Our Christmas evening of cinematic indulgence was watching Wonder Woman 1984, about which I just posted this, elsewhere on the Interwebs:
I mean, okay, all “super” and “enhanced” hero (and villain) archetypes are impossible. Not found in nature. You grant that. After a few thousand episodes in the various franchises, one’s disbelief becomes fully suspended. So when you’ve got an all-female island of Amazons (which reproduce how?… by parthenogenesis?) playing an arch-Freudian Greco-Roman Quidditch, you say hey, why not? We’re establishing character here. Or backstory. Or something. You can hang with it, long as there are a few connections to what might be a plausible reality, and while things move forward in a sensible enough way. And some predictability counts. For example, you know the young girl, this movie’s (also virgin-birthed) Anakin Skywalker, is sure to lose the all but endless Quidditch match, and will learn in losing a lesson (taught by … who is that? Robin Wright? Let’s check on one of our phones) that will brace the front end of what turns out at the end of the story to be its apparent moral arc.
And then, after the girl grows up to be an introverted scientist-supermodel who hasn’t aged since WWI (an item that hasn’t raised questions with HR since long before it was called “Personnel,” and we later learn has been celibate or something ever since her only-ever boyfriend died sixty-four years earlier while martyring his ass in a plane crash you’re trying to remember from the first movie) has suddenly decided, after all this time, to start fighting crime with her magic lasso and her ability to leap shopping mall atria in a single bound; and then, after same boyfriend inexplicably comes back from the dead to body-snatch some innocent dude, they go back to hugging and smooching and holding hands like the intervening years of longing (her) and void (him) were no big deals, and then they jack an idle (and hopefully gassed up) F111, which in reality doesn’t have pilot-copilot seats side-by-side (or even a co-pilot, beging a single-seat plane), and which absolutely requires noise-isolating earphones this couple doesn’t have, because afterburner noise in the cockpit in one of those mothers is about 2000db, and the undead boyfriend, who flew a Fokker or something in the prior movie, knows exactly and how to fly a jet that only the topmost of guns are allowed to even fantasize about, and then he and Wondermodel have a long conversation on a short runway during which they’re being chased by cops, and she kinda doubts that one of the gods in her polytheistic religion have given her full powers to make a whole plane invisible to radar, which she has to explain to her undead dude in 1984 (because he wouldn’t know about that, even though he knows everything else about the plane), and the last thing she actually made disappear was a paper cup, and then they somehow have a romantic flight, without refueling, from D.C. to a dirt road in an orchard somewhere near Cairo, while in the meantime the most annoying and charmless human being in human history—a supervillain-for-now whose one human power was selling self-improvement on TV—causes a giant wall to appear in the middle of a crowded city while apparently not killing anyone… Wholly shit.
And what I just described was about three minutes in the midst of this thing.
But we hung with it, in part because we were half-motivated to see if it was possible to tally both the impossibilities and plot inconsistencies of the damn thing. By the time it ended, we wondered if it ever would.
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