Wonder Woman: Every Gal Gadot DC movie ranked worst to best
By Wesley Bell
4. Wonder Woman 1984
The much-anticipated sequel is set in the 80s, almost 70 years after the events of the first film, with Diana now working as an anthropologist for the Smithsonian Museum and operating as Wonder Woman in secret. One of the artifacts the museum gets is a Dreamstone, which is capable of granting wishes. Diana subconsciously uses it to bring back Steve Trevor, who died at the end of the previous film, causing him to possess the body of another man, a baffling decision that barely gets addressed.
Pedro Pascal’s Maxwell Lord, a television personality and con man, gets his hands on the stone and uses its power to give himself the ability to grant wishes, essentially turning himself into it. Lord begins using it to grant wishes for people in exchange for more power and influence while Diana chases him across the world to stop him. Lord eventually decides to use his resources to grant the wishes of everyone on the planet to make himself more powerful, plunging the world into complete chaos in a matter of seconds.
Eventually, after learning about the drawbacks of the stone and slowly losing her powers, Diana realizes that she has to move on and let Steve go to be strong enough to face Lord and save the world. While not as thematically inconsistent as the first one, the final confrontation with Lord is pretty anticlimactic as Diana defeats him by somehow convincing everyone in the world, including him, to undo their wishes.
Admittedly, it does have some great moments, such as when Diana uses magic to turn a plane invisible, a reference to her invisible jet from the comics, or when she uses her lasso to swing on lightning. We also get the hilarious role reversal from the original, with Diana being knowledgeable about the world and Steve as the fish out of water. It’s not unwatchable but is a massive drop in quality, which is surprising since Patty Jenkins, who helmed the first movie, returned to write and direct. While a third film could have rounded out the trilogy and made up for the issues in this one, that’s no longer a possibility.