![]() It threw away the chance to develop a character with so much potential. What happens when your protagonist, a warrior for peace who loves humanity to her core, meets a female antagonist who is hellbent on achieving a singular, self-serving power no matter the cost? Your guess is as good as mine because Wonder Woman 1984 provides no answers. ![]() Here was a movie that provided us with a female villain - a rarity for the DCEU - and it failed to recognize how potentially profound and intriguing a premise that could be. ![]() In Wonder Woman 1984, Barbara gains her powers through the weakness of misguided idolatry - something that feels antithetical to the way female characters in this DCEU franchise have been portrayed.Īt every turn, Wonder Woman 1984 failed Barbara. This allows Barbara's antagonistic relationship with Wonder Woman to emerge more organically and for the two women to meet one another when Barbara is already a formidable force. The DC comic books give Barbara the dignity of an origin story with no ties to Wonder Woman. There, she gets the bright idea to test drive the Dreamstone and wishes she was more like Diana, who she sees as "strong, sexy, cool, special." (These reductive adjectives used to describe Diana make more sense coming out of Don Draper's mouth than Barbara's.) But because the patriarchy pits women against one another and instills the false idea that there is not enough room for everyone, Barbara believes she needs the advantages offered by the Dreamstone in order to be valuable or liked.Įven more confounding, Wonder Woman 1984 betrays Barbara's origin story, which sees her powers endowed by Urzkartaga, a deity she encounters while on an expedition in Africa. Prince later saves Barbara from a catcaller, Barbara returns to her Smithsonian office. After a night out with Diana, where the women swap stories about their love lives and Ms. The reason for Barbara's Dreamstone transformation into Cheetah is also pretty egregious considering it has no basis in the comics. But Barbara, an equally new Wonder Woman character, is a tapestry of tired movie ideas about women who exist in service of others. Worse still, Max gets the benefit of a fully fleshed-out arc complete with a young son who acts as his tie to humanity and provides some emotional stakes. Outside of these relationships, there is no baseline for Barbara power-walking to work and girl talk do not a complex character make. Who Barbara is as a person only becomes clearer when we see her in relation to Diana (as a sympathetic friend and long-distance research assistant) and Max (as a smitten love interest who can barely maintain her cool around him). Even though the character of Barbara Minerva has a rich, complicated comic book backstory (get a sense of it via Fandom's DC Database) available for the Wonder Woman 1984 screenwriting team - Patty Jenkins, who also directs Geoff Johns ( Aquaman), and David Callaham ( Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings) - to pull from, they eschew it in favor of little to no personalization.īefore Barbara makes her wish on the Dreamstone, she is a standard-issue single gal. That introduction scene is one of a few pre-Cheetah scenes for Barbara and in it, they establish her character in relation to other key characters in the story rather than showing us who Barbara is as her own person. ![]() Unfortunately, the version of Barbara we get in Wonder Woman 1984 bears little resemblance to her comic book forebear and is instead a watered-down villain who barely stands as her own person. Placing Cheetah opposite Wonder Woman in a DCEU movie should have been a major moment for this franchise. Wonder Woman showdowns in the comics have become legendary. Lithe, ferocious, cunning, and powerful, Cheetah is a formidable antagonist for Wonder Woman. 2, #7, Barbara is one of two incarnations of Cheetah who physically transform into the form of a human-jungle cat hybrid thanks to her superhuman powers gifted to her from a mythical god that puts her on equal footing with Wonder Woman. First introduced in August 1987's Wonder Woman Vol. The way in which the DCEU sequel to 2017's Wonder Woman chooses to handle one of its two Big Bads (the other being Pedro Pascal's flashy con man Max Lord) is one of a great many issues that pop up in Wonder Woman 1984. In the Wonder Woman comics, Barbara Minerva is the third of four incarnations of the villain known as Cheetah. Specifically, it has a Barbara Minerva problem. ![]()
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