“Never stand begging for that which you have the power to earn” Miguel De Cervantes, a simplified way of addressing the problems plaguing today’s generation, as it tramples the quest for equality with its acknowledgment of various societal segregation criteria created by few men in power. The problem intensifies when our art and literature become affected by it. Wonder Woman 1984 fails to do justice to the aura created by Wonder Woman (2017) as it tries to put out a sense of community that consists mainly of white people.
In the recent past, we have seen that a film that blatantly tries to push feminist propaganda, fails in doing justice to the notions they are standing by. Charlie’s Angels (2019) project and Harley Quinn’s solo outing in Birds of Prey (2020) prove the aforementioned analogy and while this was happening, films like Captain Marvel (2019) and Queen’s Gambit (2020) put on a performance that entranced the viewers. The highly awaited Wonder Woman 1984 starring the beautiful Gal Gadot becomes an extremely generic film due to the lack of depth in the story and screenplay. Pedro Pascal joins the cast with Kirsten Wiig but their characters have no depth and it’s irksome how forgettable their presence becomes just after a day of watching the film. Wonder Woman 1984 revolves around achieving humanitarian peace across the globe but is unable to embrace the diversity in the cast which is simply against the whole concept of a global community.
The film picks up 7 years after the events of the first one, Diana is now a curator at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC. She is trying to get over her lost love and finds a new friend Barbara Minerva (Wiig) at her workplace where she comes across an ancient rock. In the first glimpse, it seemed like an ordinary rock but later we see it has the power to bring back Steve. The decisions taken by Diana go haywire as everything has a price and bringing Steve back opens up a whole new can of worms that were somewhat entertaining as the friends turn into a nemesis, giving rise to Cheetah.
Patty Jenkins‘ direction is admirable as she knows the essence of crafting a DC film, the first film and to some extent, Wonder Woman 1984 has that. The failure is the execution in the face-off between Wonder Woman and Cheetah as the discord between them is extremely vague and provides no substantial proposition to fight for and this turns extremely stale with the garnish of pseudo-feminist approach of the film. The problem becomes even more ugly with the fact that no women of colour or representation of marginalised sections have been done in a film preaching the sense of “community”.
The problem is not stemming from Wonder Woman 1984 but is encapsulated in a narrative that has a vague and privileged sense of equality that is not real and when we try to investigate the root cause of it all, it comes down to the fact that diversity should not be in the actors only, but the writers, producers, and other creative staff as well. The diverse backgrounds of the people involved in the inception play an important role in making a film that feels more comfortable to agree or disagree with.
Wonder Woman 1984 is streaming on HBO Max.
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