This is a feature I have been wanting to start for sometime, reviewing movies from the perspective of what Gospel truths can be found among all the worldly morass most films are usually drenched in. I would have begun this sooner, but the lockdowns have made that difficult. The purpose of my review is three-fold:
- A synopsis of the movie so that everything else in the article can be easily understood.
- I will examine the movie for Gospel truths and moral, righteous principles.
Now, with that explanation out of the way, let’s dig into the review. Note this will not be spoilers free.
Synopsis
This movie picks up with the life of Princess Diana some 76 years after the ending of the first movie, which was set in 1918. It is now 1984 and Diana works at a museum. She still engages in heroics on the side and finds her work satisfying, but her personal life is empty. She is lonely and has yet to move on from the death of Steve Trevor. Though not immortal she ages at such a glacial pace compared to the rest of humanity that she doesn’t look like she is more that a day or two older than in 1918. At work she meets Dr. Barbara Minerva, another highly intelligent woman who is just starting to work for the museum who is capable in her work. Minerva is your classical mousy klutz, smart but socially incapable and utterly forgettable.
The police, thanks in part to Wonder Woman stopping a robbery of a jewelry store, bust a black market antiquities trade being run out of the back of said jewelry store and bring the unknown artifacts to the museum for examination. This introduces us to our McGuffin, a powerful stone that is able to answer people’s wishes, but always at some drastic price to themselves. While examining the stone both Minerva and Diana handle the stone not knowing its true powers, both wishing for their hearts desire. Diana constantly wishes Steve were alive and Minerva, seeing Diana’s beauty and flawless grace, wishes she could be like Diana. It is at this point that we are personally introduced to Maxwell Lord, a man who has been in the background on TV advertisements and such but whom we have not met personally. It is revealed that he knows about the wishing stone and had in fact hired the robbers. He so desperately wants to be successful in his life that he would do anything to obtain the wealth, prestige, and respect he desires.
In an effort to be brief I won’t go into every detail, suffice it to say that Max uses his charm to obtain the stone and then its powers. He can grant wishes, a power which he uses to get everything he can imagine because whenever he grants another’s wish he can extract any recompense he chooses. But that power corrupts him even further than he already is, driving him into complete megalomaniacal delusion and desperation. He even abandons his son, a relationship that the movie shows us is extremely important to him normally, in pursuit of wealth and power. At the same time, Steve Trevor has returned and Diana is joyful, but the cost to her is that she is losing her powers. Minerva has become like Diana in every way, including gaining similar powers, but is losing her humanity and becoming cold and brutal. After adventures together trying to stop Max and his plans, which are throwing the world into chaos, Diana realizes she must renounce her wish, which means the loss of Steve, in order to gain back her powers to defeat Max. She refuses to do give him up but Steve believes in self-sacrifice and is willing to give himself up in order to help her. He convinces her to renounce her wish and goes back to the vaguely described Heaven the movie says he was in. Diana regains her powers having given up what she wanted for what was right.
With her powers restored, Diana goes to confront Max who is using TV to extend his powers. As a result of worldwide exposure he has become so powerful that Diana may not be able to stop him and reverse the damage he has done without killing him. The movie has hinted that his death may be the ultimate outcome, but, instead, Diana uses the Lasso of Truth, to cut through the lies and corruptive magic to show Max what he is truly doing to the world, destroying it. During this moment we see a montage of Max’s history growing up unloved abused and unwanted first in a home dominated by a mentally, emotionally, and physically abusive father and later as an unwanted and despised immigrant who is rejected for looking and being different than everyone else. Max realizes that his dream has become a nightmare and renounces his wishes and power, fleeing to go back home and find his son. At the same time the Lasso’s effect of revealing the truth to everyone is broadcast across the world and people renounce their corrupted wishes as well. The result of this is that the world is largely repaired.
Problems
I always like to do the problems first because I would rather leave on a positive note generally. I will do what worked well next.
The biggest problem of this movie is that it is bloated. The story gets convoluted in a way that, while largely making sense, is largely unnecessary. For example, once he gets his powers Max, who is trying to become an oil tycoon, goes to Egypt in order to convince a wealthy oil baron there to give Max all the oil the Egyptian oil baron owns. So there is a whole section of this movie that takes place in Egypt and the movie repeatedly pops back to Egypt in order to update us with the problems caused by the oil baron’s wish. Another example is that in order to find out more information about the history of the wish stone Minerva, Diana, and Steve go to meet a guy who works in a record store but who owns a Mayan codex that is at least half a millennia old. It is all unnecessary. The Egypt scene is really just an excuse for an admittedly epic fight scene to occur that could’ve easily taken place in the US and Minerva could have easily just discovered the information they needed about the stone destroying the Mayan civilization in her own research on the stone. You could’ve saved at least ten minutes of the movie this way and it wouldn’t have made the movie plot so needlessly convoluted.
The other major problem I have here is one I also had with the last movie – Wonder Woman 1984‘s understanding of history is extremely poor. The wish stone, we are told, was made by a God of Deception who imbued it with the power to grant corrupted wishes as a way to mess with humanity. We are then provided examples of civilizations that were destroyed by the way the wish stone corrupted their wishes and peoples. We are specifically told that Romulus, the mythic founder of Rome and murderer of his brother Remus, had the wish stone, that the ancient Mayans had it as well, and that it is the cause for the end of both their civilizations. But this makes no sense. Romulus, if he existed at all, founded an civilization that lasted for over two-thousand years. It seems clear that the movie mistook Romulus for Romulus Augustulus, who lived over a millennia later. But even this doesn’t help any because the Western Roman Empire was but a ghost of itself by the time of his rule and certainly not what someone would have wished for. And if the movie did mean the Romulus of Romulus and Remus, well the civilization he founded lasted for 2,000 years after the time he would have lived, which really conflicts with the idea that the wish stone causes the end of civilizations.
The ancient Mayans weren’t destroyed, as the movie claims. The Mayan culture, language, and people are alive and well in Mesoamerica today. With a population of over six million there are, in fact, more Mayans than the total population of Native Americans in all of the United States. Of course they don’t rule their own empire anymore, but there never was a “Mayan empire.” The ancient Mayans existed as a spread out civilization of individual city-states who all shared ethnic and cultural ties. This was a boon to them as their decentralized nature made them much harder to conquer than their more centralized northern neighbors, the Aztecs. Whereas the Aztecs fell to the Spanish in 1519, the Mayans endured all the way until 1697, which is nearly a century longer than any other Mesoamerican group managed. And while their political independence was at an end their cultural identity proved to be one of the most resilient of all. You can go to Central America today and talk to them in their own native languages. They certainly weren’t wiped from the Earth in some horrific apocalypse with barely a few remembering “the old ways” as the movie suggests.
At one point, Diana also tells the story of the Amazonian warrior Asteria who died to save her people who were then fleeing a Grecian army. The movie flashes back to show us the events and the Greeks looked like 300 rejects. They’re shirtless and dressed like a poor man’s King Leonidas. If the writers had even just read a Wikipedia page they would have done better and known that the Greeks looked almost nothing like knock off Spartans from a different movie. This one bugs me because it is so easy to get right and yet they opted for some lazy, ugly, stupid trope.
Then there is the President Reagan of it all. They never name him as Reagan, but it is clear that the (very poorly chosen and acted) look-a-like is supposed to be Ronald Reagan. Well, what is Reagan’s wish when Max comes to the White House? For more nuclear weapons than ever before to surround the Soviet Union with in order to make American invincible and unstoppable. This (for some reason) perpetuates a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. I’m not kidding. The Soviet response to the sudden appearance to hundreds of more atomic bombs than ever before was to decide to launch an all out attack at the United States, because apparently the Soviets wanted to be annihilated? I mean this farcical presentation doesn’t even get MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) correct. It only works if you have parity. A nation who suddenly found it had far less nukes than the enemy would never launch first because it knew it wouldn’t be able to stop its enemies from firing all of its overwhelming arsenal in return. And as for Reagan? He wanted to abolish all nuclear weapons. In January 1984 he called for the US and the USSR to reduce their nuclear stockpiles and later in the year he proposed a new round of arms negotiations with the Soviets that would have, among other things, limited existing nuclear weapons development and eliminating some existing ones as a first step towards his goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons. In 1986 he would go on to shock everyone by offering to immediately begin abolishing all of America’s nuclear weapons if the USSR would do the same and he promised to give the USSR the anti-ballistic missile defense technology called SDI that he was hoping to develop. For all the other true and deserved criticism that can and should levelled at Reagan the one that cannot be is the one that this movie pins on him, that he was some kind of crazed pro-atomic bomb warmonger.
Successes
Now, for all its problems with history and narrative bloating there are actually a lot of things this movie does well. Namely, the themes, acting, and characterization are all excellently done.
First and foremost is that Diana is an actual hero. Unlike Snyderman and Batmurderer, this version of Wonder Woman actually puts the lives of civilians first, doesn’t value catching the bad guy over protecting innocent people, and doesn’t feel the need to engage in torture or murder in order to do her job. In the scene where she foils the robbery she specifically outs herself in danger to protect bystanders and puts protecting a child over catching the thieves. Though she still captures them the movie shows us this doesn’t always happen later on when during the big Egypt fight scene she puts rescuing two children ahead of capturing Max, to the point that she literally puts her body between the kids and a runaway armored military vehicle. What is wonderful about this moment is that Max gets away. In allowing that to happen the movie implicitly tells us what is more important to her – actual human lives are more important than winning a fight. Saving people is more important than hurting people.
Salvation is actually a core theme of the entire movie. Not only does Diana repeatedly risk her life to save and protect innocents, but she even does so to save obvious villains. In the aforementioned Egyptian action scene, Diana doesn’t just defeat a whole convoy of heavily armed soldiers, she does so without seemingly killing anyone. She purposefully goes out of her way to do so. She rips the steering wheel off one armored vehicle, telling the driver he still has his brakes. When she flips another armored vehicle over she first removes the only guy on the outside who would have most been in harm’s way by using the Lasso to pull him off and throw him onto the sandy roadside, where the movie shows us he landed perhaps a little worse for wear but largely uninjured. In her big fight with Minerva, Diana defeats Minerva but doesn’t kill her. Instead Diana electrocutes Minerva (an effect which, given that Minerva is now as powerful as Diana means she is effectively tased but not killed), saves her from drowning, leaving her unconscious but alive and breathing. Diana doesn’t just save children, she saves her enemies as well. Because she is a hero.
Then in the final confrontation with Max she finds a way to save him without killing him. This, for me, was a huge thing. In the comics, Maxwell Lord is killed when Wonder Woman snaps his neck. It is an absolute low in Wonder Woman’s canon, one of her worst stories not because of how it is told but because it so completely misunderstands Wonder Woman, her purpose, and the nature of heroism altogether. It was a blow against her a character that she still hasn’t recovered from a smore and more writers have envisioned her more as a mere weapon or a Goddess of War. These are mistakes the first movie also makes, but which this one corrects beautifully. This movie kept setting up for her to kill him, even having him standing with his back to her while broadcasting his message across the world. Instead, she saves him. She wraps the Lasso of Truth, which the movie tells us is imbued with pure Truth itself, around his ankle and uses its powers to cut through the lies, deceptions, and self-deceptions that Max was and had subjected himself to, resulting in him having a revelation that everything he loved and truly valued – his son- was being lost to him. In the language of Luke, Maxwell Lord “came to himself” and, like the Prodigal Son, realized that he needed to repent. At the same time the world is shown the truth about their corrupt wishes and renounce them. Even Minerva. This is Wonder Woman as she is meant to be – not a warrior goddess out to beat up and kill her enemies but a Messenger of Peace who uses the Power of Truth to save even the unsaveable. She is a savior, not a destroyer.
The movie also does a wonderful job of helping us to sympathize with Max without us sympathizing with evil. To many stories today revolve around presenting evil as attractive, justifiable, or understandable. These stories want to put us into the mind of evil and to convince us that if we had but had their experiences we would see the world as they do. The core reason for this is because most stories today are base don the premise that morals are relative, there is no absolute good, and that what is evil to me may not be evil to you. Wonder Woman 1984 doesn’t do this at all. Yes, we learn the tragic backstories of our villains. We even understand that the wish stone is corrupting them in some way. But never are we led to think that what they are doing or who they are becoming is good.
We are shown how Maxwell Lord’s head long rush into greed and power in order to make up for the inadequacies he sees within himself and to fill the holes in his heart created by violence and rejection with money and fear which he, because of his abusive upbringing confuses with respect. But at the same time we are shown all the chaos, death, and destruction caused by his actions along with the sacrifice both Steve and Diana make in order for him to be able to stop Max. We are shown that no matter how tragic his past his actions are unequivocally evil. There is no indulging him or his selfishness. We are not led to sympathize or empathize with his evil motivations or actions. Minerva receives similar treatment as we see her desires turn her into a literal animal.
Principles
This movie obviously understands what it means to be a hero more than the last one does or than other DC big budget movies such as Birds of Prey or Man of Steel, Batman vs. Superman, and Justice League. The focus on heroism, the fact that heroes do not sacrifice the lives of innocent people in order obtain their goals, no matter how those goals may seem justified or for the “greater good,” is all through this movie. If the essence of heroism can be summed by Captain America’s statement in Infinity War that “We don’t trade lives,” then Diana is a living example of it in Wonder Woman 1984. This alone makes the movie better than any of the Snyder films.
Humans have intrinsic, inestimable, eternal worth and are an ends unto themselves. Each human life is of greater value than all the things on the planet and no other person or group’s lives are of greater or lesser worth. Each of us is a Child of God whose very existence is the reason for all Creation. As a result we are all worthy of love and salvation, no matter how dark our path has become or the evils that we have done. This is part of the reason Christ has forbidden all killing by modern revelation. The Atonement of Jesus Christ is so powerful that it can heal the severest injuries, wipe away the the heaviest tears, cleanse the deepest stains of sin from us if we come to Him. All of us can be saved and are worthy of being saved. It was beautiful to see that, as opposed to torture and killing, being portrayed in Wonder Woman 1984. Even the uber-villain, Maxwell Lord, deserved to be loved and was worthy of salvation. That is a powerful message in a world riven by political hatreds at this moment.
In terms of violence, well it is obvious that this movie was not opposed to violence. This is par for the course with most movies. They can’t all be Hacksaw Ridge, unfortunately. That said, this movie does a lot to undercut the idea of the moral superiority or righteousness of violence with its finale. In the last big scene, Diana goes to confront a fully empowered Maxwell Lord. Repeatedly the movie has suggested Diana will have to kill him to stop him and she is even wearing a set of golden Amazonian armor modeled after an eagle – a bird of prey which kills to survive. Everything suggests violence is about to occur. But what does she do? She uses the Lasso of Truth to teach him about the beauty and power of Truth – that though the world is a painful place where we all suffer loss it is also a wonderful place full of beauty and love, that this has a special value all its own that shouldn’t be lost. Max, overcome by the revelation of what he has become and what he has done, how he has betrayed those whom he loves the most, renounces all his power, position, and control, running from the room to go and save his son. The climax of this movie was not brutality. It was not someone being punched in the face, shot, or killed. It was about the power of Truth and Love coupled together to do that which no amount of violence or brutality can – to redeem a man and save the world. Thus, while not strictly adhering to a nonviolent ethic, the movie certainly teaches the power of nonviolence in a dramatic way. Max is living and free at the end and I hope we get to see him use the chance he has been given to become a positive influence on the world as he was when first introduced in the comics.
The movie also has one of the most beautiful moments and perfect examples of grace that I have ever seen in a film. After the end of the final scene where Max renounces his wish he goes to find his son, Alistair, whom he is reunited with. In the scene, Max confesses his errors, his greed, his arrogance to his son and promises that he will repent form this day forward, that one day he will be a man worthy of his son’s love. This is the exchange between them:
Max: I just wish and I pray that, one day, I’ll be able to make you proud enough that you’ll be able to forgive me. And love me. Because I’m nothing to be proud of, Alistair.
Alistair (his son): I don’t need you to make me proud. I already love you, Daddy. You’re my dad.
Isn’t that simply breathtaking? How many of us have been on our knees pleading to become the kind of being worthy of God’s love, thinking that of we can just be good enough, worthy enough, perfect enough that we can earn His love? How many of us have questioned how God could love something as angry, stupid, hypocritical, and corrupt as I am? Here is the answer. We don’t not have to be worthy of His love. We do not have to earn His love. We are His children. He already loves us. And the extension of that love, His grace, is overwhelming when you feel it. Like Max when his son professes his unconditional love, I dissolve into pure emotions whenever I feel God’s pure love. Because I know how unlovable I am. To have Him love me anyway not because of what I have, what I have accomplished, how I write, what I say, or how I look, not because I am smart, beautiful, talented, successful, or perfect, but because I am His child and that is enough? Even now I am on the verge of tears. That is grace and it is incredible. The entire movie is building to that moment of repentance and grace and it did not disappoint.
Final Thoughts
I really enjoyed Wonder Woman 1984. It isn’t a perfect movie. The story is a bit convoluted and it needs to trim the excess fat from it, which would leave it with more time to devote to its three ongoing story arcs and develop them even more. And its soundtrack is good but nothing special, a disappointment I know to some who were hoping this would have a James Gunn/Guardians of the Galaxy-esque soundtrack. But for me these are minor quibbles. The action was fun, the characters were well acted, the stories told were meaningful, and the morals and principles taught are deeply valuable. This movie isn’t simply better than its predecessor, it is either the second or third best superhero movie WB/DC has put out (depending on how you feel about Aquaman and Shazam.) I enjoyed it completely. Strap yourself in and go for the ride. You might just enjoy it, too!