Gadot is terrifically imposing, while Kristen Wiig is the scene-stealing antagonist in Patty Jenkins’ epically brash sequel
Here is an enjoyable Amazonian incursion into Reagan’s America – but the real wonder is Kristen Wiig, playing the warrior queen’s resentful and emotionally wounded antagonist, Barbara Minerva.
It is 1984, that pre-Covid utopian era of big hair, rolled-up jacket sleeves and imminent nuclear war, and Diana of Themyscira is getting her second superheroic adventure in a world dominated by over-promoted mortal males. The first time we saw this mythical warrior queen, played as here by Gal Gadot, and with outrageously gorgeous outfits, she had just surreally shown up in the middle of the first world war. Now Diana Prince (she is never called Wonder Woman, even obliquely) is living discreetly as a civilian in the Washington of Ronald Reagan – or as discreetly as someone so resplendent can.
Prince works as a demure archaeologist at the Smithsonian museum, and it is here that Diana examines an ancient stone that has the magical power to grant any person one wish. Poor, lonely Diana silently wishes to be reunited with Steve Trevor (Chris Pine) the dashing airman with whom she was once very much in love. But her nerdy colleague, maladroit gemologist Minerva, who has a beta-stalkerish fascination with the impossibly gorgeous Diana, wishes to be every bit as strong as her. And there is a third wisher: megalomaniac oil entrepreneur and museum donor Maxwell Lord (Pedro Pascal), who wants more than one wish, so he sneakily wishes to be turned into the stone, to become a human wishing stone, so that he can persuade any individual he meets to wish for something beneficial to his interests. Could it be that Maxwell Lord is a version of Norman Vincent Peale, the positive-thinking guru who was such an influence on presidents Nixon and Trump?
