How To Harm Your Audience - Wonder Woman 1984

this feels like it was someone's first ever attempt at writing a screenplay because of the sheer quantity and variety of amateur mistakes in here that this is the kind of thing that you would expect to see written by like a 15 year old kid on fanfiction.net it really is this is just oh my god but first so everyone grant your wish let your dreams come true oh pucker red oh she's here quick everyone make your wish and in doing so cause such anarchy that you'll help me destroy the world so like why do you want to destroy the world again huh why do you want to destroy the world what like you're a businessman who wants money and power like i get that and it's what you've wanted for basically the whole movie but how does causing nuclear war play into that in any way well it's a very simple answer actually it's um that's a good point yeah oh no i've got it hold on i'm being possessed by the evil god you know behind all that wish magic so what i want doesn't matter anymore because i'm being possessed does does that work i uh sure i guess oh good good good okay the nukes are coming online soon the world will be but a pile of ash and then i will oh okay i don't know what i'm going to do after that i honestly haven't thought that far ahead but it will be glorious and then i will do something with all that ash presumably stop the music hold on a second this isn't right what don't you have a son yeah and he lives in the world yeah of course he does we all live in the world stupid little and you want to blow up the world my son world blow up i i don't get where you're yep oh my god oh oh my god that's not good oh yeah like i hadn't even thought of that like i was planning on killing the entire human race you know as you do but like at no point did i consider that my son is also a part of the human race like that didn't even cross my mind oh my god okay i am so embarrassed right now guys i i i feel like an absolute clown but she's right no she's right yeah okay turn off the machines yet turn off the machines guys turn it all off and the nukes as well got to turn off the nukes uh i renounced my wish i announced my wish that's the end of it that's the end of it i really didn't think this through even slightly did i uh um i hate you mate um yeah you huh yeah the helicopter pilot who no longer has any reason to follow my orders since i just renounced my wish and who i effectively kidnapped can you follow my orders for no reason whatsoever sure fantastic uh can you ready my chopper to land in a field that by pure chance just so happens to be exactly where my son is really like out of the millions of fields in the united states you want me to land in the one that just so happens to be where your son is yeah yeah let's do that yeah shouldn't be a problem mate give me five minutes cheers wait hold on a second you just said that you were being possessed and that was overwriting your desires yeah yeah look either the demons in control or it's not either the demons using you to act out its will or you're using its powers to act out your own which is it i don't know uh hey patty what yeah my character's motivations aren't adding up are we gonna do anything to fix that or what it's fine we'll fix it in post well uh all right i guess i'm gonna abandon my plans for world destruction which i wanted to do before for um some reason am i good to go yeah see you later because i'm pretty sure that i killed a huge number of people like with all my wish granting like it may have all happened off-screen but like i'm fairly certain i killed just a massive amount of people ah yeah fine don't worry about it like we're talking millions of people dead because of me i like is there going to be any repercussions for that or like what it's it's fine uh we've realized the errors of your ways so you're fine really you are you are just the nicest person i've met all day you you really are um oh yeah by the way do you want to live back to the mainland in my helicopter no thanks i've spontaneously learned how to fly oh cool how'd you do that i don't know wonder woman 1984 is the worst superhero movie ever made and it's for reason far worse than any craft based issue like plot character or dialogue hold on that background is way too cheery give me a sec there we go so when you compare these films the entire roster of the mcu including that r42 iron man 2 and ant-man 2. all of those films are better than modern dorm in 1984 just based on like the more objective things like plot pacing character arcs and all of that but to really hammer this home some other films that are better than wonder woman 1984 batman and robin fant forestic captain america no no no no not that one that one this is all for a reason that transcends something that can be included in an out of 10 rating because while wonder woman 1984 is a film that is objectively poorly made in many respects it's also the kind of movie that is the most dangerous kind uh it's the worst kind of movie because it has the potential to cause real harm in the world and that is far more egregious a failing than any shoddy plot or boring character ever could be specifically not only does this movie have some extremely harmful and incorrect representations it also has and this bit isn't the hyperbole the single worst moral i have ever seen in fiction ever not only is the intended moral that the movie has just come lands short entirely and lacks any kind of punch it also accidentally has some very dangerous possible interpretations that have the potential to cause actual harm in the world like honestly this film is a master class in how to fail at everything i i'm not even joking this could be like whole terms or semesters of creative writing classrooms could be dedicated to just breaking down why this movie fails and those students would learn a lot from it but when it comes to writing looking at movies isn't enough writing your own stuff isn't enough because on top of all of that you need to constantly be striving to learn the theory and to understand what makes a great story great and when it comes to finding that information as a helpful little nudge from what i found useful myself a great place to find it is audible who i can happily thank for sponsoring today's video like we've all lost count the amount of times youtube has plugged a mobile game that they've clearly never played in their life or a set of wireless headphones that they've clearly never even worn that's not the case today um because not only do i use audible all the time i go out on a limb and say that my life wouldn't be the same if it didn't have audible in it because it's just helped me so much whenever i sit down to read a book it exhausts me it like fundamentally disagrees with the way my brain's wired i'll sit down for maybe half an hour and after that i'll just be spent like all of my mental energy would be gone and i'll be an absolute wreck because i it's so taxing for me reading but with audiobooks like that's not the case because i can listen for hours and hours on end while like just playing games with it in the background while i'm absorbing all the information and it helps me get through all of my reading material so much faster than i could have otherwise like without audio books if you're looking for fiction audible's got tons of it just ridiculous amounts of fiction but specifically for writing i think a great place for you to start is save the cat writes a novel by jessica brody it's a book that is dense with information and i found it really insightful and what's really the cherry on top here is if you click my link in the description or text closer look to 500 500 you'll get access to a limited time deal that's celebrating president's day what that means is you get six months of membership for just 9.95 a month which is a really good deal like i've been using audible for a while and like that's i think the best introduction deal i've ever seen for new people coming to the site it's a really good deal the one downside to this is it expires on the 15th of february so that's four days after this video comes out you really don't have much time so if you procrastinate on this and say oh maybe i'll get it later like by then it's going to be too late because you're going to forget about it and then you're going to miss out on this really good deal so again please click my link in the description or text close look to 500 500 and get this really good introduction deal today look there it is all you have to do is click it just just click the button just go click it now before expires this green screen is going straight to my head seriously but without further ado let's crack on with it in this full deconstruction of why this is the worst superhero movie ever made let's start off with part one dreadful dialogue the simple truth is writing dialogue is hard incredibly hard for the occasional writer it's easy but for many others it's the single most stressful part of the whole process because it's it's just so tricky to get right sometimes that being said there are amateur mistakes when it comes to writing dialogue where even if someone isn't very good at it if they've at least put in some time into learning the craft they would have learned to avoid these mistakes given practice and let's be honest you know exactly where this is going because wonder woman 1984 just so happens to be a film which has all of the rookie dialogue mistakes the kind that you almost exclusively see in people who have only just started writing okay so look at this clip and tell me what you think about the dialogue here what is it doing wrong wow you're so funny i mean no one's made me laugh like this in such a long time but it's true i don't get out much so should i you just seem like you'd be really popular and i would know because i've never been popular you're so personable so free i envy that people think i'm weird they avoid me and talk behind my back and they don't think i can hear them so there's another film that does exactly this um it's another film where if this dialogue was in it it would have fitted like a glove i'm so happy i have you as my best friend and i love lisa so much yeah man yeah you are very lucky you know she wasn't any good in bed she was beautiful but we had too many arguments lisa loves you too as a person as a human being the dialogue in wonder woman 1984 is of the same caliber as that of the room like the fact that the actors are give a reasonable performance like helps to disguise this a bit like it helps to polish this turd and make it slightly less terrible but like this doesn't change the fact that this truly is bottom of the barrel dialogue you cannot get worse than this okay so on the issue that both of these clips share it's clearly an exposition related issue the thing is there is nothing wrong with having exposition in your dialogue in fact i'd argue that's one of the best places to place the exposition but there is a problem with sacrificing the realism of your dialogue for the sake of giving that exposition it's a trade-off that amateur writers make all the time yet experienced writers do everything in their power to make sure they never make it because they've learned through experience that it is a price that's never worth paying ever it's because sure when you pay that price it does a really good job of getting exposition across to the audience it also does an outstanding job at destroying the immersion the audience has because it's so because it makes the characters feel like puppets that the writer's manipulating rather than actual people just having a conversation i'm just in love with the way that this scene like opens up wow you're so funny but i can just imagine what the writers room looked like when they devised this true master stroke of a line ripple effect editor dream dream imagine imagine hmm i i really like the idea of barbara coming across as funny in this scene you know no that's a good idea me too but the problem is i'm neither talented enough nor bothered enough to actually write a funny joke what you two yeah me neither i i know yeah i know it's so problematic but i'm just oh my god oh my god oh what if and i'm really proud of myself here what if we open the scene diana's saying well barbara that joke sure was funny oh my god that's that's genius by doing that we can have barbara come across as funny while not actually putting in any effort ourselves into telling a funny joke that's that's nothing short of genius i love it but that will work right like having another character just call her funny like is as good characterization as her being actually funny what no yeah of course good i'd use it i need to use that more often that's a really good trick oh this is going to be a masterpiece like i swear that if there were a writer's room for this the two people in it should have been called dunning and krueger hey psychology jokes like why am i telling jokes only like three percent of you are gonna get like i don't know why probably shouldn't do that anywho and the truth is this scene is in terms of dialogue it's the worst scene i have seen in any movie in the past five years and it's not just because of the extremely on the nose blunt exposition it's also because it falls for another rookie dialogue mistake okay look at this clip tell me what you think is wrong with this barbara my life hasn't been what you probably think it has we all have our struggles yeah we do have you ever been in love oh don't don't mind me this is just my pickaxe i'm gonna need it because this scene is an absolute gold mine of shitty dialogue it's technically a matic but shut up unfortunately i can't play the whole clip because uh copyright id is annoying but basically they're going along uh barbara is talking about how she's anxious and bad at socializing and praising diana and then out of nowhere barbra says have you ever been in love and like it feels so wrong like when she says it the the audience recoils instinctively with disgust because it's it's just it feels like such an unnatural turn in the conversation and what's really interesting here is i know exactly how and why the writers screwed up here because i'm an amateur myself and i'm constantly struggling with specifically this issue like i never told you guys i was an expert like right now i am not a good writer i've got a long way to go before i actually make something that's worth putting out but i'm struggling with this issue all the time and i like to call it the checklist mistake basically whenever you go in to write a conversation um you'll have an agenda and it will look something like this okay so double checking before i write this scene i need to make sure the character voices their insecurities set their character arc i need to introduce this facebook for the world building i need to uh use that joke because that's that's a really funny joke and then i need to foreshadow this plot point okay yep no let's do that that's right but here's the problem i figured out with that approach because when you go in to dialogue with this mindset it has a tendency to make your dialogue feel extremely stilted okay so i have asperger's i'm fairly sure and i feel very poorly equipped to explain how humans work because i don't understand that myself sometimes but when humans speak um i'm fairly sure this is how it works you let's say you have two guys and you've got one of them will say oh how's your wife doing then then he says ah she bought a new tv yesterday without asking me first or consulting about what it was about then they're like oh you can't do that well that's that's ridiculous and then it'll talk about um what makes for a good relationship with a with a spouse for a while and then one will say you know what my dad does in situations like this and then it'll smoothly segue into talking about their parents like a real conversation looks a little bit like that i think i'm i'm not sure i please don't quote me on that one i don't understand human beings i haven't spoken to someone since like december of my 2019 please don't quote me on that one but okay so this on screen is what a real conversation might look like it's a line smoothly segwaying from point to point and i'd say that when you're writing dialogue if you can mimic that and mimic it right it will make your dialogue feel extremely realistic and if you can't mimic that i'd say that your dialogue won't be realistic at all okay so let's say that your characters are having a conversation about bread but it says right here that they need to talk about what their uncle did last night now a good writer when now a good writer when writing such a scene would have everything flow seamlessly together but a bad writer aka the people who wrote wonder woman 1984 would write it like this you know nothing beats a good bit of tiger bread target bread really you're having a laugh mate no no no it's too soft you can't make a decent sandwich out of it sure but no the texture is so lovely so soft anyway my uncle just sold my car to the witch down the road for a bag of beans that is what the dialogue would look like and it's the opposite of good dialogue like um instead of having everything flows smoothly along naturally it will just go along like this and then it jerks randomly often a completely unrelated tangent in a full segway so they can cover that topic in wonder woman's case what it is is they're talking about barbara being a social pariah but then it says there goes my camera bag in one woman's case they have this checklist and it says right here diana needs to talk about steve and show that she's lonely so it sets up a further point in the movie so instead of actually putting in blood and sweat instead of actually putting in effort they just throw this question in entirely out of left field have you ever been in love and it is awful because it's just such unrealistic dialogue by the way if any of you guys like have any like insights on this like let me know because i'm struggling with this all the time in my own writing but anyway speaking of hand-fisted segues that come entirely out of left field let's talk about this movies what is in my opinion this movie's worst flaw a toxic moral okay so later on in the video we're gonna have a bunch of light-hearted jokes and skits and it's all gonna be very very funny but um i don't i can't even try and make jokes about this one because this is something heavy uh this this is really serious and i'm anxious to talk about this because it's this this isn't about craft right this is nothing to do with what makes a story entertaining but at the same time i think it's the single most important responsibility you have as a storyteller just because you didn't intend for a message to be in your story that doesn't mean people won't see your story and then see that very message and this is dangerous as a writer because if you become ignorant of the morals that might form in your story purely on accident like you didn't try to say them they just ended up happening and one of those morals just so happens to be a toxic one people will see your story people will see that message and thus be harmed by your actions if there was ever one lesson i could ever teach it would be this because if you don't pay attention to the morals that might accidentally form in your story you might one day make a story as dangerous as wonder woman 1984. so let's look at barbara she is one of the main characters looking at her what is the moral of the story behind her character for the luckiest of you out there meaning those of you who haven't seen this film barbara starts off as a naive shy social outcast who is deeply unhappy with herself and she wishes to be more like her role model diana she looks up to diana she has a tremendous amount of respect for her and then while daydreaming and holding the magic rock she half-heartedly wishes expecting nothing of it she's just daydreaming she wishes to be more like the person she admires the most then that wish gets granted and it ruins her life sure at the start it goes great she becomes a social butterfly and confident and becomes a more liked human being in general yet this gradually turns her into a monster she becomes psychopathic loses sight of who she used to be and again barbara did not make this wish knowing it was really going to happen she wasn't overly ambitious or nefariously jealous she merely hated herself had a role model and mumbled that god i wish i were more like her and that is the very thing that leads her down the dark path where because of that desire she becomes the movie's villain what was the message that jenkins was trying to give her audience here well it's pretty obvious that jenkins was trying to say if you want to improve in life the only way to do so is to work for it because such things cannot be given to you that is clearly jenkins authorial intent but this is why you should always take the death of the author philosophy into consideration and what that means is it doesn't matter what you intended the only thing that matters is how people interpret your work because if you don't do that you might end up having this message in your story and it's a really harmful one if you're unhappy with who you are or you want to change who you are or how you identify because you're uncomfortable in your skin do not because in merely wanting to improve yourself in merely having role models you aspire to emulate only bad things can happen i imagine one or two of you are saying that right now i'm grasping at straws that i'm overlooking one or two things to reach that end conclusion and that one of two of you you're completely correct because that's exactly what i'm doing but every one in 10 people who see this movie will see some variation of that kind of moral on screen and importantly i i'm pulling this number out my bum here but every 100 people who see a story will be in a suggestible state where they'll be in a position to be impacted by the messages that story might have and if in your story you just so happen to have an accidentally toxic message like you get where i'm going with this this is deadly serious all right like i've never been more about topic before my channel because i am terrified that some poor person somewhere in the world who's in a really suggestible state who's in a really bad place in life the kind of person who can be molded like clay the kind of person who looks to movies for moral guidance because there is nowhere else in their life to find such things and yes those people 100 exist i am terrified that a handful of people like that saw this film like just imagine it as like a thought exercise forget who you are pretend that you're a 14 year old girl who has no sense of self-worth in life who is not loved by anyone including themselves the kind of person who craves nothing more than to be socially accepted and to be a better human being right imagine being that kind of person as someone who has no self-esteem you see barbara's character and like that you're in you're attached to their character you're invested in their journey because that's what storytelling does and as she's improving as she's becoming socially accepted by taking off her glasses because as you know all of a sudden i'm now significantly more attractive because i'm not wearing glasses we all know that's how it works guys they see barbara improving as a person and getting more socially accepted being more confident and for them it's the ultimate power fantasy right they're loving it they're so attached to her character and just enjoying the journey and then she becomes the movie's villain how is that child going to feel but this isn't just about her feelings it's about something far more serious because if such a suggestion person saw this movie and then they saw the moral of it's dangerous to have role models and to aspire to improve yourself they just might believe it to be true and it's it's obvious it is so obvious that patty jenkins was not trying to say that because like let's be honest who bloody who the hell would but the potential that has to truly hurt that person like not just in terms of their feelings but in terms of how they feel about themselves deep down it's nothing short of terrifying i'm frankly shocked this movie even exists like shame on patty jenkins like shame on her for doing this i know i don't usually swear but jesus christ this deserves it she i am this is the most irresponsible thing you can possibly do as a storyteller this is an aspect of storytelling that few consider and it's pretty clear that jenkins was not among those few because she executed her moral so poorly so haphazardly that it not only made that intended moral weak and watery the point that it lost its punch it also created room for some other morals to be in the text accidentally and it just so happened that this one was a really toxic one like seriously jenkins authorial intent here was so poorly done i honestly have no clue what she was actually trying to say in this film as a whole like in the prologue it lays the foundation for a moral of you must never cheat and you must always be honest in order to attain success which in theory is a perfectly fine message but then the movie forgets about that and tells a wholly different moral about how you should accept loss rather than scramble to reclaim what's already gone with diana and steve and then of course barbara's character seems to have a different moral thing going on entirely and then maxwell lord's character seems to again have something entirely different going on with him as well between his son and because the movie's themes and morals are so messy and inconsistent it makes the movie as a whole worse like look at a film like captain america from 1990 it's crap it is a terrible movie but it's just a terrible movie like who cares about how the film is full of jump cuts and cringy dialogue and awful acting like who cares about something as trivial as that when this movie is actually so bad it truly could be influencing people in the worst way possible unfortunately we will never know for a fact how many people got affected by this messaging or if luckily no one was but this right here is why wonder woman 1984 is the worst superhero movie ever made and that's not hyperbole for clickbait or anything like not only is this a film of staggeringly bad objective quality not only is it filmed with a toxic moral but it's the worst superhero movie because the point of the superhero is to give people a beacon of what they might aspire to be more like it's the fundamental reason why the genre exists and because patty jenkins did such a staggeringly bad job at ironing out her moral she very well may have gone and done the exact opposite but okay that was pretty heavy so let's ask how they could have handled it better and frankly this whole issue could have been solved with just a few tweaks it would have required some very minor changes to entirely fix this issue so in this rewritten version the movie starts off with barbara being shy and nerdy and lacking any confidence like she does in the film her co-workers are having a conversation and she joins in by nervously blurting out a fact and then one of her co-workers chastises her because she's just being so awkward then she physically just crumbles away and sobs in her office so then diana comes along and she looks up to her and she becomes her role model just like she does in the film and sure enough barbara gets the stone and wishes to be more like diana i'm tired of being who i am she says i want her strength her personality i want to be her and then she becomes basically like diana her number one role model she doesn't steal her body that would have just been very weird imagine if the film did something as bizarre as that like i'm glad that didn't happen but um but okay so power wise and personality wise she becomes basically a clone of wonder woman but after the fact she is constantly thinking that this doesn't feel right she's even less happy with herself she has even less confidence than before and this fits quite seamlessly into maxwell's magic system of i'll grant you your deepest desire but it comes at a terrible cost and in barbara's case that cost isn't material the cost is how what she was given is the perfect opposite of what she needs so as the movie goes along and she is like diana she has her mannerisms and her sense of humor and all of that yet she feels so wrong like so out of place yes she hates who she is now but she hates the person she was before even more then in the scene where they're all around the table and diana says that the only way to beat maxwell is to undo all of the wishes and put everything back to the way it was this terrifies barbara because she doesn't want to go back it like it's an idea that fills her with fear and so later in the white house just when diana is grabbing maxwell in his moments away from defeating him and bringing his schemes to an end barbara steps in and with great reluctance fights her and defeats her and then she teams up with maxwell because that's the only way to prevent herself from going back to how she used to be then in the plane just before the climax she's not acting all confident and superior like she does in the film instead she's having a nervous breakdown she's crippled with anxiety because something just feels so very wrong and she says that she's got no clue who she's supposed to be then maxwell being all sinister and the devil over her shoulder he says i know who you need to be who cares about barbara the boring old historian she was pathetic who would want to be her am i right and then barbara nods and then he leans in all sinisterly and says it's because you haven't gone far enough that's why you're unhappy and then maxwell convinces her against her better judgment to go even further away from the original her i'm going to be honest like the specific line i want to be an apex predator is the most cringey line i've heard in recent years it's it's it's more cringy than the ending of fant4stic and it's like where like the thing is like wow this is fantastic well are we some kind of fantastic four like it's worse than that and i can't think of any way to make it any less cringey but somehow maxwell convinces barbara to become even less like the person she used to be to escape her humanity altogether and that's what turns her into cheetah and for the record i think the way they used cheetah in this movie was a really dumb use of the character it could have been like she could have been done in so many better ways but we're not trying to fix the whole movie here we're just trying to fix the moral so then in the climax and we also said up earlier that in order for maxwell to be defeated it's not max who needs to renounce the wish or even everyone on earth it's just everyone who made their wish before max did somehow the rule is established that if diana and barbara both renounce their wishes that will defeat maxwell once and for all and then this presents a really powerful opportunity to tie barbara's character arc into the climax so instead of barbara just being beaten in a fist fight by diana and then the movie forgetting about her after that point the climax gets resolved when barbara confronts her demons realizes that the real issue has nothing to do with maxwell's magic it's because of how she was ashamed of who she was in the first place she was depressed about how no one loved her but how could anyone love her when she didn't love herself and her renouncing her wish and choosing to go back to her old self that is what beats maxwell and saves the world and then in the falling action we see barbara back at her old job but instead of crying alone in her office like she did the star she's walking around with confidence like she's making friends with her co-workers and we repeat what we saw at the start of the film like her co-workers are chatting and she butts in with a nerdy piece of trivia and the same one from before tries to chastise her but she just bats them off and truly doesn't care what they think because she's learned to love herself and be proud of who she truly is inside doesn't that sound like so much better immoral for this movie to have compared to the one i actually had and like what do we actually have to change to get that moral of change a few lines of dialogue change almost no plot points whatsoever like the easiness with which i just fixed the moral in this movie shows how easy it could have been to fix this for the creators if they were just a little bit more self-aware about what they were doing so i said earlier that jenkins made the classic newer writer mistake of not sticking to the same moral throughout her story and constantly going to and throw various ideas and as a result the moral she was trying to convey ended up being very weak and lacked any kind of punch the truth is this is an incredibly common newer writer mistake i'm sure for those of you watching who have written stories yourself you probably thought of this issue at some point in your career you couldn't decide what you wanted your story to say and so as a result your story actually said nothing because it was trying to say so many things all at the same time and this leads to a larger point because it feels wrong to say that this movie is badly written because that just isn't precise enough for diagnosis you know it's saying that this movie is badly written is like when you go to the doctor and then the doctor says well you're ill oh chitchis such a precise diagnosis of why i'm ill thanks more specifically this feels like it was someone's the first ever attempt at writing a screenplay because of the sheer quantity and variety of amateur mistakes in here and speaking of which let's talk about tone so at the start of the movie there's a scene in a mall where wonder woman is stopping a robbery and the whole thing has a very family-friendly feeling to the whole thing um the actors are giving ridiculous over-the-top performances the music is whimsical and with you know with jingle bells and it's a music that would fit perfectly in a family-friendly christmas movie and like in this scene like there's a there's a kid in the middle of like a gun fight but the way that it's presented the audience isn't afraid for the kid's life at all because it's just so obvious the kid's gonna be fine because it's such a light-hearted wacky feeling okay so this clip is from the opening scene in the mall i'm sorry i'm sorry okay [Music] and this clip and this next bit isn't a joke this is from the same movie 10 minutes later hey there sweetheart you need some help no i'm fine thank you you know you look as though you're having a little bit of a little trouble walking in those hills huh okay i wear these heels all the time come on let me walk you home not going home let go of me i'm just trying to help you what the movie starts with borderline lazy town hijinks robbie rotten could have been the guy robbing that jewelry store and it would have fitted in fine and then ten minutes later we had that like do i even need to explain like why this is a bad creative decision like do you you need me to say like oh the baffles all the plot structure the pacing and the various devices oh look he's here's the anatomy story by john truby if you look at page 396 it talks about the tones and you don't need me to do that i keep damaging my stuff you don't need me to do that because we can all just intrinsically sense how terrible this is it's just god awful disgusting but i do think that what is worth saying is when i wrote my first ever screenplay which was my first ever attempt at telling a story i made exactly this mistake i mean i didn't have like that scene in the park or anything nearer that that like jesus christ no no no no no but the the the screenplay started off with as a sort of light-hearted family adventure and then towards the end it got more and more grim to the point that the actual uh story ended in a very dark place and the reason why there was such just an inconsistent tone is i didn't know what i wanted the story to be and what i wanted to be was constantly changing as i wrote the screenplay this movie feels like it was written by sixteen-year-old me which if you read my writing back then you'll know that's the perfect opposite of a compliment i one thing that i'm going to say here is like a promise so you guys can hold me accountable when i reach my million subscriber mark i'm going to like show you guys my first ever screenplay and what's really interesting is i actually filmed it and i play the protagonist like i'm the main character and like i gave up like after about like filming the first half hour because i realized just how terrible and cringey it was but like when we reach a million subscribers i'll i'll show it to you i promise but anyway um total inconsistency is an entry-level writing mistake like for me personally it was the first lesson i ever learned as a writer it was the very first one like say what you want about a film like batman and robin but like at least the film knows what it wants to be like at least it picks a tone and sticks to it throughout and also like it's just a terrible idea to begin the movie with that tone of well this is a family friendly event show where you can bring the kids and then later on in that very same movie those kids react to it like this what the is that a cat ma yo there's a stray cat outside it looks like grandma the thing like if i saw this film when i was nine years old like chunks of it would have been pure unadulterated nightmare fuel for me like the parts were like pedro pascal's face just starts bleeding like that's like for adults that's fine but i imagine like little kids that's terrifying um and yet so many chunks of the movie are trying to convince you hey it's a family friendly adventure the movie does not know what it wants to be but speaking of amateur writing mistakes and that's a segue that could have been used anywhere in this video let's talk about dialogue again for a second because i want to make a larger point about this movie that sure it does include the terrible terrible like toby wiseau level dialogue it also it's a it's a far more important point than that alright so if you've seen the trailers for this film you'll know that steve trevor gets resurrected in this movie and that naturally means there's going to be a scene where steve goes up to diana and says hey diana it's me steve remember when i died 70 years ago well that was a whole thing anyway i just got resurrected surprise okay and with what i said earlier in mind the fact that this movie just has outrageously bad dialogue what do you think steve says when he sees diana for the first time like what do you think his dialogue is okay vote in the comments or something this is it you're gonna love it diana diana excuse me i don't even know you so please stop following me good night i wish we had more time that is what steve says to diana when he sees her for the first time after his resurrection so again as i said earlier i have a hard time understanding humans sometimes but like even this was too much for me okay imagine if you died and it was a very traumatizing experience it left a massive hole in the lives of everyone you left behind as it often does very tragic thing um and then you close your eyes you're feeling cold and alone as you get ready and embrace the darkness and become afraid of the nothingness that might come next suddenly it's 2091 70 years in the future half-life 3 has finally come out cd projekt red has finally released their next game insert joke here about game of thrones finally having the next installment and you've come back quantum leap style into someone else's body and you have no idea how it happened like god didn't come up to you and say aye god i haven't sent you one very specific mission my son flash daughter i've got a very specific task for you and this is what you must do none of that it inexplicably happened just just imagine what will be going through your head in that scenario just just imagine the truth is the arts for most of us would probably be something along the lines of oh something along those lines but like just imagine it like you'd feel you'd be terrified by the new technology that's so advanced it might as well be magic and you'd also feel just profound melancholy and depression about all your loved ones and friends who you greatly cared about but they're all probably dead at this point because it's just been so many years and and like um you'd also feel just profound guilt because who was this guy's body you just stole he was a person he had a life like does he have children who like were depending on him and now he's gone then there's no one to feed them is his girlfriend now worried to death is his family now out scouring the woods in a group because he's now gone missing and he's been legally registered as a missing person i don't label the point but the sheer variety and volume of emotions you'd feel in such a scenario would be too much for anyone like save for maybe a psychopath to properly manage like you probably fall into depression quite easily have a nervous breakdown and there's a there's a fairly high chance that you'd actually fall into insanity because this is just such an extreme scenario where your fundamental purpose in life and everything about your identity has been completely upended but okay all of this is going through your head and then you find out that your beloved spouse is still alive all these years later so then you rush straight to them and then you see them you see their face across a crowded room how do you react well well obviously you'd you'd start shaking you'd stutter you'd nervously walk up to them maybe your hands would be shaking and then you just grab them you wouldn't speak to them first you just touch them just to check that they're real and physically there that this isn't some kind of sick hallucination and then you try and explain yourself but you'd stutter and fumble over your words because how would you even explain yourself in such a situation like oh hi i'm your beloved spouse who's been dead for 70 years you couldn't just say that no one could actually just say that it would be a very very very socially awkward thing you'd come across as an absolute madman and you'd probably terrify your other half that's how a real person would react in such a situation do we get that do we get an accurate depiction of the human condition no we get this i wish we had more time i don't care if it's a reference to the first movie the the emotions steve is expressing or rather the complete and total lack of emotions is just not realistic it's not how a human being would react in such a situation and then it just gets even worse because in the next scene steve and diana are walking by the waterfront and steve is explaining how he got resurrected he is explaining how he pulled a jesus with the same monotone board delivery you might have when you come home to your spouse and just explain your boring day at the office this is not how human emotion works and we can all feel that on some level even if it's just a subconscious one like in galaxy quest they have a good joke about something like this where everyone goes through this immensely traumatizing thing as they get teleported through space and then get probed by these disgusting aliens but one of those characters reacts to this whole situation like this that was a hell of a thing what's wrong with them i don't know come on and he says that while everyone else is shivering with fear and going it's funny because one of the characters is acting in such an unbelievably calm way in such an extreme scenario while everyone else is actually acting very realistically to that very thing but while galaxy quest has that guy acting so calmly as a self-aware joke wonder woman 1984 does that exact same thing but it's not self-aware about it even slightly if the movie had simply explored steve feeling guilt just mere guilt for stealing someone else's life that would have undeniably made him a more interesting character because of all that spicy spicy internal conflict but more importantly it would have also made him feel like a realistic character because he's actually feeling an emotion that we expect him to feel contrary to how he actually appears in the film which is more of a soulless husk of a plot device any real person will feel at least some guilt for stealing a man's life and the fact that steve doesn't feel that the dissonance prevents us from caring about his character because he is so clearly coming across as a two-dimensional caricature that has as much depth to him as a piece of paper and how can anyone become invested in this narrative when the characters come across like that and worst of all if you ever seen this piece of garbage i mean film sorry a bit of a freudian slip right there you'll know that steve gets resurrected into this random stranger's body i need to watch my wording here because i don't get hit with the old demonetization hammer but steve does the horizontal with diana at one point while he's possessing this guy's body but hold on because the guy's being possessed he can't give his consent does that technically mean wonder woman does the r word to this guy the answer is yes she does now this is obviously very very bad and um a lot of people are saying that this makes diana and steve come across as extremely despicable characters for doing such an evil thing i know that shadowverse he made a video about this where he talks specifically about how this makes diana basically look like a monster the problem is um when people say it makes diana and steve look like bad characters as in like actual bad human beings that is the wrong thing to say because it gives the writers simply too much credit um if you look at game of thrones for example when joffrey orders ned to be executed that makes the audience think that joffrey guy sure is an evil person or when you look at the joker slam a pencil through that guy's eye that makes us think he just murdered someone and used that as a punchline for a joke that joker guy sure doesn't value human life at all like both of those examples are great because they convey an aspect of what the characters are like deep inside hold on hello hello hello oh this is my dog by the way for some reason he has the exact same name as daniel green's dog by complete coincidence in the cosmic scheme of things i've no idea how but his uh his nickname is the closer dog so yes i know he's very fluffy hey i've got to make videos i've got to make videos hey go on go down you go oh hey hello it's my other dog oh no don't i'm recording your bloody mutts go go go go eat your boneyos okay right where was i uh i completely forgot both of those examples are great because they convey aspects of the character in who they are deep inside there is there is it's essentially exposition and it's good quality exposition about how who that character is deep inside diana doing the horizontal with steve is infinitely worse fiction because it's accidental characterization it's giving exposition about an aspect of her character that isn't actually there diana isn't actually that evil it's just the directors completely overlooked this and as a result is pretty immersion breaking like this is so egregious because it doesn't make when i saw this right it didn't make me think wow diana and steve really are just horrible human beings it instead made me think wow the person who wrote this film really didn't think this through even slightly and that's the problem this is truly awful storytelling because the writers failed to consider such an obvious implication in what they were doing this does not make diana's character look bad i don't like people saying that because it gives the writers too much credit it instead makes the writers look bad because of just how goddamn negligent they were when they wrote this script um also as we continue sifting through this raging dumpster fire as another good example of how this movie just fails to understand humanity on the most basic level is when everyone renounces their wish in the climax okay so maxwell lord goes up to the entire human race and ask them all to make a wish what one each and then almost as far as i can tell almost everyone on the planet makes a some wish of some sort and then diana with her lasso of truth tells the human race to renounce their wish and to go back to the way things were and everyone on earth renounces their wish and that saves the day the problem is is if this film actually took place in the real world that wouldn't happen and it would look a bit more just look like this eyes okay i wish my wife didn't have cancer 12 seconds later oh that's what you wish for the end of world hunger i mean that's a good wish don't get me wrong but like for me this is the best day of my life like my kids were going to grow up without a mother like the person i loved the most in the world was going to die but that's gone now it's not going to happen and i get to spend the rest of my life with the person i love the most in the world like this is hold on where's that music coming from this world was a beautiful place just as it was no it wasn't my wife had a terminal illness you can only have the truth and the truth is enough oh really so some people who are in poverty like who couldn't afford food or shelter and their kids were starving like to all those people who just made their wish and they're finally out of misery for the first time in their life to all those people you're saying suck it up and go back to being miserable because the truth is enough what does that even mean the truth is enough the truth is beautiful what renounced your wish no yeah yeah about that uh the world's about to end i kind of need you to pronounce that wish right now i don't care it's not happening what so you're saying that you love your wife so much that you're willing to let millions die just as you have a chance at living yeah well no if this movie took place in the real world that would be how it ended wonder woman 1984 is a film of such depressingly low quality does such an outrageously bad job at capturing the human condition that while it may not be the worst piece of art ever created it certainly on par with the stories that come out of random story generators because the ai that writes those stories and the creative team behind this movie all seem to have an equally as good a grasp of humanity as the other and that's the core of it folks give me a movie that's got really bad pacing and poorly done story structure and just incomplete character arcs or boring as hell world building because a movie that has all of those flaws yet also has realistic characters at the same time would do a far better job at getting its audience invested in its narrative over a movie that deals with its characters as reprehensibly as this film does this is the kind of movie where the audience is holding their breath waiting for the moment for a strong gust of wind to come and blow the characters over and finally reveal that they were cardboard cutouts all along because they had felt just so two-dimensional from start to finish okay so this next point is a smidge political which i don't like being on this channel but at the same time it's a very important thing this movie gets wrong so i have to talk about it you know how sometimes a guy will write a book or direct a movie and he'll give this completely incorrect reductionist depiction of how women actually are because he just doesn't understand them on a fundamental level like it would play out where maybe or every woman loves makeup and high heels and knitting and all they can't stand the sight of blood and every last woman is fawning over the men dreamily like it might look something a bit like that when that happens the creator gets crucified by the public and rightfully so because they're misrepresenting reality hurting their audience's feelings and perpetuating incorrect stereotypes wonder woman 1984 is exactly that just the other way around instead of it being a male director poorly representing women it is a female director poorly representing men which is equally as bad that shouldn't be a controversial thing to say every single guy in this movie with the two exceptions of steve and one homeless guy who has about three lines of dialogue every single male character in this movie is an absolute creep i need to watch my language carefully here because you know youtube demonetization etc etc but so instead of just explaining and giving examples i'm gonna play a bunch of clips and let the movie speak for itself you let me know if you think this is misrepresenting what the average man is like [Music] do you have everything you've ever wanted i'm sorry i didn't see you there hey we can share if you like no thanks hey there sweetheart you need some help no i'm fine thank you let's go with me i'm just trying to help you i don't have a tv well i have a great relationship with sears i can get you a brand new tv by the end of the day 19 inches no strings attached hey there how are you doing hey they're beautiful no thank you excuse me oh diana hoping i see you uh listen i've had my eyes on you for some time so if you ever need it now men as evil as this exist of course they do nobody is denying that um there are undeniably a bunch of twatish guys out there in the world who see the other gender as nothing more than objects to gorecat and use for their own purposes regrettably um it is unfortunate that people like that actually exist but if the movie had a handful of people like that there would have been nothing wrong with that because that is true to reality but to have every character every last one be a monster is misrepresentation that is merely insulting at best and truly harmful at worst okay so this is the internet naturally someone's going to be disagreeing with me right now in the comments so let's just address those people i imagine a few people are saying that jenkins was trying to say women can persevere against any obstacle they see in life and it just so happens that sometimes those obstacles are men now theoretically that's an admirable message to have but to the people trying to defend jenkins here they should not be given the time of day because even if jenkins did get across that moral effectively that could not be an excuse for misrepresenting men because there is no such thing as a justification for misrepresentation a justified misrepresentation is a non-sequitur it just doesn't those are two words that cannot work together if someone wanted to give across a moral in some way but in order to do that they had to misrepresent a sexual orientation or a religion or members of an ethnicity that is not okay because misrepresentation is always harmful as far as i'm concerned and the good karma you generate in the form of giving out that positive moral whatever the hell the moral is it's going to be vastly outweighed by the just the far greater negative karma of misrepresenting a group and hurting their feelings and perpetuating incorrect stereotypes this is the main problem with misrepresenting any group of people because stereotypes exist and it is a rare day that they're accurate and an even rarer day that they're not harmful and what this movie does instead of doing what should have done instead of breaking down the stereotypes and giving an accurate depiction of what reality is it instead reinforces them and lends credence to the views of the people who view incorrectly such groups but to give patty jenkins some credit i guess she's probably not an evil person she's this feels like it comes from a point of ignorance over actual malice which frankly most of the time is exactly how misrepresentation actually comes about of course that is not a justification it's really an explanation of how she's screwed up if you cannot immerse yourself in the perspective of someone who isn't you because of some differences that you have between them maybe your uh devoutly atheist but they're a christian maybe uh you're fine with eating meat but you're writing a vegetarian if you cannot immerse yourself in that person's mind truly understand them and give an authentic depiction of who they are if you can't do that you are a bad writer now i'm not calling you a bad writer but you get what i mean a failure to do that equals poor storytelling and wonder woman 1984 just so happens to have that failure in spades um and speaking of spades spades are used to dig holes and plots have holes and okay i have no idea how to connect that would you just pretend that in a good segue is talking about pacing so poor pacing what is this movie's most common criticism when you're creating a massive 50-hour plus game like the witcher 3 or a big thick novel like stormlight this isn't so hard and fast and it can come a bit later but with screenplays you have to be i don't want to say formulaic but you have to be ruthlessly efficient with your plotting the general consensus in screenwriting circles is you want your inciting instance happen about 12 minutes into your movie about 20 minutes is when it's beginning to push a bit too far like you can probably just about get away with that but i think 20 minutes is a bit of a stretch and ideally you do want it to come a bit earlier but in this movie's case the inciting incident is when pedro pascal's character gets hold of the wish stone and basically wishes for unlimited wishes that right there is when the plot actually starts so with that in mind the fact that the general consensus is you want your inciting incident to happen about 12 minutes into the movie guess how long it is into this movie when until maxwell gets a hold of the stone just take a guess it's 50 minutes that means that the audience is watching for nearly a full hour before things start actually happening the plot starts actually moving and like sure after maxwell gets hold of the stone the plot does start to get a little bit more interesting from then on but like before that point the movie is an absolute slog to get through it's just unbearably slow if the script for wonder woman 1984 arrived on the desk of a movie producer in the form of an unrequested spec script it would be guaranteed to be thrown out purely based just on this issue alone and rightfully so to really bust this movie's balls let's compare it to the dark knight a film that most video essays can't go one video without referencing including myself um but it's a film that is praised for many reasons and it's love for many reasons and i think the most impressive thing the film does is how it has a practically perfect pacing so to realize where the dark knight has such good pacing let's look at the dinner scene where bruce meets harvey it's only a few minutes long it's quite short but this scene accomplishes a great many things for the story firstly it fleshes out harvey's character as well as bruce's relationship with him it also introduces a core theme of the movie you either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain and it also ends with bruce pledging to throw a fundraiser for harvey which sets up a later scene in the very next scene after this the joker meets the mob bosses and this scene does so much like it fleshes out the joker's character it introduces the fact the mob is desperate because batman and harvey are doing such a good job at fighting them it introduces the chinese banker and says how he's fleeing to hong kong and that lays a foundation for the later scenes where batman comes after him it sets up the plot line of the joker and the mob working together to take out batman it also introduces the rivalry between joker and gamble where he puts a bounty on him and like that sets up a later scene where the joker comes after gamble and frankly i don't want to label the point by giving out more examples but you get the idea but the reason why the dark knight has basically perfect pacing is because each and every scene does so much for the overall narrative nothing is redundant even slightly and that if you ask me is the bread and butter of good pacing and this right here is one of the things that makes a great writer great because it's hard to write a standalone scene that's entertaining in itself it is exponentially harder to write a sequence of entertaining scenes and to make them all weave together in a grander connected story the ability to do that is one of the things that makes a great storyteller great and if like if you can manage that you're most of the way there to writing truly brilliant fiction but now we've looked at a film with fantastic pacing let's look at wonder woman 1984 so the very first scene is diana competing in amazonian triathlon it's 11 minutes long an extremely lengthy sequence and what purpose does it serve in the narrative none it it does nothing for the story it neither sets up diana's character arc or any plot elements like it half-heartedly lays the foundation for what could have been this story's theme as we discussed earlier if you want to win you have to do honestly as cheating never pays but this theme is never capitalized on at any point in this movie like this scene does nothing for the grander story okay and the next scene after this one is in the mall where she busts the robbery at the jewelry store what does this scene do for the overall narrative it sets at the magical mcguffin that the plot's going to revolve around because these guys were trying to steal it that's it it serves one purpose and then the next scene after this wonder woman is moping around and going out for dinner on her own what does this do it tells us that wonder woman still misses steve and is lonely and again that's it like this does one thing for the narrative like by this point in the movie we're 20 minutes in there is no inciting incident in sight and so far this movie has only done two things for the narrative it's established that diana feels lonely and has introduced the mcguffin that's one purpose per 10 minutes this is outrageously bad pacing because so little is happening narratively speaking in such a large amount of time like going back to the dark knight that one scene with the joker and the mob it fulfills five things for the overall narrative and that scene is just four and a half minutes long like when you compare that to wonder woman 1984 it's almost funny how night and day the difference is like the really bad thing here is like many of this movie's issues it would have been really easy to fix like it would have not been very hard to tighten this opening up at all for one that opening in thermoskira like it's hands down the scene of the movie that i enjoyed the most like in terms of having entertainment value it's the movie's best scene i i think and all of that being said it should have been deleted like the exact same goes for the many scenes where steve is wandering around looking at the world with all like yes it's fun to watch as he gawks around in this museum and it has a really good entertainment value and it should have been deleted like despite it being one of the best moments in the movie this is all because it does nothing to bolster the overall narrative why couldn't they take the scene in the mall and the one where she's moping around feeling lonely for herself in the restaurant and just merge them so the film kicks off with that montage of maxwell's voice over then we see diana sitting alone at a table in the mall and feeling lonely but then the store gets robbed and she quickly changes into her armor and goes to fight them now the inciting incident is more so about like 35 minutes after the movie's opening rather than 50. like that's still pretty awful but it's a lot better this all comes back to what i said earlier great fiction is not about writing individual scenes that are entertaining it's about writing a sequence of scenes that all weave together in one grander narrative obviously the one exception to this is if you're writing like short stories or something but sometimes as a writer you need to have the discipline to do this now this is the best scene i've ever written the characters are snappy the dialogue is witty oh i just love it but he doesn't weave into the narrative as well as it could shane i guess i'll just have to delete it and again this is one of those key abilities that makes a truly great novelist or screenwriter the ability to write a scene that is truly a joy to read or watch something that you are so proud of because it's really entertaining but to have the discipline to delete it anyway because it doesn't weave into the overall story as well as it could you know the whole phrase kill your darlings i think stephen king coined it um it's basically a cliche at this point when it comes to writing advice but this is exactly that and if the creators of wonder woman 1984 had the discipline to kill their darling scenes it would have made the pacing in this movie so much better like for you writers out there as a really quick tip this is something i do and it's really quite useful once you've written your story write out a list of the scenes in chronological order and then right by each scene the purpose that gives the overall narrative if you can if it's got like three or four things great if it's just one thing or god forbid zero things see if you can't delete that scene or merge it with another scene so you can basically condense your story a bit more if you can do that i promise you it will make your pacing quite a bit better okay so we're nearing the end now but for the final portion of this video let's talk about the sheer incompetence with which this movie uses its magic systems so when it comes to the fantasy genre there is a really common complaint and by the way this film does fall into the fantasy genre because it's got magic and the complaint goes like this i don't like fantasy because when magic gets involved it can resolve any problem at any time in any way when mata gets involved in instead of the writer resolving conflicts in a satisfying way the magic will suddenly develop a new quirk which will be used to resolve said thing thus it makes for unsatisfying fiction that is a complaint i've heard from many people over the years and my dad literally says it every time i ever talk about fantasy if a book or movie does this it is a perfectly valid reason to not like that story but the problem with this complaint is all too often people don't mention specific books which do this they imply that the whole genre falls for this issue and that is just wrong and here's why if a magic system suddenly develops new quirks and those quirks are then used to solve a problem that is not any old magic system that's a poorly written magic system now this whole topic is a bit of a pandora's box so i can't fully explore it but the core of how to do this is to only resolve problems by using aspects of the magic that have already been demonstrated and the audience already fully understands as brandon sanderson's first law of magic goes the author's ability to resolve in a satisfying way with magic is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic uh also before i forget uh praise be to our lord and savior brando sandow praise be praise be uh he once uh tweeted me saying that he liked my video on how to do fight scenes i'm very happy about that i still smile every time i think about it get in get in sorry i'm i'm not being very professional now am i but going back to it it's unfair to say that using magic in a story inherently results in deus ex machinas and unsatisfying resolutions because magic only ever does that if it's poorly written speaking of poorly written magic systems let's look at wonder woman 1984. so looking at the first wonder woman film and batman vs superman and justice league what are the powers of wonder woman's lasso like what can it do it compels people to say the truth that's it that's the only thing it can do if you've got it on you you cannot lie and it will make you tell your darker secrets that is just how the lasso works and that's the only thing it can do or rather used to do so move over doctor who with your sonic screwdriver that has its powers changing from season to season because a new magical object has taken the crown of suddenly pulling random abilities out of its bum and doing whatever the hell the writer feels like it can do in the moment does it dish out exposition dumps where anyone who sees it hallucinates and then sees visions sure why not does it act like thor's hammer where you can spin it around and then it propels you into the sky sure to throw that in there as well does it grasp onto lightning the way that spider-man's webs latch onto buildings and so it propels her through the sky it just throw that in there as well you've already made up a bunch of other powers let's throw some more in there when it touches someone does it make them see the truth not say their truth out loud not compel them to never lie but make them see the truth inside when they touch it sure why not he could never do that before but let's throw that in anyway like yes i know a bunch of those powers come from the comics but that's not a good excuse look at thor's hammer for example in the mcu from the word go it could only do four things you could only wield it if you're worthy it allows you to summon lightning uh you can spin it around and make you go into the sky and also you can summon it from a distance like from the word go the mcu has been really consistent with how mjolnir works like in thor 3 the hammer doesn't suddenly develop the ability to give thor psychic powers and rightfully so because if it did that it would have just come out of nowhere and the very similar issue would have been really crappy when handling magic the number one thing that you need to do with it is be consistent because the moment you stop being consistent you sacrifice your ability to resolve conflict in satisfying ways with it as said by our lord and savior brando sando crazy our lord and savior brando sando but look at the lasso's ability to make people see the truth it's an ability of the object that has never been shown before and the very first time it's ever shown is the moment it's used to resolve the climax in this movie she wraps around maxwell and makes everyone see the truth through him but this is a textbook example of how not to use magic because this magic is used to resolve the main plot in the exact same moment it's introduced for the first time like it makes for a deeply unsatisfying moment in the story um but what makes this even worse is this isn't the only time this movie does this look at the moment where they're stealing the jet but then they say oh no but what about radar it's presented as this big problem but then wonder woman says oh silly me i forgot to mention this one earlier i can turn things invisible now and then they turn the plane invisible what is interesting about this example is how it is yet another example of a classic amateur writing mistake so all too often as a writer what will happen is you're going along in your story when suddenly your characters will come across a problem and you have no idea how to overcome it with what you've established in the story so what you'll then do is pull something out of thin air suddenly the magic system can do this certain thing that it's never been shown before or one of the characters has an object that they use to resolve the plot and it's an object that's never been shown before in the whole story like this is something that happens all the time in first drafts and that like it's perfectly okay to do this because what will happen is you you use this entirely unforeshadowed thing and then you grab your notebook and simply write in it note to self remember to foreshadow this thing much earlier in the story in a later draft and that's all well and good because it adheres to sanderson's first lord magic i appreciate lord and savior brandon all of that with wonder woman 1984 it feels like they did exactly that that they had their note put out and they wrote in it all their notes about what they should foreshadow and whatnot but then they lost it they must have turned it invisible like diana did with that bloody cup she mentioned because so many of these issues would have just been easy to fix really really easy case in point um when diana turns that plane invisible all you had to do was like play a 10 second clip somewhere earlier in the movie of her just practicing to turn something invisible like just show her practicing and nearly getting it just about right but failing there you go just 10 seconds of the movie a little bit in a montage i don't know somewhere that would have helped fix this issue and what makes the magic in this movie so much worse is it breaks its own rules it establishes rules about how things work and then it breaks them you you don't you wish i had an audience with the president today of course i do wait a minute if i ask for your wish before yesterday a poor shot you the movie goes out of its way to establish the rule one wish per person it's a limit of the magic system that even maxwell has to contend with but then later on in the film when max and barbara are in the plane this happens but you only get one wish but i might dear grant the wishes so i take what i want in return barbara's already made her wish and maxwell basically says oh oh no it's fine really like i've always had the ability to grant multiple wishes per person like i've always had that ability just just let me know what you want and i'll grant you a second wish it really is no biggie it is either one wish per person or unlimited wishes per person which one is it the movie cannot make up its mind and this just the overwhelming lack of care that went into crafting this story is it's downright depressing and what makes this even worse is this is like a really easy issue to fix but all you need to do was change that one line from maxwell so when barbara says but you only get one wish maxwell then says but you didn't do it through me you did it through the stone do i look like a stone to you as far as i'm concerned i've yet to grant you your wish so let me know what do you want now personally i'd be really embarrassed to have something like that in my own story but at least it's an explanation you know it it makes some form of sense compared to the complete nonsense of an explanation that the film actually gave us and don't get me started on wonder woman suddenly learning to fly how did she do that the only basis for the explanation is that she learned a lesson as a person she learned to let go of steve and renounce her wish she learned to let go of the past her simply learning a lesson in her mind gave her additional superpowers what what what is it like and also what makes it even worse is in batman vs superman we see diana in a commercial plane that means that she can't fly in the modern day so how did she lose her ability to fly between 1984 and batman v superman we don't know i don't think we'll ever get answer that how did she even get her powers in the first place this is the kind of thing that you would expect to see written by like a 15 year old kid on fanfiction.net it really is this is just oh my god and like i i had a whole other section of this video planned that i just had to cut for my own sanity but it was basically like outlining all the plot holes in this movie and i'd i saw a bunch of them that i don't think anyone else has mentioned that are completely just immersion breaking for me um i i can't i'm not gonna do the whole section but i'll tell you my favorite one right my favorite one is um so near the start um that relic nearly gets stolen so then the fbi gives it to uh the museum because they want an expert's opinion on it but then diana like it like half an hour later in the movie takes off the lid pulls out the hay in the bottom of this box and there's a goddamn receipt saying maxwell lord on it with his company name on it you're telling me you're telling me patty jenkins pat patty dear patty patty patty piper fatty jenkins i'm i'm going insane you're telling me that the fbi found this relic at a crime scene right and a crime scene and they clearly cared a lot about it because they wanted an expert's opinion they didn't like blindside this they thought it was very important you're telling me that they took it out of the crime scene and didn't actually look inside it because if they had looked inside this box if they had spent the three seconds required to pay any attention to this they would have found a receipt linking this stolen object to maxwell lord then they would have had concrete proof that he had committed crimes and bought things illegally and then he would have been arrested and the movie wouldn't have happened the plot would've been resolved how does that work like checkmate atheists like and like what actually i want to say here is this in terms of like the videos that have been the most traumatic for me mentally this isn't the worst one the worst one i ever did was a one on metal gear survive i made a video on like another channel like a second channel i've got called it's called ruski i've abandoned the channel at this point but if you want to see me having a true mental breakdown after like analyzing something like a truly just breaking it as a person on the screen and just how terrible the thing is go watch my thing it's called like the day metal gear died or something it's anywho i have to stop now for my own sanity uh but anyway uh hit like the subscribe follow the like button there's the patron tweet me on the patreon i'm just gonna i'm just gonna go collapse now cheers my knee

Channel: The Closer Look

Views: 2,283,901

Keywords: wonder, woman, wonder woman, video essay, essay, video, the closer, closer look, the closer look, 1984, wonder woman 1984, woman 1984, dialogue, writing, advice, plot holes, review, chris pine, gal gadot, patty jenkins, trailer, cheetah, soundtrack, scene, clip, last of us, star wars, tenet, the best kind of failure, how to kill a franchise, wonder woman 2

Id: -E7Pc9C7G4I

Length: 80min 36sec (4836 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021