comes out of nowhere to fight Diana in order to protect Max. We’re never told how Barbara knew these characters would be at the White House or how she knew Max was in danger, but it doesn’t matter because the movie demands a fight scene between Diana and Barbara. Again, for a film that’s supposed to be about the evils of excess and taking shortcuts, it frequently engages in this behavior, and not in a way that’s purposely awful to demonstrate the awfulness of these actions.

Wonder Woman 1984 becomes even more muddled when you simply try to understand what Max Lord is up to. Pascal is delightful as he chews the scenery, but his character’s motives are frequently confusing. He basically becomes the wish-granting stone, and he’s constantly asking people to wish for things, and it’s not until over halfway through the movie that you understand he’s trading wishes for power even though the stone is also weakening him, so it’s confusing how much power he’s really getting from all this. Also, the movie never seems entirely comfortable making him the central foe of the movie, which is why it awkwardly tries to weave in Barbara to Max’s machinations.

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Image via Warner Bros.

When you lift out certain elements of Wonder Woman 1984, they work and you can see what Jenkins is going for. The Diana/Steve stuff takes one of the strongest elements of the 2017 movie and transplants it into 1984 to wonderful effect. The chemistry between Gadot and Pine remains outstanding, and Pine is a blast as a man out of time, awed and confounded by the world around him. The film also works to create serious stakes by showing Steve as the one thing Diana wants the most, and why that sacrifice would be so hard for her, but this entire relationship is diminished when the film is spending so much time bouncing between Barbara and Max and what they want.

There are moments when Wonder Woman 1984 manages to be joyful and really lean into the colorfulness of its 1980s setting, but even here the movie is scattershot and at time surprisingly limp. There’s a set piece early on at a mall where Diana foils some robbers, and there’s just nothing particularly exciting about it. Wonder Woman uses her lasso to swing around like Spider-Man, and because Wonder Woman is technically “in hiding” (the DCEU has created a scenario where the world isn’t supposed to know about Diana) there’s not much the film can do with her being out in the open, so you get kind of middling scenes where Diana is either trying to stop a convoy or fighting with Barbara.

Gal Gadot in Wonder Woman 1984
Image via Warner Bros.

Wonder Woman 1984 is a movie with a well-intentioned message that has no idea how to put that message into a compelling story. The film is guilty of both trying to do too much with regards to how overstuffed it is and guilty of doing too little with its thin plotting and confusing character motivations. 2017’s Wonder Woman works because it’s the story of Diana going from a sheltered existence, discovering why the world needs her, and deciding to fight for that world despite its many shortcomings. The sequel has none of that, and while Wonder Woman is still a hero we need, she deserves much stronger stories than what her new movie has to offer.

Rating: C-

Wonder Woman 1984 Poster