Reviews

This should have been the easiest movie for a writer to write and a director to make. Everybody loves the eighties and Gal Gadot has already established herself as Wonder Woman. Yet the movie sucks.

The opening scene is fantastic, showing Wonder Woman as a child and experiencing a valuable character arc. Then it goes down hill. The Cheetah character should have been deleted from the script, it added nothing to the story and created too many cringe moments. Seeing her accosted by multitudes of evil white males as she jogs is one of the least believable scenes in recent movie history. I guarantee that in the real world she would have barely been noticed if she was really jogging through any Western City. The most interesting character was Max Lord but the Cheetah storyline stole so much screen time that we didn't see his motivation or relationship with his son developed properly. So when he sacrifices his powers at the end, it rings hollow. Now, onto the most important sin the movie commits. It is set in the eighties but somehow treats this setting cynically, rather than being a fun playground. We're not in the nineties, people don't reference the eighties cynically any more... except apparently the tone deaf director. Please, redo this movie with someone competent at the helm.

We are up to number... 15?? 20?? Whatever... in Disney's desperate attempts to wring every last cent out of what at the time was a clever new take on super hero movies with Iron Man. So I shouldn't be surprised that the writers and editors are phoning it in by now but it really shows. I would suggest the writers get a copy of any of the top 100 books on screenwriting... any one at all... and read the very first lesson of any of those books, you know, the one where they say "show don't tell". I guarantee that we didn't need 80% of the movie to be exposition from the characters, especially in a superhero movie. I am sure the CGI team, you know, the people who take up most of the credits, could have fired up the Unreal Engine and pumped out a few more video game cut scenes to fill us in. But I shouldn't blame this all on the writers, the editors pretty much looked at all of the footage, every last scrap of boring exposition and said "whatever, just chuck it all in". My girlfriend actually skipped a minute of dialogue at one point and it made no difference at all. I would complain about the obvious cringe, especially during that lame scene at the end but so many of Marvel (property of the Mouse) fans probably see that cringe as a positive aspect. Whatever, it's hard to find a movie with less cringe nowadays, so it's to be expected. There were a couple of great laugh out loud jokes and fat Thor was great, not to mention the Thor/Starlord dialogue. But I can't recommend sitting through 2.5 hours of exposition and awkward CGI for the few brilliant moments. I guess you could look at it as a learning experience, Avengers showed us how a huge ensemble superhero movie could be done right and Avengers Endgame showed us how to do it poorly.

This is what happens when a greedy studio executive desperately tries to reduce a successful and beloved show to a formula. They take the elements of the original show and insert one dimensional P.C. placeholder characters, a couple of smaller characters from the original and cynically insert the pilot into the original series slot. The pilot is horrible from its awkward beginning to contrived musical end (whoops, forgot to mention spoilers). A previous reviewer cited the time Golden Girls attempted this type of stunt: I don't recall that. However, I do remember when Supernatural attempted to make us sit through a cynical money grab and it was horrible. If you like the Goldbergs DO NOT WATCH this.