The first “Wonder Woman” is a film that snuck up on many people in 2017, restoring excitement in DC films for many after the disappointment of “Batman V Superman” and “Suicide Squad.” Now, after many delays and three years’ waiting, Patty Jenkins returns with “Wonder Woman 1984,” and according to early reactions, the film delivers.
First of all, you should still take these with a grain of salt. Though the reactions come from qualified and competent critics, they are still short social media reaction posts that don’t allow for nuance, and are mostly meant to hype up the film. Even then, the reactions themselves aren’t completely positive, and they do recognize there are issues with the film. With the release just a couple of weeks again, in an unprecedented simultaneous launch in select theaters as well as HBO Max, it’s time to check what critics are saying about “Wonder Woman 1984.”
If there seems to be one consensus, is that the film is an uplifting experience that can bring the disastrous 2020 to a kind of cheerful close. Nerdist writer Amy Ratcliffe said the film is “uplifting, hopeful, and so utterly Wonder Woman,” and teased that the film “doesn’t look or feel like any other modern superhero movie.”
Similarly, IGN’s Jim Vejvoda described the film as having “a very heartwarming and hopeful message that, frankly, we really need this year,” while Fandom’s Eric Goldman compared the film to “Bill and Ted Face the Music” and recognized the film has issues. “I do think one villain gets a much stronger third act than the other and wanted more for the other character in a couple of respects,” Goldman Tweeted.
Reactions seem to agree that the film takes big swings, not all of them work but the film is still more ambitious than recent superhero films. MTV News writer Josh Horowitz said the film “felt like a lost film from the Richard Donner era of superhero films,” but Germain Lussier from io9 recognized the film is “very long, to a fault at times.”
Lastly, it wouldn’t be a social media reaction without filmmaker Ben Mekler‘s hilarious fake reactions, and his Tweet about “Wonder Woman 1984” doesn’t disappoint, saying it’s “Full of wonder, optimism, and a near-fetishistic obsession with 1984’s favorite toy, the koosh ball, ‘WONDER WOMAN 1984’ is quite simply the best DC film since ‘THE DARK KNIGHT.'”
After the film got delayed for over a year, and with the release just a short couple of weeks away (even less for international audiences), we’ll soon find out just how ambitious and how worthy a sequel “Wonder Woman 1984” is.