Wonder Woman 1984 Review: The DCEU's Biggest Disappointment

🦸 This review is part of the The Old DCEU – Every Film Reviewed – watch every DCEU film from Man of Steel to the finale (2013–2023).

Wonder Woman 1984 should have been magnificent. You have Gal Gadot, who is Wonder Woman in the way that Robert Downey Jr. is Iron Man — actor and character inseparable, both operating at full conviction. You have an 80s setting full of genuine cinematic possibility: the decade’s visual excess, its Cold War paranoia, its mall culture and power suits and the specific American optimism of the Reagan era that the film could satirize or celebrate or subvert. You have Patty Jenkins returning with a larger budget and a mandate to expand the story she’d told so brilliantly in 2017. You have a premise — a wish-granting stone that will give anyone anything they want at a cost they don’t understand — that has genuine thematic potential.

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And then you watch the film, and you watch that potential evaporate. Wonder Woman 1984 is the most frustrating film in the DCEU — not because it’s incompetent, but because you can see so clearly the better version it could have been. The script needed at least one more major draft. The wish mechanics need internal consistency. The villains, both individually fascinating, needed more screen time and fewer compromises in how their arcs resolve. Steve Trevor’s return is emotionally powerful in individual scenes and ethically problematic in ways the film declines to engage with.

The film’s central mechanism is the Dream Stone: a magical artifact that grants wishes, but at the cost of something the wisher values. Diana wishes for Steve Trevor to return. He does — in the body of another man. Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal) touches the stone and becomes it — a living wish-granter who can bestow desires and extract what they cost. Barbara Minerva (Kristen Wiig) wishes to be like Diana. The cost of all these wishes is that the wisher loses something proportionate to what they gained.

In theory, this is sound mythological structure. In practice, the rules are applied inconsistently enough that by the third act you’ve stopped trying to follow the logic and are simply watching events occur. Diana loses her powers gradually as Steve lives. Maxwell’s victims lose their health to grant his wishes. Barbara loses her empathy. These costs are introduced and applied differently to each character, which creates a mechanical incoherence that the film’s emotional sequences can’t entirely overcome.

Narrative Architecture: Good Ideas, Bad Execution

The film’s two villains are its most interesting elements and both are underserved. Kristen Wiig’s Barbara Minerva begins as a genuinely affecting character — a brilliant academic who is invisible to everyone around her, constantly overlooked, desperate to be seen. Her friendship with Diana is the film’s best relationship, and Wiig plays Barbara’s early warmth and loneliness with real nuance. When she makes her wish, the transformation from overlooked to powerful is dramatized with real clarity. Her final-act transition into the film’s secondary villain is rushed, underdeveloped, and wastes the setup entirely.

Pedro Pascal’s Maxwell Lord is the film’s sharpest satirical potential. A TV infomercial con man who has spent decades performing success he hasn’t earned, desperately building a persona that hides a frightened, inadequate man — and then, through the Dream Stone, finally becoming powerful enough to grant wishes on a global scale. In a different film, Maxwell Lord could have been a precise skewering of Reagan-era American hucksterism and the culture of performance over substance. This film has those ambitions but can’t commit to them, and Pascal — who is always excellent — ends up playing a character whose motives drift as the script requires rather than as the character demands.

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Steve Trevor’s return is the film’s most contentious element. The mechanics are as follows: Diana’s wish brings Steve back, but into the body of an existing man who had no say in the arrangement. The film never acknowledges the consent issues this creates. It treats the body possession as purely a practical inconvenience — Steve can’t quite control the 1984 clothes, which generates comedy — and never engages with the ethical dimension of the host body’s displacement. In 2020, this landed badly with audiences who noticed the problem, and the film’s unwillingness to address it directly is a genuine script failure.

What Works

The film is not a total write-off. Gal Gadot’s performance is everything you’d expect — grounded, emotionally generous, and specific in ways that justify every casting choice Jenkins has made for this character. Hans Zimmer’s score is excellent: the Wonder Woman themes are deployed with the confidence of a composer who now fully owns the character’s musical identity, and the Cairo sequence has a genuinely excellent cue. The golden eagle armor — Diana’s suit for the final confrontation — is beautiful design. And there are genuine emotional beats throughout that land despite the structural problems around them.

The opening sequence, set at a young Diana competing in an Amazonian athletic competition and learning a lesson about shortcuts, is the film’s best segment and possibly the best opening Snyder’s DCEU produced. It’s mythologically resonant, visually spectacular, and thematically precise — everything the preceding two hours needed to be and wasn’t.

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Is Wonder Woman 1984 worth watching?

For DCEU completionists, yes — it fills in Diana’s story and has genuine moments despite its problems. As a standalone or for viewers who loved the original and want more of the same: manage your expectations significantly, or skip it.

Why is Wonder Woman 1984 considered disappointing?

The Dream Stone wish mechanics are internally inconsistent, Steve Trevor’s body-possession return isn’t engaged with ethically, the villains’ arcs are compromised in the third act, and the resolution requires an implausible global epiphany. A great director and great lead can’t save an undercooked script.

Who are the villains in Wonder Woman 1984?

Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), a wish-granting con man, and Barbara Minerva / Cheetah (Kristen Wiig), Diana’s colleague who wishes to be like her and loses her humanity. Both are individually fascinating; both are underserved by the script.

Does Steve Trevor actually come back in Wonder Woman 1984?

Yes — through Diana’s wish on the Dream Stone, Steve returns but into the body of another man. The film treats this as romantic; it does not engage with the ethical dimension of that arrangement.

Is Wonder Woman 1984 suitable for kids?

PG-13, and actually one of the least intense DCEU entries in terms of action and violence. The mild tone is somewhat the problem. Fine for 10+ in terms of content.