Imaculata

It is surprising given the high quality of the first Wonder Woman movie, how bad this sequel is. It has all the flaws of the first movie (a disappointing climax with a CGI baddie) and then does everything else wrong as well. I'd say that the only thing that actually works in this film, are Gal Gadot and her chemistry with Chris Pine. Everything else, from the premise, the tone, the humor, the period, the plot, the action, it is all poorly done.

I think the movie's worst mistake, is that it gets the 80's wrong, despite it being in the title. The plot also has a lot of trouble getting started, and the movie never really pulls you in as a viewer. Then there are a bunch of dreadful sloppy factual mistakes, that could have been easily prevented if the writers had done the bare minimum of research. And these are not nitpicky mistakes either, they are things most people know. Such as that you can't fly a jet from New York to Cairo without refueling, and that a WWI pilot would not be able to just fly a modern jet in the first place. These things would be hard to ignore, even if the rest of the film was any good.

Pedro Pascal is a wonderful actor, but he is terrible in this. He serves as one of the movie's villains, when the movie didn't need more than one. But both his look and cheesy overacting are jarring to say the least. I found it impossible to take him serious as a villain at any point on the movie, and he never really feels like a serious threat to Wonder Woman. I think this is partially due to the fact that the stakes of the movie never materialize. It never feels like there are any real stakes and so it is hard to care about the plot or the central conflict, which inevitably revolves around a bit of sloppy writing. The penultimate climax feels far fetched and unearned. And then the movie falls back into the same mistake as the first movie, with a boring CGI fight. You'd think they would have taken the criticism of the first movie to heart.

I am glad I didn't have to watch this in a theater, but I don't think it is even worth watching for free.

The Believer is easily the episode with the weakest writing in the entire season. It feels as if the writers had just an idea for one cool action scene, and failed to write a cohesive plot around it. There are a lot of loose elements in this episode that never really come together in a satisfying manner, and certain plot points feel horribly contrived. This episode highlights one of the main weaknesses of the show as a whole (the weak writing), and puts it under a microscope for all to see.

Even more odd is that the episode leaves the main characters exactly where they were at the start of the episode, making this whole episode feel like a redundant fetch-quest. It feels like such a waste of time, considering we are one episode away from the season finale. They could be setting up the villain, but instead the writers waste time with more planet hopping. Can someone punch up these scripts for a change?