No, we're not going to talk about the 20-minute literal obstacle course that opens Wonder Woman 1984, a flashback that the movie could easily have shortened or cut altogether. We're talking about something else: how Diana and Kristen Wiig must later find out the nature of the mysterious Wishing Stone. Ninety minutes into the film, with the audience mostly having figured it all out, the heroes are still at sea, and they need details so they can save the world.Â
Warner Bros.
The movie's solution:
Kristen Wiig finds a flyer advertising a Mayan shaman. She follows its directions to a "squat next to Galaxy records," and Diana and Steve Trevor show up there soon after. And so they all get to meet the shaman Babajide.
Warner Bros.
Turns out Babajide's kind of a fraud. His name's really Frank Patel, and he's a "citizen of the world," not quite Mayan. Ha, ha! But he does have at least one Mayan ancestor, and he has a Mayan book, so he's able to tell the gang everything they need.
But what if instead ...Â
Diana and Kristen Wiig both work at the Smithsonian Institution. So how about they get everything they need from there? One of them can discover the Mayan book among the place's artifacts, explains it to the other, and Diana can use her mythological knowledge to fill in the gaps. They could even make Kirsten Wiig a scholar of all things Mayan, if someone in the room needs extra prior info. The pivotal conversation could be entirely between characters we care about. There's no need to visit some new guy and new set that appear for four minutes and that everyone in the audience will forget.
Weird thing is, the movie does have Kristen Wiig start by scouring the Smithsonian. We get multiple scenes of this. But she comes up short. Again, I'm not calling out characters for missing easy solutions—I'm calling out the writers for making this needlessly difficult.Â