Yes. Everything Is Rubbish.

Where-as the first Wonder Woman movie felt like its own thing and a chance to redefine the female superhero movie, something that Marvel themselves hadn't done at the time of its release, and some would say Wonder Woman managed; its sequel beats a trodden path. Namely that of the Batman films. Specifically Batman Returns and Batman & Robin. We get more than one villain. A story of a geeky socially awkward woman girl turned sexy villainess. A maniacal man hellbent on making everyone bend to his will. A city / world thrust into turmoil. Wonder Woman 1984 becomes a film of tropes, off the back of a film that set it up to be anything but. Tropey films are not inherently bad. With Wonder Woman set in the 1980s and going to lengths to achieve the look, even down to being shot on film, it makes sense creatively. Stranger Things is as tropey as they come, but it was great in part because of that and how self aware it was. Yet, whilst WW84 seems like it wants to lean into this, it never...

Wonder Woman was the best part of the mess that was Batman v Superman . Whilst Batman was being more miserable than usual and Superman was being a rubbish hero, Wonder Woman was a nice reminder of how a super hero should handle their shit. So her getting her own film didn't just make sense for the DC extended universe, it was genuinely welcomed following that train wreck of a film. A Wonder woman film is LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG overdue. A female superhero led film full stop is very much overdue, and Warner Bros. have thrown the gauntlet down and done something that Marvel have yet to. But the film is far from perfect and inherits its fair share of problems from Batman v Superman. And whilst the film is Wonder Woman's by name, it feels as much as Chris Pine's film as it does Gal Gadot's.

I went into Batman v Superman with no expectations. I had not watched any of the trailers, I was not aware of what went down in the comics as canon between these two miserable sons of bitches. I knew nothing about Batman v Superman's story or context other than it featured Batman, Superman, and that Wonder Woman was in there somewhere. Now, whilst I am up on bits of DC and Marvel lore, I would not consider myself an all knowing fan. I love Marvel as a franchise and have followed DC intermittently over the years in the forms of live action films and animated series' based on characters from the universe. But I am not the one to go to for references sake when it comes to how true to the print any of the adaptations are. I know more than your average person who has heard of these characters, but not a great deal more. So I did not go into Batman v Superman from the perspective of somebody who was going to see just how well the film stuck to the story that had been told years befo...