151 min | PG-13 | December 25, 2020 | Warner Bros. Pictures
The year is 1984 and a magic stone grants any wish you want. Diana wishes Steve Trevor back from the dead, and a broke con man wishes to become the stone itself. Everybody gets what they want, and the bill comes due.
The year is 1984. Diana Prince works at the Smithsonian and lives alone, decades after the war that took Steve Trevor. An ancient stone grants wishes and exacts a price for each one. Diana wishes Steve back into the world. A failing con man named Maxwell Lord wishes to become the stone itself. The film is about greed dressed up as desire and the lie that you can have everything without losing anything.
Gal Gadot plays Diana with warmth and loneliness, and she carries the quiet scenes better than the spectacle. Chris Pine plays Steve Trevor as a man out of his time, and his bewilderment at the modern world gives the film its lightest and best stretch. Kristen Wiig plays Barbara Minerva as a meek scientist who wishes to be powerful and curdles into resentment. Pedro Pascal plays Maxwell Lord as a striving huckster who believes his own pitch. Pascal commits to the desperation under the bravado. He finds the wounded child inside the salesman.
Patty Jenkins directs from a script she wrote with Geoff Johns and David Callaham. The production design builds 1984 as a temple of consumption, all neon malls and brass and excess that rhymes with the wishing stone at the center. The opening sequence on Themyscira stages an Amazon athletic contest with real physical clarity and stakes. The third act abandons that clarity for digital effects that float and lose weight. The script keeps adding rules and reversals until the wishing-stone logic collapses under its own bookkeeping.
The film wants to be a fable about renunciation. It asks its hero and its audience to give up the thing they want most. That is a real idea and a brave one for a blockbuster. The execution buries it under a plot that runs too long and explains too much. Jenkins reaches for sincerity and lands on sprawl.