2017’s Wonder Woman felt like a game changer for WB’s DCEU. After several misfires with Batman v Superman and Suicide Squad, it felt like maybe, just maybe, the DCEU was getting back on track. The film wasn’t perfect (by any means) but Patty Jenkins was able to bring the icon that is Diana Prince to the big screen. To this day the No Man's Land scene is still talked about and the way that Gal Gadot embraced the role solidified her as Wonder Woman. That’s what makes Wonder Woman 1984 such a disappointment. It’s hard to understand how we went from an extremely competent first solo outing to a convoluted mess that looks like it has unfinished special effects, lackluster fight scenes, underused performances from Pedro Pascal and Kristen Wig and most importantly, a script that should be an embarrassment to all those involved. And don't get me started on how this film is set in 1984 and yet doesn't have a memorable soundtrack. How is that even possible?  Where to begin? Let’s start with how this film looks. WW84 reportedly had a budget of $200 million and I’ve been spending the last 24 hours trying to figure out where it was spent. There’s an awkward looking scene in the trailers (one of the first clips ever released) of Wonder Woman running where you can clearly tell they put Gadot on a treadmill then edited the background to look like she’s running in the streets. It looks very weird but we all thought it would be fixed. It wasn’t. Not only was it not, but scenes like that are throughout the entire movie. In the first 20 minutes of the film there’s a scene where Wonder Woman is stopping some criminals in a mall. The scene is shot so awkwardly and poorly, I thought they were doing it on purpose to suggest that it was really a cheesy, 80’s movie someone was shooting. What's worse is EVER big action set piece is like this. It feels like you're not watching a 2020 blockbuster but a 1980's film on VHS. What’s frustrating is that, we’ve seen so much better from the DCEU. The fight scenes in Birds of Prey from earlier this year are so much better than WW84. The special effects and CGI of Aquaman blow this film away. If you go all the way back to 2013’s Man of Steel, we’ve seen a female super-powered character use speed in fights and it look amazing. Yet in this film, watching characters run and fight gives you the feel of watching a 70’s Superman film. The movie looks so bad at times you may pause it and then start messing with your TV's settings thinking it's something on your end. It's not. The film just looks bad. Like it’s predecessor, WW84 doesn’t do the film’s antagonists any justice which is a shame considering Kristen Wiig as Barbara Minerva and Pedro Pascal as Maxwell Lord are actually pretty good. If you’re looking for the comic book versions of these characters you’l be disappointed but at this point in the DCEU, it’s to be expected. Where this film fails is that it doesn’t give them enough time to shine (because it’s too busy focusing on a love story between Diana & Steve) and then completely removes all of the stakes by the end of the film. There may have been some worry about how Wiig would pull off this role and I can happily report that those worries were unfounded. She does an excellent job in the role and honesty should have been the main antagonist of the film and really leaned on the bond then eventually conflict between Diana and Barbara. Unfortunately that doesn’t happen because WW84 seems to have forgotten one of the biggest appeals of the first film: Men aren’t necessary for this story. Both Diana and Barbara are inexplicably tied to male characters that could have easily been cut out of the film. Pascal’s performance is good but the audience also isn’t given the motivations behind the character to actual care about him until nearly the very end. Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor was completely unnecessary and felt like a reaction to the fact that Pine & Gadot had such great chemistry in the first film that they ...