WONDER WOMAN 1984

In a league of her own

- Dave Golder

RELEASED OUT NOW! 12A | 151 minutes

Director Patty Jenkins

Cast Gal Gadot, Connie Nielsen, Robin Wright, Kristen Wiig, Chris Pine, Pedro Pascal

How do you make a successful DC movie these days? By keeping it as far from looking like a DCEU movie as possible, it seems. While a small but vocal section of fans online eagerly awaits the Snyder Cut of Justice League, the irony is that the best-received DC films of late – Shazam!, Aquaman, Birds Of Prey – are the ones which seem to ignore that the Justice League shared universe ever existed. Even the first Wonder Woman film, made at the height of the Snyder-plan, had only one brief nod to Batman, then went and did its own, more interesting thing.

Now we have Wonder Woman 1984 (or, if its onscreen title is to be taken as canon, WW84, which perhaps holds a double meaning for a movie set at the height of Cold War nuclear tension). Even more than before, this feels like Wonder Woman emancipated from the grimdark trappings of the Snyder-verse. Don’t read that to mean, “It’s gone all MCU!”, though. Superficially, WW84 may feel a little more Marvel, but its main influences in terms of tone and emotional heart are clearly the Christopher Reeve Superman films (and, more specifically, director Richard Donner’s blueprint for that series). Patty Jenkins returns as director, with Gal Gadot once again starring as the Amazon warrior, and together they deliver the kind of sequel you want, keeping everything you liked about the first film but creating something very different as well.